Jan McLucas (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Aged Care, Disabilities and Carers) Share this | Hansard source

The Environment and Heritage Legislation Amendment Bill (No. 1) 2006 encapsulates all that is wrong with the current Howard government. Debate began in the other place less than a week after the 409 pages of amendments were tabled in the House, without a Bills Digest and without the informed public discussion that such an environmentally critical piece of legislation warrants. The legislation makes very important and significant changes to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, which in itself, as you would know, Mr Acting Deputy President Murray, is a very long and complex piece of legislation.

It proposes more than 400 pages of amendments to the EPBC Act and yet public comment was limited to the magnificent total of 11 hours of inquiry in the Senate Standing Committee on Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts. Labor senators had less than 10 minutes to question each witness who attended. Despite the bill’s importance to North Queenslanders, my constituents—we can gauge that from the number who made written submissions to the inquiry process because of the impact on the protection of the Great Barrier Reef and the Wet Tropics, to name two icons in my part of the world—not one individual or organisation from the region was able to appear before the committee.

The way this bill has progressed is just another example of the debasement of political processes, of democratic processes, by the Howard government. But it is worse than that. In the lead-up to the parliamentary debate, the public was deliberately misled about the import and impacts of the bill. For North Queensland, the EPBC Act is critical, and increasingly so, to the protection of the Great Barrier Reef in particular, through the management of the reef by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, and the Wet Tropics, along with our savannah lands and Cape York.

What is going to happen as a result of the proposed changes to the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Act and this legislation is that the minister, who is well known for putting the Howard government’s political interests ahead of the protection of the environment, will get far greater discretionary power. To provide this minister with even greater scope for abuse of due process and disregard for environmental science and independent advice is dangerous in the extreme. The interface between proposed changes to the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Act and these amendments are so-called by the minister ‘a simple alignment and harmonisation of the two acts’. In effect, the way that that will play out has not yet been analysed properly, but here we are passing a bill that has been exempted from the cut-off, has not had the scrutiny that it requires and has certainly not had the level of input that it should have had from my constituents in North Queensland.

This bill is not only bad for what it does do; it is bad for what it does not do. Its most glaring omission, of course, is climate change. It gives the lie to the Howard government’s claims to be concerned about the impact of climate change. Here was a golden opportunity to actually do something other than add verbally to the emission of greenhouse gases. My colleague in the other place the shadow minister for environment, Mr Anthony Albanese, has suggested that the act should include a climate change trigger—that is, a section that stipulates that new projects must be assessed for their climate change impact as part of any environmental assessment process if the project emits or is likely to emit more than 500,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, or its equivalent, per year or permits any other action, series of actions or policies that would lead to such an emission outcome. This is eminently sensible policy. It is eminently responsible policy and it is simple to do. But, no, the Howard government will not have a bar of it. The Howard government is content in its arrogance, its laziness and its incompetence to expose North Queenslanders and our natural heritage to all the demonstrable risks of climate change. It is prepared to bet the Great Barrier Reef and the tropical rainforests against the best science in the world and against the evidence that is plainly there.

Just a week or so ago it was reported by Central Queensland University researchers that yet another coral bleaching event had resulted in:

... 100 percent mortality of all hard coral species on the reef flats at Middle, Shelving, Monkey, Miall and Halfway Reefs ...

These are near Keppel Island. The researchers referred to the bleaching as:

... a fairly calamitous event. These reefs copped a fair hiding. They are definitely compromised.

One hundred per cent is a fair compromise, I have to say. This disaster comes on top of the widespread bleaching that occurred last summer, as we know. The impacts of climate change are right before this government’s eyes but it refuses to open them. It is hard of hearing as well. My constituents in the Torres Strait have been crying out for some Commonwealth leadership—any Commonwealth leadership—to deal with the impact of rising sea levels, which put them at immediate risk.

The issue that they want leadership on is a survey to establish baseline geophysical climate data—tide heights, land elevation, potential temperature rises, potential rainfall rises and the like—so that they can start planning for the future. But instead what have they got? They have got misleading information from the minister and the member for Leichhardt. There are 8,000 people who live in the Torres Strait, many of them only a metre or so above the existing sea level, and they cannot even get permanent tidal gauges out of this government to establish present high tide heights accurately. These are islands that were extensively flooded by king tides earlier this year and whose residents are afraid that they will be forced off their island homes by climate change. Only last week, there was a meeting of concerned residents on Thursday Island, in the Torres Strait, and it was reported in the Torres News of last week. The headline reporting of this meeting read ‘Everyone “can make a difference on climate change’’.’

The people of the Torres Strait are trying very hard to reduce their emissions and to think about ways to ensure that emissions from the Torres Strait do not impact any further on events that they predict are about to occur. The leadership is being shown by the people of the Torres Strait—not by this government. This government has done nothing to support the people of the Torres Strait in dealing with a real and emerging concern that scientists say could very well lead to people having to be moved from their islands in the Torres Strait in the foreseeable future. This is not something that is going to happen in a couple of generations time; it is something that scientists say could happen in the very foreseeable future—in our generation. But this government will not even give the Torres Strait Islanders a tide gauge so that they can find out what the tide levels are at the moment.

This legislation was a chance to provide a foundation in the EPBC Act for action against climate change. But the Howard government’s adherence to its free market dogma has meant that the opportunity has passed us by once again. Instead, we have a mishmash of spending that is largely reactionary rather than proactive, we have scientists who do not conform to the Howard government’s view of the world being told to be quiet or else, we have a policy on renewable energy that essentially actively discourages its use in Australia and forces its developers and proponents overseas and we have a pro-nuclear policy that utterly ignores the fact that nuclear energy is not greenhouse friendly and is not economically competitive.

We have a policy vacuum when it comes to carbon trading. We have a Prime Minister and an industry minister making the running on just about every aspect of climate change policy as they thrash around trying to make up for 10 years of lost opportunities. And what is the Minister for the Environment and Heritage doing while this is all going on around him? He is off to China to open a $300 million wind farm that is funded entirely under principles of the Kyoto protocol. Labor says: sign the Kyoto protocol, as a start, and then we can get on with the business of dealing with climate change.

In the 400-plus pages of amendments that this bill proposes, there is not one single, solitary mention of the words ‘climate change’. The environment minister does not want to talk about climate change because of his admission in this chamber that Australia was not meeting its own emissions targets. While he blocks wind farms in Australia and forces Australian renewable technology overseas, our greenhouse emissions continue to soar. Between 1990 and 2004, Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions rose by 25.1 per cent, once you exclude the decisions of New South Wales and Queensland on land clearing—and I commend those governments for taking the hard but required decision on land-clearing matters.

When the environment minister made his admission, he offered no preventative measures. In contrast, Labor will take decisive action to avoid climate change impacts and to prepare the Australian economy for an era in which carbon based energy is in increasingly short supply. We know that signing the Kyoto protocol is just a start, but it is a very important start in dealing with climate change. We will also continue with amendments to the EPBC Act through the climate change trigger mechanism. Any action covered under the trigger mechanism will require ministerial approval—unless the minister decides that the action is not controlled under the act. If the action is approved, the minister can, under the act, attach conditions to the approval, such as the need to mitigate the resultant greenhouse emissions. Labor will also ensure that the minister considers whether the direct or indirect emissions of carbon dioxide that are likely to result from an action will be minimised by the use of best practice environmental management and low-emissions technology.

In effect, Labor will act to ensure that climate change becomes an integral consideration of the EPBC Act. We will add a new objective to the act ‘to protect Australia from dangerous climate change’; we will add a new principle of ecologically sustainable development to note ‘decision-making processes should consider and minimise where possible the adverse effects of climate change on Australia’; we will add a new section 3B, outlining the significance of climate change; and we will add a definition of climate change to reflect the definition of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which was established under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

The minister for the environment has stated that climate change is ‘a very serious threat to Australia’—yes, we know that—but his actions with regard to the amendments to the EPBC Act show otherwise. The failures of this bill are not confined to climate change. It curtails third-party appeal rights, it undermines public consultation processes and it politicises the decision-making processes. It removes the checks and balances and makes the application of the act much less transparent. The minister, who already plays fast and loose with his powers, becomes much less accountable. Our experience at False Cape in Far North Queensland—an iconic piece of land on Trinity Inlet, in Cairns—has exposed the current limitations in the act. Unfortunately, these amendments will extend those limitations so that any power that the community may have to question decisions made by the government will be further eroded.

The bill contains five separate measures to strip away the right to appeal ministerial decisions before the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. They relate to threatened species, migratory species, marine species, whales and dolphins and wildlife trade permits. We have all had correspondence from the RSPCA urging us to change those measures which will strip away appeal rights. Labor will repeal the sections of the bill that remove the right to appeal ministerial decisions to the AAT.

This bill also further undermines our system of heritage protection by abolishing the Register of the National Estate. In its usual way, the Howard government has employed innocent-sounding phrases to hide the real intent of the government. The parliamentary secretary, in his second reading speech, referred to the archiving of the Register of the National Estate. If there were a shred of honesty left in this government, the parliamentary secretary would have said straight out that the register is being abolished. This bill removes the requirement for the minister to have regard to the Register of the National Estate when making decisions, and, five years after the act comes into force, the Register of the National Estate in effect ceases to exist. Labor will move amendments to restore the Register of the National Estate and to require the minister to have regard to the register when making decisions.

This is a sad and sorry piece of legislation. It is a dangerous bill and it is bad policy. It does nothing to extend or entrench the protection of the environment or Australia’s national heritage.