Ian Campbell (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for the Environment and Heritage) Share this | Hansard source

One of the things we insisted on in the second part of the Meander Dam process was that all of that information be made public. That is one of the things that this bill allows me to do as federal minister. I know this contradicts some of the outrageous claims that this amendment bill we are debating tonight weakens the act. I think it makes the act a lot more effective, and in many parts strengthens it, but before the night is out we will be inserting—all going well—a new provision that will give me a quite explicit power under section 132. That section currently creates provisions that give the minister power to seek further information for approval decision, but we are adding a new part D3, which gives the minister the power to seek further information if the relevant impacts of the action have been assessed under a law of the state or territory, and the appropriate minister of that state or territory. So, basically, it gives a quite explicit power to the Commonwealth minister to demand that information from the state. We will be making sure that all of that information is made public so it is a transparent process that the community can be involved in.

I will very quickly respond to the details of the amendment about the insertion of a water trigger and a land clearance trigger. The State of the environment report gives us some very positive news in relation to land clearance. I am sure many of us would like to see even better results but I commend the graph on page 71 to anyone who is listening and who cares about the environment. You can go to the DEH website and follow the links to the SOE. If you go to page 71 you will find that, back in the seventies, Australia was clearing up to 550,000 or 560,000 hectares, in net terms, a year—that is the difference between the amount of forests destroyed and the amount of forests replanted. By about the nineties that figure was hovering around 250,000 and possibly up to 300,000 hectares a year net loss of forest, and hovered around those figures right through to about the end of the 1990s.

The great news in this report is that—and the data has not been put in for post-2004—in 2003 we very nearly hit break-even in Australia. In fact, we are looking like planting more trees than we are chopping down, for the first time since white settlement. So that is a good achievement, and it is a cooperative achievement, I think it should be pointed out, between the activities and policies of the state governments and the federal government. It shows a very useful trend.

On my latest mathematics it looks as though the combined policies of the Natural Heritage Trust, the National Action Plan on Salinity and Water Quality, the 2020 plantation vision and some other measures, have seen us plant, over the last 10 years, in excess of 900 million trees in Australia. We are on track to plant one billion trees, and if I can get my mathematics and calculations close enough I hope to go somewhere and plant the billionth tree, probably some time early next year.

I will be as brief as I can because there are other amendments that senators will want to talk about. This underpins the fact that the cooperation between the state and federal governments, the EPBC Act, and a range of other policy measures—including, for example, the Tasmanian private forest initiative, which I will launch in Tasmania, to purchase 45,000 hectares of forests on private land, with a large proportion of old growth—are more sensible and effective ways of protecting Australia’s forest cover, protecting our biodiversity and reversing land clearing.

Similarly, in relation to the water trigger, although we get very frustrated at the lack of progress from time to time, the government are committed to working cooperatively with the states on water policy. We have backed that up, not only with vigorous action and leadership by the Prime Minister—and more lately by the Parliamentary Secretary with special responsibility for water, Mr Turnbull—but with some $700 million just in the Murray-Darling Basin alone, through the Living Murray initiative; an extra $500,000 for works given to the Murray-Darling Basin Commission in the last budget; and the $2 billion water fund, which creates incentives for the states to put in place a range of measures.

We think that cooperative approach is the best way to go. There have of course been threats made about the Commonwealth taking over control of water, from both sides of politics I think it is fair to say. But my strong view is that a cooperative federalist approach is desirable. That is not to say that the Commonwealth would rule out seeking to go further if we were not able to make the sort of progress that the government would want. So I am not going to denigrate the proposal of a water trigger outright. I think it is the sort of thing that the Commonwealth would keep in its policy back pocket, to be quite frank. But we think that in a federation where the states have primary responsibility for water resources—quite properly, I would say—a cooperative approach is the best. But we do recognise that water does not respect state boundaries—particularly the water in the Murray-Darling system, which crosses four states and one territory—and that getting that cooperative federalist approach right is very important.

The issues at stake are huge for Australia, and the Commonwealth could never rule out using a blunter legislative and constitutional instrument some time in the future. But we have committed and re-committed to a cooperative federalist approach, working with the states. I think that, although we do not believe we have made good enough progress to date, there are already some signs that that approach can bear fruit for the environmental and ecosystem outcomes we are seeking and, also importantly, for sustainable agriculture.