Stephen Conroy (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Government in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the senator for her question. The Australian government's reform of national environment law will ensure better and smarter environmental protection into the future. The reforms will also reduce business costs by cutting red tape and unnecessary delay. Since the EPBC Act was introduced more than 10 years ago, environmental management has evolved and the economy has continued to transform. Reform is needed to ensure this important legislation continues to work effectively in a modern Australia.

The reform package will deliver new strategic approaches and provide a more streamlined assessment process, new nation­al standards for accrediting environmental assessment and approval processes, a new Australian government biodiversity policy for consultation, improved listing of species for protection, identification and protection of ecosystems of national significance, better regulation of international trade in wildlife, more public information, a more cooperative approach to developing environmental stand­ards, better processes for heritage listing and a draft environmental offsets policy for consultation.

The Council of Australian Governments has agreed to a federal government proposal on the need for major reform of environ­mental regulation across all levels of government. The government rejected the recommendations to introduce an interim greenhouse trigger and to amend provisions relating to the regional forest agreements. The government will be consulting on cost recovery options for the administration of the EPBC Act and will release a consultation paper in the next few weeks. The report by Dr Allan Hawke AC was tabled and publicly released on 21 December 2009. It had 71 recommendations. We did not agree with 15 of those but agreed wholly or in part with the other 56 recommendations. Minister Burke convened five stakeholder roundtables— (Time expired)