Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for the Murray Darling Basin) Share this | Hansard source

I appreciate that Senator McLucas has been attempting to answer my questions and respond to my comments in a reasoned and sensible way. I appreciate that, perhaps in this instance, through no fault of Senator McLucas, there really is little reason or common sense as to why these provisions have been put into the bill before us.

Let us be very clear here: this opposition amendment is about removing a last-minute amendment to this last-minute bill. The last-minute amendment was made on the motion of the member for New England in the other place. He amended the legislation so that it would prohibit and limit the capacity of future governments, or this government, to be able to enter into bilateral arrangements with state governments. What are these bilateral arrangements I keep referring to? They are the capacity for the Commonwealth to sit down with the states and negotiate an agreement that would try to provide some streamlining, some level of efficiency to the operation of the EPBC Act.

The amazing thing is that the government, by its adoption of the member for New England's amendment, has now completed a full about-face in the space of 18 months in relation to these bilateral approvals. It is not that long ago—only at the start of last year—that the government was arguing that it wanted to see greater use of bilateral approvals and bilateral agreements. This was the recommendation of the Hawke review. The Hawke review, amongst its many recommendations, encouraged efficiencies, encouraged an elimination of duplication and encouraged the government to look at how it could better streamline agreements and arrangements with the states. So it is that the government went to the 12 April 2012 COAG meeting and produced a communique that stated:

The Commonwealth will work with the States and Territories to improve the process for approvals of these categories—

projects within the Commonwealth's current jurisdiction affecting World Heritage sites and specific areas of action, including nuclear actions, defence development and developments affecting Commonwealth waters—

… for consideration by COAG at its next meeting.

The government made very clear and the Prime Minister made particularly clear in her media release—a joint media release with the Minister for Finance and Deregulation—of 13 April 2012 that bilateral agreements were a key part of what she saw as being a way of getting a better arrangement for environmental approvals in place. The Prime Minister, in her statement and in her press conference, said at the time:

… what we want to work towards here is a streamlined system, so that projects don’t go through two layers of assessment for no real gain.

And so the classic examples that are brought by business is where people have gone through sequential assessments, so it’s double the time, things that have been required for the first assessment are required in a slightly modified form for the second assessment, so they don’t even get the benefits of just uplifting the work and re-presenting it, it’s got to be redone.

Clearly that is an inefficient system. At the inaugural meeting of the Business Advisory Forum yesterday, the Prime Minister said:

… business leaders raised delays in environmental approvals and assessments as a major cost. These delays, due to duplicative processes across federal and state systems, can take businesses months or even years to resolve.

Today COAG acted on that concern and the Gillard Government and states and territories agreed to fast track arrangements to use state assessment and approval processes by March 2013.

The Prime Minister went on to say:

The removal of these regulations will protect the environment whilst ending the costly delays that result from double-handling and duplication.

So we have a situation where, in March last year, the Prime Minister said the Gillard government and states and territories agreed to fast-track arrangements to use state assessment and approval processes by March 2013. By the end of last year, the government announced that it was not going to proceed in that way. In the face of a scare campaign from the Greens, in the face of some push back from the environmental lobby, the government abandoned its commitment to greater use of state assessment and approval processes and, at the December COAG meeting last year, it walked away from doing so.

It is one thing for the government to get cold feet and decide that it is all too hard in some way, shape or form, but what is remarkable about what has happened now is that the government has done a complete and utter reversal of belief in this space and is now legislating against even the possibility of using such state approvals processes—legislating out the possibility that it, or any government, may in future decide to undertake such approvals processes.

As I said to the chamber before, these mechanisms within the act have effectively lain dormant throughout its history. It is not like this is an area that has been open to abuse. It is not like this is something that has handed powers over to state governments on a regular basis only to see them be abused—far from it. The Howard government, which brought the EPBC Act into law, the Rudd government and the Gillard government—or whatever the government is going to be known as tomorrow—have always basically kept the powers to themselves. There is no need for legislation that bans the referral of those powers because there has effectively been no use of those powers. They sit there as an option—an option, however, that is important, an option that the government itself argued was the right thing to pursue and an option that the Hawke review argued, in its recommendations to the government, was the right thing to pursue.

The coalition have a particular concern of our own in this regard. That is because in April 2012 the coalition committed to offer state and territory governments the opportunity to act as a one-stop shop for environmental approvals as well as seeking to create a single lodgement and documentation process for environmental approvals should we win the election later this year—whenever it may be held, under whichever Labor leader it may be held. The coalition have given a commitment that we want to use bilateral approvals powers. We want to negotiate sensibly with the states and we want to ensure that absolutely, definitely, there is no undermining or watering down of environmental standards. National matters of environmental significance as legislated for in the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act should of course be upheld and upheld to the right and proper standards that the Commonwealth government would expect. But, as Senator Conroy has already made clear, the assessment processes are largely happening at a state level. Senator Conroy basically said, in the earlier part of this debate, that in relation to this proposed new trigger the information would go to the states and that would be all that the Commonwealth needs, and, if the state ticked it off, you could expect that the Commonwealth would tick it off as well. That not only highlights the duplication that is being created through the passage of this bill but it also demonstrates very clearly that you could get great efficiencies in the operation of the EPBC Act—perhaps in this area, perhaps in other areas, definitely in some areas—by making greater use of these approvals mechanisms and bilaterals mechanisms.

The coalition is gravely concerned by the government's decision to adopt measures and to support amendments that tie their hands and tie the hands of future governments if they want to improve the efficiency of the EPBC Act, if they want to ensure that the duplication that occurs in assessments and approvals at Commonwealth and state level is minimised as much as possible. We think it is an outrage, to be frank, that the government have supported amendments that not only limit the use of these powers but fly in the face of what the government themselves had said they thought should be undertaken less than a year ago. Less than a year ago, your policy was effectively to do the same sorts of things that our policy promises to do. Less than a year ago, your policy was to make use of the provisions in the EPBC Act that you now seek to limit the use of. So, within the space of a year, your policy has been reversed completely, to the point where you now want to partly outlaw that which you as a government proposed previously to do.

The government has given far from adequate explanations as to what drove its reversal of the opinion, but we can simply assume that it was driven once again by the base political motive of keeping the Independents—in particular Mr Windsor, the member for New England—happy in this regard. That is no way to make good legislation. That is no way to govern the country. It is a crying shame the way this government has approached this important matter of our environmental laws and how they interact with the states and territories.

This is not a hypothetical conversation. This is not a conversation or a debate or a discussion that is just talking about things that might happen. This is a conversation about real costs that are incurred by real businesses that flow through into the competitiveness of the Australian economy and Australian industry more generally. One of the great battles Australian business is having at present is to remain competitive on the world stage. One of our great challenges at present is to see how Australian business is going to maintain areas of competitive advantage in the face of a higher Australian dollar, in the face of higher costs and taxes, like the carbon tax, and in the face of higher regulation, particularly with the extent of the red and green tape that exists across government nowadays.

Deloitte Access Economics undertook a cost-benefit analysis of reforms to environmental impact assessments under the EPBC Act. Their analysis estimated the benefit from reduced delays at $135.1 million in 2012-13, increasing to $288.4 million in 2020-21. In net present value terms, this represents a total gain to society of $1.19 billion. So there are real costs arising out of the cross-jurisdictional duplication in our environmental regulation.

It is outrageous that this government not only wants to ignore the advice provided to it by its own expert review, the Hawke review, and to overturn its own policy position as set out in the government response—which recommended greater use of these approvals processes—but also wants to go so far as to support the passage of legislation which actually prohibits and limits the use of these approvals processes. I implore the government to reconsider its position on the Windsor amendments passed in the House. Everybody knows the government supported them on a whim. Everybody knows there was very little, if any, consultation within government ranks about supporting Mr Windsor's amendments. Everybody understands that there are people within the government who, thankfully, have a higher level of common sense, who understand what the impacts on industry will be and who wish the government had not supported those amendments. This is the government's chance to right that wrong and remove those amendments from the legislation.