Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak against the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Amendment (Cost Recovery) Bill 2014, and I do so for several reasons. The crux of this bill is to say that the Department of the Environment can only get properly funded if it is prepared to tick off on myriad destructive proposals. I think that is perverse logic and, sadly, we have seen over many years a consistent imposition of an efficiency dividend. We have seen staff cut after staff cut at the environment department. The department is chronically underresourced, such that it is not able to perform its functions adequately. Now we have this dangerous proposal to say: 'That's all right. You can take money from the developers because you won't have your independence compromised. It's not like you're starved of funds and you need to approve these development applications to get the money that you need'! So this is a very dangerous course of action. The inability to manage those risks is the very reason why the Greens are opposing this bill.

There is obviously well-documented literature on regulatory capture, and I raised this issue in Senate estimates. Much to my surprise, the department had not engaged very deeply with the concept and nor were they able to reassure me that they had these mechanisms in place to manage the inappropriate influence that was being put on them by the industries which they are meant to be regulating as opposed to facilitating. Sadly, what we see is that there is no political will to ever refuse development. There has been literally 10 refusals in the 14 years that we have had the EPBC on foot. This just makes a mockery of our environmental approval system. It just makes it a tick-and-flick process—which brings me to the ANAO audit that was issued last week in which this point was highlighted.

The ANAO report said, in fact, that chronic underresourcing of the department is why it has an inability or perhaps a lack of political will to enforce conditions. The ANAO report was incredibly damning. It found that the staffing in the department was so low that compliance was simply not happening to the level that the public would expect it to happen. This has been an open secret for a long time. Everybody knows that the developers can get away with blue murder because the department is simply not enforcing its own conditions. Evidently from this government there is no political will to do that, but certainly those public servants themselves do not lack the political will; they lack the resources to do their jobs properly. Despite this and despite the regular reports finding that compliance is poor—we had the Gladstone inquiry report just a few weeks and the ANAO report last week—this government is going to increase the staff cuts to that department and to many others. There are going to be 129 staff cut from the section that includes compliance. Again, in estimates, I asked: 'Are you serious? Are you really going to cut more people from compliance?' They were not able to give me the figures for how many will come from that subset, but 129 people will be sacked from the division that includes compliance. This is incredibly concerning to the Greens. This is just the latest assault on the environment from this government.

Sadly, in the short period that this government has been at the helm, we have seen a litany of attacks and assaults on Australia's environment. We have this crazy and dangerous proposal to give away the Commonwealth's powers to protect the environment to state governments. That is obviously coming to us in a separate bill, which I hope this place kicks out on its rear-end for the dangerous and dodgy proposal that it is.

This plan to say that the Commonwealth could no longer stop development in World Heritage areas, that it could no longer save the last remaining habitat of a federally threatened species—what planet are we on? We have had 30 years of increasing involvement of the Commonwealth government in protecting the environment, and rightly so. The national environment is not just nationally significant; we have told the world that it is internationally significant when we protect it with something like a World Heritage listing. The notion that you could put the state governments in charge of that—and even, as this government wants, the local governments in charge of that—just boggles the mind. You seriously could not think of a worse proposal for the environment. And it comes at the worst possible time in history, when we are in a climate crisis, when we are in a biodiversity crisis and when all of our environmental indicators on soil health, land health and marine are going down.

Sadly, that is just the first assault. There have been so many others. We do not have a minister for science anymore. We do not have a stand-alone minister for climate change, because of course climate change is crap, according to this Prime Minister. We do not have funding for the Environmental Defender's Offices anymore—the only independent, public-interest community legal centre that helps the community enforce environmental laws. Senator George Brandis decides that, no, he does not like the fact that the community can enforce the law, so he has abolished the funding to the EDO.

We have got the attempt to roll back our climate laws, which, again, I hope this place stands firm on and sends packing, because we desperately need to do something about climate change. The system we have got in place is the best system that we can have. It is designed to be improved and it is designed to set this country and our grandchildren up for a liveable future. This government is trying to abolish the Climate Commission, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and ARENA. Again, it is economic lunacy to not invest in renewable energy, to not invest in the future, with the clean energy and the job creation those bodies have facilitated, along with the fact that the CEFC is making us money when we are in this so-called budget crisis. Where on earth is the rationale for abolishing that body?

The approval of the world's largest coal port in the Great Barrier Reef comes in at No. 7 on my list of the Abbott government's assault on the environment. I do not know in what universe that is considered acceptable, given the hundreds of scientists and the many thousands of community members who have spoken out about it, along with the international condemnation of the World Heritage Committee. They have come out saying not only that climate change is a huge threat to the reef on top of crown-of-thorns and water quality from run-off but that dredging and dumping is the latest threat to the reef. Yet we have the world's biggest coal port approved by the Abbott government at Abbot Point. Perhaps he just liked the synergy there with his name.

Reef Rescue is a fantastic program where work has been going on with farmers. Sadly, $40 million has been cut out of that successful program. The Water Commission too has been abolished. Again, that was an independent body that was doing excellent work and providing independent scientific advice. This government is not so keen on science; it prefers to listen to—I don't know—the IPA.

There has been an attempt to delist the Tassie forests. Thank goodness overnight that was roundly rejected by the international community and the World Heritage Committee, with one country even calling the attempt feeble. Thank heavens we still have protection for those beautiful and important forests. Unfortunately, the Prime Minister thinks we have got too much forest locked up in national parks. Apparently he does not realise that, actually, half of Australians like to visit national parks on a regular basis and that tourists kind of like to visit them too. So it is not just good for biodiversity; it is actually also good for our economy. But, no, we have got too much forest locked up. The government is dismantling world-leading marine protection laws. Again, these are not only attacks on the environment but an assault on economic profitability and the tourism sector.

All of the megamines proposed for the Galilee Basin in my home state of Queensland would be a climate disaster should they proceed, including for the likes of Mr Clive Palmer and Ms Gina Rinehart. If we open up the Galilee Basin and mine all of that coal it would make that region, that basin, the seventh largest carbon emitter in the world—right when we are in a climate emergency and right when we should be, at every moment, thinking of the lives that we will leave for our grandchildren.

The list goes on, unfortunately. The government is refusing to give landholders the right to say no to coal-seam gas or coal on their land because of the huge threats to groundwater—and to surface water, for that matter—and to the very farming operations themselves. So much for standing up for the farmers. I have brought bills and motions before this place. We have not received support for those actions to try to protect land and water from the rapacious fossil fuel industry, which is thankfully coming to its end. Do we want to fix the mining tax and raise some revenue in this so-called budget crisis? Nah. We just want to give the big miners what they want, so this government wants to abolish the mining tax.

The government are already seeking to abolish the Biodiversity Fund, one of the few measures that has actually been helping to rehabilitate land and has been available to land managers to access support for the good land management that they do and could have been funded to do. No—they want to abolish that as well. Cape York World Heritage nomination: where did that go? It got delayed and now we find out in estimates that the staff have been slashed to progress that nomination. There used to be 5.7 people and now there are only 1½ people progressing that. The traditional owners want that listing. They were so close to finalising the consultation—they were about to put the lines on the maps—and the government have pulled the rug out from underneath them because they are not committed to World Heritage. And almost half a billion dollars has been slashed from Landcare over five years.

It is against that backdrop and against that most heinous assault of giving the powers to protect Australia's national environment to states or councils—they don't care who; anyone will do—that we have this bill to seek to recover the costs of assessing development applications that would have a significant impact on a matter of national environmental significance. It is somewhat ironic that we are seeing this bill now given that the Abbott government soon will not have many applications to assess anyway, precisely because they are giving away those powers to the states and local councils. Frankly, one wonders why they are bothering. Indeed, one wonders why they are bothering when they have not set up a structure that will enable the conflict of interest to be managed.

A year or more ago we saw a similar proposal mooted for the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority so that they would be able to increase their fees for offshore dumping. We opposed that as well, because you simply cannot have a regulator hooked on funds from the damaging activity that they are meant to be regulating rather than facilitating. So there is no mechanism to manage the conflict of interest there, nor to manage the threat to the independence of the department. Given the chronic under-resourcing and chronic understaffing, it is a slap in the face to say, 'The department does not deserve to be funded and well-resourced; we are going to make the developers do the work that the government should be doing.'

The Department of the Environment needs to be properly resourced to do its job independently without scrimping and saving, and ticking and flicking. They should not be in a position where they do not have the people, the expertise, the time or the money to properly scrutinise these most damaging of applications. They are not assessing people's carports or a house going up; they are assessing significant impacts on matters of national environmental significance. This is the worst of the worst, and we are chronically underfunding and understaffing the regulatory folk who are meant to be doing that job. It simply demonstrates that there is no political will in the government to stand up for the environment, and there is simply a mentality of tick and flick, and of continuing to slash staff.

That is why the Greens will be opposing this bill, as we will oppose those other assaults on the environment that I mentioned earlier, and as we will oppose, with every fibre of our being, this plan to put state governments or local councils—anyone will do—in charge of the national environment. It is a recipe for destruction, and we will fight it with everything we have.