Lisa Singh (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

( I rise to speak in opposition to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Amendment (Bilateral Agreement Implementation) Bill 2014. Labor opposes this bill because it clearly does absolutely nothing either for environmental protection or for biodiversity conservation. That is something that has been very much a commonplace mainstay of this government—doing nothing for environmental protection and nothing for environmental conservation.

What Labor also opposes in this bill, apart from the watering down of the critical water trigger, is the creation—in the now-customary shambolic manner of the Abbott government when engaging in law reform—of a sprawling and inefficient new regime of environmental approvals. It might be termed an 'eight-stop shop' in which the central authority of the Commonwealth for environmental approvals is delegated down to the level of state governments and territories, and even to local councils. There will be at least eight different jurisdictions' worth of green tape. It is not a one-stop shop but a shopping mall.

Neither the Minister for the Environment nor the Prime Minister has once said that this bill is designed to improve environmental outcomes. This bill is designed to fast-track developments that negatively impact environmental issues of national significance. This government will not make a decision that explicitly protects Australia's environment. This bill is another crystal-clear demonstration—as if we needed one—of this government's conviction that the environment is an obstacle to be cleared and not an asset to be managed. By giving these powers to states and territories we will see significant transformation in the way in which the environment is considered and decisions are made around it by government. Under these changes, the government will trust Campbell Newman to approve the dredging and dumping of hundreds of thousands of tonnes of mud on the Great Barrier Reef. They will put Colin Barnett in charge of the Ningaloo Reef. They will put Will Hodgman and his clear-felling administration in charge of Tasmania's iconic, World Heritage listed forests.

But the bill goes to something beyond the pro-development at any cost attitudes of state governments. It provides the ability for these same state governments to accredit local government to undertake critical assessment and approval processes. The Mayor of Mackay will have more practical influence on the state of the Great Barrier Reef than the Australian Minister for the Environment. Allowing states to approve state backed projects that impact on environmental issues of national significance is worrying enough, without further diluting accountability by putting local government in charge of Australia's natural assets.

One of Labor's serious concerns with the whole process is the lack of quality and consistency of processes between the states. In fact, this bill specifically mentions the inconsistency—while doing nothing to address it. The bill acknowledges the different systems and standards in each state but ignores any issues that this might present. At the same time it mentions, for the first time, local governments having the power to approve developments that currently need to go through, at a federal level, a robust process that is consistent across this country.

The government is adamant that it will maintain environmental safeguards; but it is unclear how it will do so as it devolves approval powers to severely compromised state government departments. We know the real work of delegating approval powers is being done in the bilateral agreements with the states. We know the work is being rushed by an underfunded task force in an undermanned federal department. I understand there has been a lot of emphasis in recent discussions about this bill on the threat it poses to the water trigger. On that issue, I would like to note and at least acknowledge Tony Windsor's work in the last parliament on getting the water trigger recognised as a matter of national environmental significance and his ongoing support of the independent expert scientific committee and the importance of the water trigger mechanism. However, if only the water trigger is protected by amendment at the cost of allowing the bill to pass, then all of the other matters of national environmental significance lose their protection under the EPBC Act.

This bill, along with the bilateral agreements being developed, will mean that World Heritage sites like the Great Barrier Reef and the Tasmanian wilderness, nuclear activities such as uranium mining, and threatened species protected under international treaties will be, at best, put in the hands of state governments. Labor oppose this bill because we believe the national government is responsible for matters of national environmental significance. It is important to highlight the flaw in the logic upon which this bill is based. In the same breath as recognising that some approvals are of such significance to Australia that they should be designated as national, it allows the national government to evade its national responsibility for them and, instead, handpasses responsibility to states and councils that are less equipped to make the hard, legally sustainable decisions necessary in this area and less interested in taking the long-term and wide-ranging perspectives on the Australian environment that the Commonwealth must.

It is important to remember that UNESCO's World Heritage Committee report expressly referred to this bill when it described as premature the notion that the Commonwealth's environmental protection powers would simply be handed over to the Queensland government. The Great Barrier Reef not only is one of the seven wonders of the world but also literally underpins billions of dollars of economic activity in the Queensland area and the work of 60,000 or more employees, largely in the tourism industry. This is an incredibly important matter for Australia from an environmental, social and economic perspective. The possibility that the reef would be put on the in-danger list would have very serious ramifications for Queensland's tourism industry, as much as it would reflect the very serious state of crisis that the reef finds itself in environmentally.

The centrality of the Commonwealth to decisions affecting matters of environmental significance across the country is well established in Australia and emerged as a result of dedicated activism and prolonged struggle to save our wilderness. Just as Tasmania is now a central node in questions of national significance around ecology, conservation and clean energy—with the Abbott government's pathetic attempts to delist parts of its World Heritage area at this year's UNESCO meeting—so it was that the decision over the Franklin dam in Tasmania in the 1980s played a central part in the establishment of the authority of the Commonwealth in protecting matters of national environmental significance.

The Franklin dam judgement of the High Court ensured that the role of the national government was recognised and its laws would prevail in relevant areas of the protection of the natural environment. And now the draft bilateral agreement with my home state of Tasmania has been released. The draft agreement could present an opportunity to improve the overall environmental assessment regime in Tasmania. But it will not. The EPBC Act objectives of 'protecting the environment' and 'promoting the conservation and ecologically sustainable use of natural resources' have been replaced in this draft agreement with less direct objectives of avoiding 'unacceptable impacts on matters of national environmental significance'. That is not good enough. The Tasmanian Environmental Defenders Office—another environmental protection and obstacle to development defunded by the Abbott government—has also noted that rigorous, efficient and effective assessments are not possible unless adequate resources are available.

As Will Hodgman's Liberal government takes the axe to native forests and its Public Service, there is no prospect of the Tasmanian environment department being able to carry out rigorous, efficient and effective assessments. They might be swift assessments, but they are not good ones. Such regulatory work requires a national perspective as well as an international one, with the Commonwealth sitting at the nexus between the international community and the laws and agreements which govern international environmental regulation and cooperation. It is important that the level of government that mediates between the domestic and the international levels also has appropriate powers to look after Australia's commitment in these areas. The exercise of the Commonwealth's powers in this area are, however, appropriately limited to certain categories to ensure that they are used only in some circumstances. The decision must be connected by one of nine matters of national environment significance to trigger the Commonwealth's involvement. The Commonwealth has a greater capacity to consider the relevant issues in these matters through the Department of the Environment than many state environmental departments—resourced, as they are, to provide state-specific rather than nationwide advice and often under budget constraints. They are not responsible for international obligations and are also not appropriate bodies to assess the impact of environmental matters that cross the borders of several states, as many major questions of environmental impact assessments do. Furthermore, whereas some states may have particularly strong economic interests in one area or another, the Commonwealth is able to take an overarching perspective on these matters without the potential for conflict that a different level of government would bring to the task.

Given the extensive negative environmental effects that this bill carries with it, it is timely to reflect on the Abbott government's record on the environment. I would like to call upon the representatives of the government in this chamber to speak up and tell us about its achievements in protecting the environment. Now is an opportunity to inform the Australian public just what their policy priorities are in regard to environmental protection and to tell us what they think are their greatest environmental successes have been.

I ask this question in all honesty because, as we near the first anniversary of this Abbott government coming to power, the only actions that are able to be identified in this area are those that are failures. There is an extensive list, which I will assist those opposite by quoting from.

The first, of course, is a double failure: the attempt to remove 74,000 hectares from the protected forests and landscape of Tasmania listed as a World Heritage Area. This was a failure in two parts. The first was the attempt to pursue the delisting, making the claim—later to be contradicted by the government's own environmental department—that the areas were degraded and failing to recognise the need for continued protection of Tasmania's remarkable wilderness. The second failing was in the government's incompetence in executing its policy, with the application being soundly rejected by the UN committee, with Portugal describing it as a 'feeble attempt to remove protection from an important area'.

Another important failure of the government was the defunding of the Environmental Defender's Offices and its abolition of the Climate Commission. This assault on the environment went hand in hand with its removal of the price on carbon, in doing so playing its part in exposing Australia to the unpredictable and dangerous effects of climate change. While it had promised to implement its own policy to replace the price on carbon and engage in direct action so far this has not occurred, leaving the country without a policy in this important area—having taken this country completely backwards on climate change policy.

Another prominent failure is the removal, at the stroke of a pen, of Australia's system of maritime reserves—the largest in the world. Will we see them being re-proclaimed at some stage in the future? Perhaps—I do not know. The only certainty here is that on questions of environmental protection the government, as it stands, cannot be trusted. Of course, on top of that, we are yet to see where the government will go in relation to the renewable energy target—a bipartisan policy for so long, going back to 2001 under John Howard's leadership. And yet, through the politically-motivated Warburton review and its findings as of last Friday, we are clearly put on notice by this government that its response will certainly be nothing but negative and another broken promise when it comes to a bipartisan policy position in supporting the current legislated renewable energy target in this country.

Labor continues to support streamlining and improving environmental standards and environmental assessment processes for major projects, but final approval on matters of national environmental significance should remain with the national government. Labor began negotiations with the states to establish agreements to reduce regulatory double-up in 2012. Throughout these negotiations it became clear that some states could not be trusted with Australia's unique environment. The Australian government has a responsibility for protecting Australia's precious environment and the EPBC Act in particular accounts for matters of national environmental significance.

The Abbott government clearly has no interest in protecting Australia's environment for the future. Not for our future, but for our children's future. Since coming into government, Tony Abbott and Greg Hunt have made bad decision upon bad decision that have hurt our environment. At this time I have not heard a single response from the government about what is going on within it as a government, its response to UNESCO at an international level or any success or positive outcome in environmental policy that it is doing within itself.

But this is the furthest that this government has gone in terms of putting our environment at risk to irreparable damage by leaving decisions of national environmental significance to state premiers and local councils. It is something that Labor takes very seriously. It is something that Labor will not support, because we need to have our national government in charge of the assessment processes for those important projects that have major national significance. That is why Labor will not support this bill. I conclude my remarks on that note, to say that Labor will not support this bill.