Christopher Back (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Exactly, so—thank you very much. Those who have an different opinion to us, and I hope Senator Cameron is taking careful note, as indeed I am sure he is.

What will this do? It will give some business certainty. We will not have these lengthy and duplicitous arrangements that we have seen in the past. It will allow the better sharing of environmental information and data between business, governments—be they local, state, territory or federal, across boundaries—and, of course, the wider community. What it does do is eliminate that need for this multiple jumping of hurdles simply because of a difference between jurisdictions with very little, if any—in fact no—environmental advantages to be retained.

We will see increased use of strategic approaches under the EPBC Act, such as the environmental assessments, to improve the environment. I make the comment again that it will certainly be better, easier, simpler and faster for business to be able to put forward their proposals, to have them evaluated and to have them approved or rejected with or without amendments. I make the comment again as a person coming from a business background that any project that does not have community support, environmental sustainability and economic sustainability is not going to survive in any case. Those are three very powerful parameters. We are going to see a situation in which we are only going to need one application, one assessment process and one approval decision in normal circumstances. This is going to be enormously to the benefit of not only business but community confidence.

We will at all times, as the minister has assured us, make sure that the environment is protected. We will see more transparency around decisions being taken. We will see better access to information. We will make sure that there are—and these are points that the minister himself has made—audits, five-yearly reviews, reporting mechanisms and an escalated dispute resolution process in place to resolve any issues. There is the fact that, as I say again, the federal environment minister will retain the ability to call in the assessment and/or approval process if he or she has concerns about engagement with the community or environmental sustainability. The minister will retain under the EPBC Act the capacity to suspend or cancel an agreement. Naturally, the minister will continue to take responsibility for the bilateral agreements in place and have the necessary influence should he or she be concerned about the compliance by the states with that process. All of those points need to be made.

I now want to go to the question of the water trigger. As a Western Australian senator, this is not an area about which I have specialist knowledge, simply because it has not been the subject of such intense scrutiny in Western Australia as it has been on the east coast. But it is my understanding that currently the act does not allow for the accreditation of a state or territory process for the purpose of approvals relating to the developments about which we are speaking. This amendment will actually give the states the particular powers to do that. The state approval processes will have to meet the higher environmental standards to be accredited. It is quite interesting. As the minister has said, he will ensure that the Independent Expert Scientific Committee on Coal Seam Gas and Large Coal Mining Development will be made available to those relevant states to help them determine the success or otherwise of those projects.

I want to turn now to some examples of anomalies that we have seen in environmental approvals not just specifically between Commonwealth and states but in general. In 2013 we had occasion to meet with the then shadow minister and the now minister for minerals and resources, Ian Macfarlane, in the town of Kalgoorlie. We met with mining exploration companies as a result of the doubt at that time and that still lingers today, as a matter of fact, because of the fact that the mining tax has not been repealed. I think eight or 12 of the big mining exploration companies were in town with their drilling rigs because mining exploration had effectively come to a halt. We were asking them if they could explain to us some of the areas where red tape might have been interfering with their operations.

One of them mentioned a drilling exploration exercise some 200 kilometres north-east of Kalgoorlie. Senator Siewert would also know the area north-east of Kalgoorlie. It is remote country. This particular company wanted to move their operations some half a kilometre from where they were doing exploratory drilling to a new location. They seemed to be having an enormous amount of difficulty getting approval. So eventually somebody got in a motor car and drove from Kalgoorlie to Perth, went to the office of the relevant department and asked, 'What is going on?' This was after some six weeks of the staff sitting around idle. They said, 'You have not given us the last of the environmental information we require.' The bloke asked, 'What is the information you require?' They said, 'Your crews are staying in caravans. Presumably they are washing up in their caravans. You have given us no undertaking as to what is happening to the waste water coming out of the sinks of the caravans 200 kilometres north-east of Kalgoorlie.' We asked, 'What has that exercise cost you?' The fellow turned to us and said, 'I don't think you want to know.' Whilst this is not directly related to this particular amendment in front of us, these are the sorts of things we have to stop. We have to cut out this type of red tape.

I want to refer to the Busselton hospital project in the south-west of Western Australia. I am happy to say that it is now underway. It has started construction. The Barnett government has an excellent program to build hospitals around both metropolitan and rural Western Australia. I do not know that the ringtail possum is particularly under threat in Western Australia. It seems to me that everybody I speak to has seen immeasurable numbers of them. Certainly in my own circumstances I have particularly seen them in the ceiling of my home in North Yunderup. Nevertheless, that project was held up for many, many months because nobody seemed to be able to come to an understanding as to how they were going to deal with the possum numbers in Busselton. I do not know the details, but I do know that the project was held up for some period of time.

Another project is in Bunbury, the largest regional city south of Perth. It is a ring-road that will bring access to the port of Bunbury. It is being held up at this very moment because of environmental concerns over the shifting of the Preston River. The Preston River is already a man-made channel because that river was diverted many years ago. It is currently in limbo awaiting environmental approvals at both state and federal level. Another that comes to mind is Mangles Bay at Point Peron near Rockingham—just at the Causeway, for those of you who know the naval base HMAS Stirling. That project originated in 1989, at which time they started public and environmental reviews. In 2014, with a series of sensible demands and requirements by the state environment minister, Albert Jacob, it was eventually approved subject to it coming to Canberra, to Minister Hunt. The issues with the proposal related to the destruction of seagrass beds, and the requirements placed on the project were for the revegetation or re-establishment of areas two or three times larger than those that were to be destroyed and, of course, substantial sums of money associated with the rehabilitation of the Cockburn Sound. But you have to ask: if we have been engaged in this exercise for almost 25 years, why is it necessary to have federal government approval, Minister Hunt's approval, for something that has been the subject of so much investigation and which clearly meets the three goals that I have spoken about?

When it comes to our state, which I can speak of with more authority than others, I go to the move made by Premier Barnett in 2009 when he declared the Camden Sound whale sanctuary, some 400 kilometres north of Broome. Premier Barnett did not wait around for federal government intervention. Off his own bat, he made the decision that that whale sanctuary at Camden Sound, one of the largest in the world, would be protected for the humpback whales.

I go to the then Minister for Fisheries, Hon. Norman Moore MLC, now retired after a stellar career in the Western Australian parliament. It was Norman Moore, as fisheries minister, who dealt with issues associated with the declining rock lobster fishery. He was able to reverse that decline and turn it around by bringing in sensible policies, practices and procedures. He allowed an extension of fishing to 365 days a year but placed a quota on the fishermen—so now they can decide when they will fish. Will they fish to maximise the Christmas market? Will they fish to maximise the Chinese New Year market? In the meantime, the fishery re-established its internationally acclaimed reputation.

I go to the highly sustainable Exmouth Gulf prawn fishery. There is no need for federal intervention—decisions are made by the state. Within the Shark Bay Marine Park is the Shark Bay fishery, which is managed within the marine park to ensure the taking of prawns, scallops and crabs is sustainable. That is an important point. Every time you talk to the Western Australian Fishing Industry Council, they want to tell you about sustainability. The abalone industry is highly managed and about to expand a high-value marine product. I remind Senator Johnston that in the Peel-Harvey you cannot take crabs from today until 31 October or you will be the subject of either a $3,000 fine or a year in jail—or, indeed, both. So I urge you to keep your nets out of the water.

The point I want to make is that in all of these cases it is the local community, it is the state and local government, it is the people who are most affected by the environment in which they recreate, live and flourish, who should be driving this agenda. I had the opportunity for some seven years, on an island off the coast of Fremantle, Rottnest Island, to be part of, to guide, to lead and to implement many of these environmental policies. They had nothing to do with the federal government. They were driven by the community that used the island and loved the island. I could speak for some time about both the marine and the terrestrial environmental initiatives that we undertook on that island as a result of those three criteria: economic sustainability, environmental sustainability and, of course, community support. I urge my colleagues in the Senate to support this legislation which sets up administrative arrangements that were envisaged at the time of the 1999 act.