Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise proudly to oppose the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Amendment (Bilateral Agreement Implementation) Bill 2014 and to rebut some of the rubbish that we have heard spouted in this chamber by the previous speaker, who is trying to claim that this will not have any deleterious environmental impacts whatsoever. In fact, this is all about doing over environmental protection in this country and thereby ensuring that the rights of big mining, big property, big developers, big forestry, the big dam builders and the big frackers are prioritised over the rights of our ecology, which ultimately underpins the rights of future generations in this country.

Make no mistake: this is all about ripping off future generations and denying them the opportunities for prosperity that we are so lucky to have in our lifetimes. This is undoubtedly a massive step backwards in environmental regulation and environmental protection in this country. What we are talking about here is the government proposing to hand the power to protect the precious places of Australia—the ecologies and all of the creatures and plants that rely on those ecologies—over to state and territory governments, who, quite frankly, have an absolutely appalling record of environmental protection.

To illustrate what I am talking about, I want to go to a story about something that happened in Tasmania during my time in the Tasmanian parliament. This is in relation to the pulp mill proposed for the Tamar Valley by the company formerly known as Gunns Limited. Gunns are in administration at the moment, and I am very pleased about that. When they were a publicly listed company they submitted their proposal for a toxic pulp mill in the beautiful Tamar Valley in northern Tasmania. They submitted it to the peak planning authority in Tasmania, then known as the Resource Planning and Development Commission—now known, I should state for completeness of the record, as the Tasmanian Planning Commission. The then Resource Planning and Development Commission undertook a reasonably comprehensive, it has to be said, assessment of Gunns Limited's pulp mill. However, it became clear towards the end of that process—this information became public because I put in freedom of information requests to the RPDC—that they were moving towards a finding that Gunns Limited's pulp mill proposal was 'critically non-compliant', as stated by the RPDC.

What happened then? The head of the Department of Premier and Cabinet made a phone call to Gunns Limited. They tipped Gunns Limited off that the RPDC was in the process of concluding that Gunns Limited's pulp mill proposal was critically non-compliant. We then had some toing and froing between senior levels of government—by that, I mean then Premier Paul Lennon and the then CEO of Gunns Limited, John Gay. As a result, the project was ripped out of the hands of the RPDC and instead subjected to an extremely dodgy, extremely unacceptable parliamentary approvals process. I will not go into the many, many deficiencies of that process, but suffice to say that moved it from a supposedly independent planning authority into a highly politicised environment within the Tasmanian parliament. We saw bullying, we saw intimidation and we saw lies told to the Tasmanian parliament by the proponents. We saw consultants to that process who abjectly failed to conduct themselves in anything like an impartial way. As a result, disappointingly for Tasmania, parliamentary approval was granted, with only the Greens and a few brave members of the upper house willing to stand up for proper process and to stand up for the Tasmanian environment.

I place that on record because this is the kind of attitude to environmental protection and the kind of attitude at the political level in Tasmania that you are proposing to reward by handing over certain powers and authorities through the processes of this legislation. Let me be clear about this: Tasmanian governments have starved for resources environment departments and other assessing authorities in Tasmania. The honourable exception to that was in the four years between 2010 and 2014, when the Greens did ensure that extra resources went into some of these areas. But, apart from that period, state governments of both Labor and Liberal persuasion have starved bureaucracies in those areas of resources. There is simply no way, in Tasmania at the very least, where my expertise lies, that assessments can be done comprehensively and adequately, particularly of major projects where there is political interest, because I simply do not trust the Labor or Liberal parties in Tasmania to not politically interfere in the assessments of those projects as they so corruptly did in the assessment of the Gunns Limited pulp mill.

We know that there are a number of deficiencies in the legislation currently before us. One of the most frightening aspects of this legislation is in the area of the approval powers. These changes do not actually reduce duplication, which is the furphy that has been peddled in relation to this legislation. What they basically do is give authority to state and local governments to tick off on many projects which simply should not proceed because of their impact on the ecology and therefore on the welfare of future generations. It has to be clearly stated here that the current system is a separation of powers and responsibilities; it is not a duplicate system. As I said, this is the big furphy here. It is entirely reasonable to separate out powers and responsibilities—it is what happens in a federation. What is not reasonable is to describe a separation of powers and responsibilities as duplication, because that is not factually accurate.

This bill, very disappointingly so, will allow state and territory governments—and, extraordinarily, local councils—to make decisions about matters of national and, in some cases, international environmental significance without any expert advice from federal government departments. Again, this is another step in the ongoing emasculation of Commonwealth government departments that are there to protect the environment and to deliver intergenerational equity in this country.

I want to make the point about local governments that there are local governments in Tasmania that have less than 5,000 ratepayers in their municipality. They have trouble assessing carports, let alone the difficulty they are going to have assessing larger, more potentially environmentally destructive projects. So when you struggle, because of your very low rate base, to deal with applications for house extensions, for the building of decks, for garage extensions and carports, you are certainly going to struggle on major, more environmentally impactful projects.

So, unfortunately, what we are dealing with today in this Senate is a bill that will basically allow Commonwealth standards not to be reflected in state laws, and that alone makes a mockery of the claims that standards will be upheld. This is all about reducing protection for the environment. How do we know that, and how do we know that we have had an effective admission from the government that that is the case? It is because they talk about 'jobs, jobs, jobs' as their highest priority, they talk about efficiencies, and, in the context of this legislation, they talk about savings from what they describe as 'pen-pushers'. Well, one person's pen-pusher is another person's environmental protector.

Alone of the parties represented in this place, the Greens understand very deeply that we need to protect our ecological processes. We need to protect our climate. We need to protect our environment, for the benefit not only of all the humans and all the creatures on the planet now, but in fact for future generations. Apart from anything else, this bill clearly fails the intergenerational equity test. So, clearly, this bill should not proceed through this chamber of the Australian parliament.

Now I want to address something that the government, as I understand it, has claimed here, when they say, 'We've got some draft agreements coming down the line with the states, and don't worry—we've got call-in powers in those draft agreements.' We need to understand, as my colleague Senator Waters said in her contribution, that this is in fact a highly prescribed test for when the Commonwealth minister can have a state of mind where he or she 'knows' that something problematic is going on at the state level and call it back in. But it has to be before the state has already issued the approval. So the question quite correctly posed in this context by Senator Waters is: how on earth is the Commonwealth minister going to know that something problematic is going on at state level before the approvals are issued? Of course, the only answer to that question is that it will be somewhere between extremely difficult and impossible for the Commonwealth minister to know. So we are not satisfied at all with those call-in provisions, particularly as state governments right now—and I will speak again from my experience in Tasmania—are quite frankly prepared to do or say anything to get developments up in their state. And it does not matter to them that those developments compromise the environment or future generations, because that is outside the electoral cycle that is the only thing that the current state government in Tasmania is focused on. They are focused every day—as are the Labor and Liberal parties in the Australian parliament—primarily on one goal, and that is: winning the next election. And this legislation is abundant proof of that and fits very squarely within those strategic imperatives.