Karen Grogan (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The government welcome the Greens party introducing this bill, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Amendment (Expanding the Water Trigger) Bill 2023 [No. 2], we understand the reasoning behind the private senator's bill and we commend Senator Hanson-Young for focusing on this important issue. The government have already committed to legislating the water trigger as part of our broader commitment to reform our environmental law. We're committed to extending the protections under Australia's environmental law to coal seam gas and other types of unconventional gas. That would include shale and tight gas, which are the ones that I believe Senator Hanson-Young is most concerned about because, due to the passage of time, they sit outside of the laws that we all know are broken. When the laws were first developed, these forms of gas were not included.

The government have made their own commitments on this topic over many years, and we are delivering on those commitments under the strong new environmental laws to deliver a nature positive environment. The laws we have currently are highly process driven, they're cumbersome and they're difficult to work with. It's difficult to find anyone who thinks that they work for them—not the environmentalists, not business, not developers. They just don't work, and we've known this for a considerable time. Unfortunately, our colleagues in the Liberal and National parties chose not to do anything to address that when they were in government.

These processes slow down decision-making and put people through an awful lot of hoops. And I'm not averse to a hoop if I think it's a useful one; I'm not averse to a lengthy, hard process if that's going to protect our environment. But we know that that's not necessary. There are many ways to improve this system to better protect the environment, which our laws don't appropriately do now, and better ways to ensure that people who are thinking of undertaking a development, be that a housing project or whatever across the entire spectrum, can work out early in the process whether the project's got legs. We can work out early in the process whether the development that's proposed is going to seriously destroy the environment, in which case it will not go ahead. The strengthening of these laws is critical—it is absolutely critical—to protecting our environment.

As much as these laws are not supported by anyone and they've been in place for a very long time, the new legislation, which is complex and is undergoing significant amounts of consultation, will be built on three basic principles: clear national standards of environmental protection, improving and speeding up decisions and restoring trust and integrity in the system. Our plan is that we will, hopefully, halt the decline in our natural environment and actually start to repair it.

Our Nature Positive Plan will provide stronger laws designed to repair nature. It will protect plants, animals, native species, endangered species and critical ecological environments. It will develop a new environmental protection agency, and they will help make those decisions, those important development decisions, early in the piece to stop unviable projects going ahead—unviable in terms of how they impact our environment.

There will be more certainty for business. They will save time. They will save money. There will be faster and clearer decisions. That is the right thing to do for business. It is right to tell them upfront that their project can't go ahead because of its impact on the environment. It saves them time and money, and it saves everyone a lot of grief. The environmentalists will then have a clearer pathway to see what is going to go ahead—what projects are really just flying a kite and aren't going to progress, and those that actually are going to progress.

The EPBC Act has to be reviewed every five years, and the last couple of reviews have turned out some pretty damning results. The most recent one, which was done in 2019 by Professor Graeme Samuel, found that our laws don't protect the environment and that they do not work for business either. They are unwieldly and costly laws, they are time-consuming for business, they don't provide certainty and they've led to widespread distrust in the system. Professor Samuel got to a consensus point between business groups and environmentalists in his review. He made a series of recommendations that are linked together and considered the full spectrum of people interested in this arena and in the full spectrum of what developments are required and what environmental protections are critically essential. To understand the Samuel review and look at the State of the environment report is to be deeply concerned about the state of our environment and deeply concerned about how it's going to progress over the coming years. There's a conflation of so many different issues, and we are seeing their hard impact on our environment.

I understand the concerns of Senator Hanson-Young, particularly in relation to any potential unconventional gas developments in the Northern Territory that stem from the Beetaloo potential projects, the Beetaloo inquiry and the extensive work that Senator Hanson-Young has done on this issue. We have offered the services of the Independent Expert Scientific Committee on Coal Seam Gas and Large Coal Mining Development to the Northern Territory government to assist them in assessment that may be required for any gas projects seeking their approval. This is the committee that will actually do the work once the expanded water trigger is legislated under the laws that the government is revising for the EPBC Act. That is exactly the process that will be followed, so, in the interim while we are finalising the legislation, we have offered that committee to do work for the Northern Territory government to ensure that those assessments are done in line with how we regulate other forms of gas.

We know that the environment is in bad shape and is getting worse. We as a government know that we are revising those laws. We hear from some people that we're not going fast enough. I appreciate that, but it is really complex. There are a lot of views to take into consideration, and it is a very unwieldy piece of legislation. We are going as fast as we can, but we are in bad shape, and let's not forget that. We need to protect our environment. We need to do everything we can to protect our environment for the long term because that report found that Australia has lost more mammal species to extinction than any other continent, and for the first time Australia has more foreign plant species than we have native. A habitat the size of Tasmania has been cleared, and plastics are choking oceans—up to 80,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometre, which is deeply alarming.

It's not surprising that we have done so badly, given we had 10 years of neglect and mismanagement by the Liberal-National government. They axed the climate change laws. Imagine where we'd be if we'd had 10 years of climate laws acting in this country. Imagine how much better a situation we would be in now. They ignored the Samuel review into environmental laws—twice they ignored the review. They sabotaged the Murray-Darling Basin Plan and are continuing to do that as we speak. They promised $40 million for Indigenous water but didn't deliver a penny and didn't deliver a drop. They set recycling targets—