Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

I am glad to have the opportunity to speak in this debate. There are many bills that come before us in this place that have Orwellian or euphemistic names, but the EPBC Act, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, exists to deliver on the imperatives that are clearly present in its name. Unfortunately, the Abbott government puts no great value on those imperatives; the Abbott government wants to lump the EPBC Act and a range of other critical legislative protections in the simplistic, slogan-oriented category of 'green tape'.

As the brilliant Clarke and Dawe sketch revealed recently, the responsible minister appears unaware that his title is Minister for the Environment—just as the Abbott government is unaware, or ignorant, or wilfully blind to the fact that the EPBC Act is intended to serve in the interests of protecting and conserving our natural world in all its living diversity. To serve that function the EPBC Act assessment process has to be rigorous; it has to be open and transparent; it has to be an opportunity for Australians to share in the protection and conservation of the greatest shared asset in our common wealth, and that is the environment, marine and terrestrial, of which we are a part and which we are charged with keeping in trust for future generations.

For those reasons the EPBC Act process can never be allowed to become a rubber stamp to be banged out in the interests of speedy investment and careless development or for the mere appearance of scrutiny and diligence. Given both its preference for obfuscation in general and its history of eroding environmental safeguards in particular, it is sadly not all that astonishing to witness this government's latest assault on Australia's hard-won framework of environmental protection and our underlying respect for the rule of law. Indeed, this bill is merely the latest slip in the steady downhill trajectory when it comes to environmental protection in our country.

That environmental defenders and, for that matter, ordinary community members and activists would dare to make use of the EPBC Act to properly examine and properly constrain large development projects in the interests of ensuring transparency and due diligence—not to mention the best environmental and community outcomes—has provoked this government into yet another ideologically driven act of folly. Apparently changing the rules and belittling your legitimate adversaries is what you do when the game does not go your way.

What is particularly galling in the circumstances that have given rise to this bill is the way the government has deliberately and repeatedly misrepresented the facts in relation to the environmental assessment process and the involvement of the courts. Thankfully, the media coverage of this issue has allowed the wider community to understand that the failure to achieve approval of Adani's Carmichael coalmine in central Queensland was not the result of a court process initiated by environmentalists, but entirely the result of mistakes made by the minister. Yet this outcome was marshalled in support of the apparently pressing need to stop conservation groups from having access to the courts. I mean god forbid that ordinary Australians—people who care about the extinction of native species, who care about the contamination of groundwater, or the degradation of coral reef, or deforestation—should have the ability to contest aspects of enormous development proposals with the potential, in many cases, to cause enormous harm.

Just as this government has sought to mislead and scare the public on other issues for its own political purposes and political gain, so too in this case has it employed inflammatory language—'vigilante litigation', 'sabotage', 'inner-city greens'—to distort and grossly simplify a matter of important policy into a ridiculous kind of Punch-and-Judy show.

It was interesting to note Richard Denniss' recent observation in theAustralian Financial Review that data compiled by The Australia Institute, where he is chief economist, suggests that the third-party 'law-fare' Mr Abbott is so agitated by has only challenged approximately 0.4 per cent of projects covered by the EPBC Act he now wants to urgently amend. Denniss went on to make a number of salient points that go to the core of this government's values and methods. He wrote:

While much has been written about the Prime Minister's lack of an agenda, in reality he has a very clear set of goals. Unfortunately for the business community, those goals have more to do with stifling the desires of progressives than the pursuit of the pro-business agenda. Stopping same-sex marriage, spruiking a mine that many banks won't touch and ripping up a market-based emissions abatement mechanism are not 'distractions' for Tony Abbott; they are his raison d'etre.

Let's be clear about what is at stake with this legislation. By acting to limit the range of people allowed to have standing for the purposes of the EPBC Act, the government is acting to seriously dilute its effectiveness, which means that Australia's environment and biodiversity will be at greater risk of destruction and harm. As I have said previously on this subject, there is no doubt that this change would lead to poorer assessments, to mistakes and misjudgements, and to serious environmental damage and danger to life—including human life.

From the time that it was implemented by Prime Minister John Howard in 1999, the EPBC Act has worked remarkably well. It has given developers a clear framework within which to shape their projects and seek the necessary approvals. It has provided government with an effective administrative tool for supporting economic development that adheres to appropriately high environmental protection standards. It has empowered ordinary Australians—people who are neither part of government nor driven by an economic interest—to participate in the fact finding, analysis, consultation, argument and, on rare occasions, court action in relation to projects that stand to affect the environment that belongs to all of us in this country, wherever we live.

There are many examples where court challenges brought by environmental advocates have either prevented negative outcomes or forced closer inspection of projects that fall under EPBC regulation, among them the mass killing by electrocution of thousands of spectacled flying foxes on a lychee farm in Queensland, the development of the proposed Nathan Dam in Queensland, which would have caused pollution in the catchment of the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area, Japanese whaling in the Australian Whale Sanctuary and the question of greenhouse gas emissions from mines in NSW and Queensland. All these cases were subjected to greater rigour and more careful consideration through the involvement of people and groups who are devoted to the environmental cause. Let us pause for a second and pay tribute to those people. They are Australians who give their time and energy through great and unstinting conviction, through great love and respect for the natural world in all its fragility and beauty, wanting that beauty and diversity to persist, fighting to ensure that fragility is not pushed beyond the point of no return, which has already occurred too many times, and doing that work, lifting their voice, taking it to the streets, and to the courts if necessary, for the benefit of all of us.

In his second reading of this bill the minister showed the government's true colours. He said:

Since coming into government we have applied the highest environmental standards. We have halved the time for environmental approvals and cleared the backlog of projects left by Labor.

We have approved over $1 trillion in projects and established a one-stop shop for environmental assessments. All while maintaining environmental standards.

For the Abbott government, the EPBC Act is merely an example of green tape that stands in the way of investment and needs to be swept aside. Coming from a government that thinks coal has a bright future and that has actively undermined progress towards a clean energy economy, this claim to high environmental standards is laughable at best.

While the fate of the ornamental snake in central Queensland may not be of direct concern to my constituents in Fremantle, it is certainly in the interests of people all over this country that places, iconic and otherwise, are protected from irreversible environmental destruction. The impacts of the Adani mine in the Galilee Basin and its proposed port at Abbot Point, inside our iconic Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area, are of course of great concern to the traditional owners of the land. They are of relevance to the surrounding communities, and they are of relevance to all of us. As Wangan and Jagalingou man Adrian Burragubba, one of the traditional owners of the land where the Adani mine is proposed, said in the group's video plea to stop this mine:

I'm gonna convince all of our people to stand together as one people and one voice, and then we're gonna ask all Australian people and people from all over the world to stand with us and unite with us to fight this fight.

It is wrong in spirit and wrong in concept to restrict the opportunity for people to have access to the courts in the very small number of instances where such action is necessary to legitimately question and even oppose development that has the potential to do very significant environmental harm.

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