Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

This is a dummy spit from a government that broke the law and now wants to stop the community from enforcing the rules. We are only here because the minister did not follow the law, did not follow his own department's advice and was found by a court to have done the wrong thing in approving a massive coalmine without any regard for the obligation the so-called Minister for the Environment has, under the law, to look after the environment. The minister does the wrong thing, he gets called on it by the court—and, now, what do they say? They say, 'Let's change the rules so that the community can never take us to court again if we break them.'

This is critically important, because the rules we are dealing with are the rules in this country to protect our plants and animals, to protect our environment, to protect places like the Great Barrier Reef. The government says, 'We want to change the rules so that organisations and people who are concerned about the environment cannot take us to court. We only want those who are so-called directly affected to be able to do it.' Which individuals are going to be able to say that they are directly affected by an action on the Great Barrier Reef? Which individuals are going to be able to say that they are directly affected when an animal or plant species faces extinction?

What does the government want to happen? Does the government want the plants and animals and the Great Barrier Reef to start hiring lawyers themselves and go to court? The reason we have this law is to protect our environment. Because fish, snakes and skinks are not that well-known for hiring lawyers themselves and trotting off to court, the law says it is okay for people who care about the environment to do it themselves. Then we will leave it up to the independent court to decide whether the government has complied with the rules. That is too much for this government. They want to be able to do whatever they like, including ignoring the law that is there to protect our plants, our animals, our waterways and our reefs.

If this goes ahead, what does it mean for the ability of people to stand up for the environment? It means, for a farmer, that now they cannot have a group concerned about protecting the local area go to court, on behalf of the farmer, to protest against a coalmine that might affect the farmer's agricultural land. Instead, it means the only person who can go is someone who is directly affected. It means they themselves have to put their farm, their house or their business on the line and go through expensive litigation and face all the consequences that come from taking on what might be a massive multinational. It means they cannot tend to their farm and their business, because they themselves are going to have to be the focus of legal action. Instead, we have the very sensible proposition that says not anyone in the country but those who care about the area in question and have a history of caring about the area in question have the capacity to take it to court.

This government is just doing this because they have been caught out. They are looking for a distraction—beat-up on the greenies for a bit of a distraction. The problem is, as with everything this government does, they cannot even run a scare campaign properly. They have overreached, and the farmers know it. That is why you are hearing the National Farmers Federation saying, 'Isn't it curious that this happened not long after we went to the government and said, "What are you going to do to make sure we still have rights to defend people who will be affected by coalmines that we do not like?"'

It is why you hear farmers and landholders saying they do not have the time or funding to be investing in legal action with regard to environmental approvals. It is why you have lawyers making the point that going to court is very difficult, stressful and costly. Stephen Keim and Chris McGrath inThe Canberra Times said:

Removing this potential scrutiny will encourage both public servants and ministers to be less careful about complying with the law's requirements.

So it is clear what the government is doing: it is running away from criticism and giving itself the power to do whatever it likes with the environment, including not abiding by its own laws. This comes at a time when the government has hitched its wagon to a dying coal industry, an industry which is in crisis around the world. In the next year or so, you can expect to see some of the bigger players struggling and perhaps even declaring bankruptcy. Here in Australia, the community is already speaking up and saying: 'Coal is an industry of the past. Coal is the next tobacco, the next asbestos. We need to move towards renewable energy.' But the government is saying it is going to hold back the tide of renewable energy and do everything it possibly can to protect its mates in the coal industry who helped put them into power, including changing the law so that ministers are able to break it.

From listening to some of the speeches from the government you would think that there had been a tsunami of litigation that has resulted in critical projects being held up. It is not true. Our existing environmental protection laws, as important as they are, are weak. They do not allow for things like climate change to be taken into account and they do not give protection to a number of areas that they might. You often have to squeeze yourself through quite a narrow hole in order to be able to challenge the minister in the first place. The reality is that only 22 of the more than 5,000 projects that have gone through under this act have been challenged by community members and only two have been permanently stopped by legal challenges. With all this talk of 'lawfare', we are talking about two cases in 5,000 being stopped. And, remember, they get stopped because the minister does not follow the law, the minister does not uphold the standards that are there in the first place.

We already have a situation where you cannot just front up to court unless you have a proven interest in protecting the environment. We already have a situation where the environmental protection laws do not do enough—but the ones that we do have are important and worth defending. We already have a situation where we have to squeeze through some existing weak environmental protection laws and challenge the decision of the minister in court. In more than 5,000 projects, only twice has that been successful in having a project stopped—and we would say the environmental protection laws should be strengthened so that that number could go up. When that happens to hit one of the mates of this government, they cannot run here quickly enough to say they want the right to be able to break the law whenever they like and they do not want anyone to be able to hold them to account for it.

It is no wonder that people from environment groups to Alan Jones are now telling the government that this is a very bad thing to do. You were desperate for a distraction because you were not doing very well in the polls, so you overreached and picked on the so-called greenies. But you have said to farmers, to everyone who cares about the Great Barrier Reef, to everyone who cares about our waterways and to everyone who cares about plants and animals that they do not have the right to ask you to uphold your own standards anymore. That is why there is a community backlash. It is not often that the Greens and Alan Jones share a common platform. The fact that is happening on this ought to send a very clear signal to the government that they have engaged in overreach and it is time for them to step back.

Instead of changing the rules to protect a dying industry, instead of changing the rules to allow a government to break its own laws and do whatever it likes to the environment, it would be much better if we ditched this legislation and asked ourselves which projects we can invest in that will stand Australia in good stead in the 21st century. Believe it or not, there will come a point where the rest of the world tells us to stop digging at the rate we are doing now. There will come a point when the rest of the world says they want to be powered by renewable energy instead of coal. At that point, Australia had better have something to sell the rest of the world. If all we are doing is changing our laws and redirecting scarce public money to ensure new coal projects get off the ground—in a world where scientists have told us that 70 to 80 per cent of the coal that is in the ground needs to stay there if we are to avoid dangerous climate change—it is just madness. Let me repeat that. We as a planet have to leave in the ground about three-quarters of the coal that is already there. We cannot dig it up and sent it off to be burned. We have to make the switch to renewable energy and cut our pollution.

So instead of trying to prop up a dying industry by changing the laws and putting money into it, let's make the switch to renewables in this country and let's protect our environment. It is important for all of us that we have clean air and clean water. People visit this country because they like places such as the Great Barrier Reef, and there are many in this country who want to protect it. For what it thinks is a quick buck—although it is not turning into that—the government is saying: 'We're happy to dig up coal and burn it at a great rate of knots. It doesn't matter if climate change is going to bleach the Great Barrier Reef. It doesn't matter if it turns into a massive coal superhighway that pollutes the reef. We don't care about any of that. We just want to dig up and burn as much coal as we can.'

That short-sightedness and the fact that this government is able to unite everyone from Alan Jones to the Greens in condemnation of this bill shows just how out of touch it is and goes a long way to explaining why it is so on the nose with the public—because the public does not want this. The public wants people to be able to stand up in defence of the environment, the public wants government to comply with its own laws and not to write itself a get-out-of-jail-free card every time it breaks the law, and the public increasingly wants this government turfed out. If the government wants to have some chance of staying in power, it should start by ditching this bill and doing what the Australian people want.

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