Julian Leeser (Berowra, Liberal Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the government's latest attempt to rewrite the approvals framework that underpins jobs, investment and certainty in our economy. In 2024, I had the honour to deliver the Garfield Barwick oration. Barwick is a hero of mine, a former member of this House, former Liberal attorney-general, former chief justice of Australia and the founding president of the Australian Conservation Foundation. In my address, I spoke about Barwick's approach to the environment, which was balanced, prudent and realist. Recognising the complexities of modern life and the demand for raw materials, it envisaged that advanced development and conservation could exist peaceably. When Barwick was president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, he commended the foundation at that time for doing a great deal to introduce a sense of balance into the consideration of the protection of the environment. Explaining what he meant by 'balance' in 1970, he said, 'We realise this generation must have access to resources and must use the technologies which are available to make the life of the ordinary man better, but resources can be used and technologies employed without doing avoidable damage to the environment.'

This balance is what the Environment Protection Reform Bill 2025 should be about, but unfortunately it's not, and it gets the balance wrong. This bill doesn't make small changes or amendments. It's almost 1,500 pages of legislation and explanatory materials that reaches into every corner of the economy that builds, digs, grows and manufactures. It will determine whether projects are approved in months or in years. It will determine whether capital comes here or goes somewhere else. It will determine whether Australians get a system that's workable and provides certainty to the private sector or one that is slower and more complex.

What has the Albanese government chosen to do with something that's this significant? We heard the Prime Minister say it just then. They want to rush it through the parliament in one week. The bill was introduced into the parliament on 29 October. Stakeholders have immediately asked for more time to consider the bill. The Senate has already had to step in and refer it to an inquiry reporting on 24 March next year. According to the Prime Minister's timetable, the bill will be passed in the Senate before the Senate has had a chance to even consider this properly. This is outrageous, because 1,500 pages takes time to read, weigh and consider.

The member for Watson has carriage of the bill in this chamber, and he knows this. When he sat on this side of the chamber, he regularly decried rushed legislation. In 2014, in relation to a piece of legislation, he said:

The timing of this bill has precluded members of parliament from doing their job …

Is the timing of this bill precluding not only the parliament but stakeholders from doing their job to ensure the final bill passed is in the best interests of all Australians?

Or should we look to 2019, when Minister Burke said, 'There's only one reason the government have decided that they want this legislation to be rushed through tonight, and it's because they've decided to play the game.' So, this is now the game that the Albanese government is playing: acting in the same vein that they accused the former government of doing. Today they're doing precisely what they used to decry, and on such a large and far-reaching piece of legislation from their own government.

This matters because rushing this legislation will have real consequences for Australians. This bill updates the 1999 EPBC Act. As environment minister, the Leader of the Opposition commissioned Professor Graeme Samuel to undertake an independent review. The former coalition government introduced reforms, including streamlining pathways. It's no surprise to anyone that Labor, in opposition, blocked them at the time. The Labor government now has presented its own model, but at what cost? Minister Plibersek attempted to make these reforms in the last parliament. They were withdrawn under internal pressure.

Labor promised an environmental protection agency at two elections, and four years on it hasn't delivered what it promised. This is all too familiar from those opposite when it comes to energy and the environment. Let's not forget that they promised that Australians would see a $275 reduction in power bills. Four years on, they haven't delivered. The Prime Minister said that life would be cheaper under his government. Four years on, the government hasn't delivered.

The issue I particularly want to speak about in relation to the bill is very simple. It's about the transparency that this government is allergic to, and it's about scrutiny. The bill, as I indicated at the start of my remarks, is the perfect exemplar of this government's approach to transparency, scrutiny and allowing the parliament to do its job. Dumping 1,500 pages of legislation sight unseen, with economy-wide ramifications, and then demanding that the parliament pass them without properly looking at them is not the action of a government that wants the parliament to do its job. Indeed, we as legislators would be failing in our job if we didn't scrutinise the legislation properly.

Many of my colleagues have already made this point. The legislation contains a range of extraordinary changes that need to be properly weighed. Instead, we heard this petulant demand from the Prime Minister just a few moments ago to pass this bill—more reminiscent of a toddler than of a government acting in the national interest. More importantly, this bill says something very important about the government's approach to transparency and accountability. This is a government that talked a big game on transparency before they came to power. They promised to be so much better. Prior to the election, the Prime Minister promised the Australian people that, if they elected him and the Australian Labor Party to office, he and his ministers would deliver transparency, integrity and accountability in everything they did. Those are the standards he told the Australian people he would uphold and that he wanted them to judge him by if he was elected as Prime Minister of Australia: transparency, integrity and accountability.

Now we know that these standards are not the standards that the Albanese government and the ministers are holding themselves to. The former Attorney-General, the member for Isaacs, loved preaching about accountability and integrity, but his government has done the exact opposite. He said that :

appropriate, prompt and proactive disclosure of government-held information informs community, increases participation and enhances decision-making, builds trust and confidence, is required and permitted by law and improves efficiency.

The point they made in opposition was that transparency actually promotes better government. But that's not what we're seeing in the bill.

What about the Minister for the Environment, who's responsible for the procedural mess we're dealing with today? What did he say when he was in opposition? He said, 'We deserve answers and transparency.' He also said it was not negotiable, and should not be negotiable, that the Prime Minister comply with the standing orders and properly answer questions. Clearly he's changed his tune in government.

And what about the Prime Minister? In his foreword to a Code of Conduct signed personally by him, we get this sort of sanctimony:

Australians deserve good government.

The Albanese Government is committed to integrity, fairness, honesty and accountability and Ministers in my Government (including Assistant Ministers) will observe standards of probity, governance and behaviour worthy of the Australian people.

In making all the fanfare that he did in relation to his Code of Conduct, at clause 4.4, under 'Responsibility and accountability', he said:

Ministers are required to provide an honest and comprehensive account of their exercise of public office, and of the activities of the agencies within their portfolios, in response to any reasonable and bona fide enquiry by a member of the Parliament or a Parliamentary Committee.

That's exactly what we should be seeing with the bill. Instead, we've seen a very different tune from this government. Instead of transparency, accountability and openness we've seen the approach demonstrated by this bill, where we have a government that is demanding that it be rammed through without proper consideration. More important than that, the approach to this bill is part of a very disturbing pattern around secrecy and opposition to scrutiny. There's overwhelming evidence that the resistance to scrutiny that we are seeing in the approach to this bill is endemic.

We've seen it in other areas, such as the surge in FOI refusals. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, the watchdog of the FOI system, said that the proportion of FOI requests being completely refused shot up to 27 per cent in the December 2024 quarter. By 31 March this year the proportion of requests that had been completely refused by government had, according to the OAIC dashboard, shot up to 31 per cent. We've seen it in this government's approach to consultation, which, extraordinarily, made nondisclosure agreements a condition of participation in too many areas. We saw it in the secrecy in relation to workplace relations reforms. They gagged small business, employers and industry groups that were directly targeted. They got people to sign legal gags and tried to enforce them because they wanted to lock them out of consultation.

This government should hang its head in shame. This is the same government that drafted a secret manual directing officials on how to avoid answering questions in Senate estimates, called 'Approaches to SEQoNs asked of all (or multiple) agencies'. The government was exposed because of a leak. The document was circulated among agencies, and the involvement of the Prime Minister 's Office is very murky.

This is a government that has repeatedly flouted orders for the production of documents. In fact, this government is now so egregious that the Senate has been forced into extraordinary procedural steps, like extending question time just to ensure basic standards of transparency. The Centre for Public Integrity has made clear that compliance with Senate orders for the production of documents has fallen to the lowest level since 1993. For whole generations of Australians, no government has been worse than this one in actually producing documents for scrutiny. Claims of public interest immunity, a claim that is used to oppose the release of documents, have tripled among this government, and we're seeing them made every single week.

We're seeing this in the malicious and petty slashing of staff from all those in opposition and on the crossbench, whose job it is to help hold this government to account. This government broke with decades of bipartisanship to reduce the number of staff. And we're not talking about electorate offices; we're talking about staff whose job it is to help us scrutinise the government.

That brings me back to this bill, which, as I've said, is just one more data point in a long line of data points that illustrate this government's addiction to secrecy. It's the sort of petulant approach that, as I said, you'd expect from a toddler. This government has now brought this bill into this House. The Senate, rightly, sent it to committee. Stakeholders want time to look at it. They want time to consider it. They want the chance to tell us, as legislators, how it will affect them. Instead, this government tried to rush it through. The Business Council of Australia has been clear:

… without significant changes … we risk embedding a system that's even slower, more complex and lacking the clarity and certainty needed for investment.

That's the Business Council, not the coalition. It's a serious concern. We should be examining those concerns in committee. Are those concerns borne out by evidence? Are changes required? What do the changes look like? Does this bill actually provide a solution to a productivity problem, or does it do the opposite, as industry has been telling us? I want to be clear: there are reform options that the coalition supports, but there are also serious issues with the legislation that we're being asked to consider. My colleagues have spoken at length to those issues.

I want to talk about scrutiny in this government's approach. As I said, this bill has already been referred to committee. Those opposite should be well aware of the importance of the committee's procedures and why we have committees in this place. It's worthwhile reminding people what Practice says about the importance of committees in the function of our parliament. It says:

The principal purpose of parliamentary committees is to perform functions which the Houses themselves are not well fitted to perform, that is, finding out the facts of a case or issue, examining witnesses, sifting evidence, and drawing up reasoned conclusions. Because of their composition and method of procedure, which is structured but generally informal compared with the Houses, committees are well suited to the gathering of evidence from expert groups or individuals. In a sense they 'take Parliament to the people' and allow direct contact between members of the public and representative groups of Members of the House. Not only do committee inquiries enable Members to be better informed about community views but in simply undertaking an inquiry committees may promote public debate on the subject at issue. The all-party composition of most committees and their propensity to operate across party lines are important features. This bipartisan approach generally manifests itself throughout the conduct of inquiries and the drawing up of conclusions. Committees oversight and scrutinise the Executive and are able to contribute towards better government. They also assist in ensuring a more informed administration and policy-making process, in working with the Executive on proposed legislation and other government initiatives.

So, this is what the purpose of the committee is in our system. This is why a committee inquiry into this bill has been established. This is why, because of the complexity of this bill, a reporting date for this committee has been listed as March next year.

Instead, as the Prime Minister said, we have a rushed attempt to bring this bill into this House and have it debated today, without the benefit of a committee inquiry. The Prime Minister is standing over the Senate and saying to the Senate that they will pass the bill in the next week of parliament sitting without the benefit of that sifting and weighing process which is vital to the committee processes of this parliament and vital to the legislative scrutiny that all of us who are not part of the executive—and this includes members opposite—have an absolute responsibility to do in regard to a bill with such economy-wide ramifications as this one. It is about whether the parliament should be allowed to do its job and whether all of us should benefit from the deliberations of the committee process and the weighty consideration that such a committee would give to a bill as complex and economy-wide as this.

What we have, in this bill, is an arrogant government that is instead trampling all over the committee process. It's clear that, by suspending standing orders to rush the debate today, the government has abandoned the longstanding position of the importance of proper consideration of legislation. It has also abandoned due process that must take this matter through a committee process. It has ignored the community benefit and the national interest in scrutiny and transparency and the use of the parliamentary process to deliver the best possible legislation in the national interest. Labor has taken this silly and entirely political approach, attempting to ram 1,500 pages of law and explanatory materials through the parliament without notice and with urgency.

I want to make a couple of closing comments to put the bill in context. Australians are dealing with a productivity problem. We can't afford to hardwire delay, confusion and litigation into our approvals system. The bill before the House is being sold as a productivity measure, but there are clear and present concerns that, far from improving productivity, this bill as presented would actually do the opposite. Parliament's duty is to write laws that work. Australians expect us to have genuinely considered the legislation that the government has put before us. They expect that laws are clear, proportionate and practical. This government does not respect that understanding. It does not respect the parliament and it does not respect the Australian people.

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