Ian Campbell (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for the Environment and Heritage) Share this | Hansard source

I thank all the senators who have contributed to the debate on the Environment and Heritage Legislation Amendment Bill (No. 1) 2006. In closing the debate and in responding to some of the issues that have been raised, I will at the outset make a couple of points. The first point is about coalition senators contributing to the debate. For many years we have had a process in this place where we try to get legislation through. We know that the Labor Party and the Greens quite often filibuster and fill the speakers list and try to delay legislation.

Confronted with repetitive speeches and lengthy debates where literally no new material is added, coalition speakers, unless they have an incredibly special point to make—and we witnessed that today with Senator Ian Macdonald—basically share the government’s view about wanting to get the legislation through. Coalition senators have chances that opposition senators do not have to discuss legislation in the party rooms and other party forums. Unless they need to make a special point, the only contribution a coalition senator makes to the second reading debate on a bill when confronted with endless, often banal, contributions by opposition senators is to delay the passage of the legislation. So coalition senators do the government and, in this case, the Australian and world environments a benefit by not speaking. For Labor to seek to make some sort of cheap, pathetic political mileage out of the fact that the speakers list is filled up by Labor senators making generally banal and pathetic contributions is just that—quite pathetic.

Having said that, I want again to address some of the misleading statements by opposition, Green and Democrat senators. This bill is—and it was described by Senator Allison as such—generally speaking, a piece of administrative and technical legislation. It enhances and improves the environmental and heritage protection of the original act, which was brought into this place by the coalition and is heralded around the world by environment groups and other governments as a model piece of environment legislation for a federation. This bill is, generally speaking, a piece of legislation that makes the act more effective.

To say that we need to go through the sort of process that Robert Hill had to go through to build this historic piece of legislation, for an amending bill, is, quite frankly, absurd. To say that I have not consulted on this bill is not only absurd; it is wrong. I have consulted widely on the detail and on the philosophy of this bill, not only with conservation groups but also with industry. I have also used the benefit of the advice of the department, who have been operating with this legislation for the last few years.

The legislation has achieved phenomenal benefits for the environment. It has achieved a whole range of outcomes in terms of changes to development proposals and systematic consideration of development proposals. At its heart, this legislation seeks to implement one of the visions I have for environmental protection in Australia, and that is for it to have a long-term and sustainable focus. Historically, environmental protection legislation and legislation that seeks to assess proposals that may affect the environment has been done on a project by project basis. That is the environmental legacy we have from state and federal Labor governments, whereby marina proposals, mine proposals, any proposals that have an impact on the environment, are assessed one at a time and rarely, if ever, are the cumulative impacts of developments assessed in the process.

I made a statement last year which elicited an interesting response from the Labor Party. I said that our coast was being salami sliced, that the development of the Australian coast worked on the assumption that it was an endless resource. I made the point that around 80 per cent of the Australian population live within a few kilometres of our coast and that the pressure on this incredibly valuable part of the Australian environment and indeed our heritage was at great risk if the sort of population growth and pressure that occurred over the past 30 years, and the development that occurred over the past 30 years, was allowed to go unchecked.

Mr Acting Deputy President Brandis, in your own part of the world you can look at the coast from, say, the Tweed River system up north to Noosa. Fast-forward from what that looked like back in the 1970s, when you and I went to school in Brisbane, to what that bit of coast looks like now. It has been transformed. The development has virtually taken away much of the vegetation and has had massive impacts on the ecosystems up along that magnificent piece of coast. Anyone trying to imagine what that could have looked like 30 years ago would be horrified. That is not to say that all the development is bad. In fact, a lot of it is very good and a lot of it has been done environmentally sensitively. But there has been that sort of population pressure on a pristine part of the coast, an important part of the coast where there are phenomenally important wetlands and marine ecosystems, in Moreton Bay, up through Pumicestone Passage, up north to the Noosa coast and then down south through Stradbroke and down to the Tweed.

That sort of population pressure is occurring in many other parts of Australia. In Western Australia, Senator Webber will know, there is a similar story. Look at the coastline from, say, Yanchep in the north of Perth down to Bunbury in the south. Compare what that looked like in the 1970s, when Senator Webber and I were going to school, and what it looks like now. Again there has been a phenomenal amount of development. Much of it has been done very sensibly and very sensitively, and I think that coastline is still an incredibly attractive place, but the point I make is that the assessment process has been done development by development and there has not been a strategic framework within which to look at it.

This legislation now achieves what I want to put in place. One of the lasting legacies for the Australian environment of the Howard government will be the possibility to plan 20, 30, 40 years into the future, working with the states and with local government to put in place a strategic overlay for development on a landscape and regional scale for the first time in Australian history—instead of a developer putting a proposal forward, going through the gamut of local and state planning processes and then discovering that there is a threatened species or some other nationally environmentally significant issue that triggers the federal law so that they have to go through another process. The wonderful thing about Robert Hill’s EPBC Act, the Commonwealth EBPC Act, is that it has put in place a mechanism to ensure that the state and federal processes can work side by side and there does not have to be a duplicated process. That is a big achievement. This legislation and the agreement of COAG to get all of the states to sign bilateral agreements so that that process can occur right across Australia is phenomenal.

What we are doing in this bill—and this is the centrepiece of it, apart from changing some processes which we think have hindered environmental protection within the existing legislation—is to allow that long-term overlay strategic development assessment process. This is what we are hoping to achieve, under the legislation, up at the Burrup Peninsula. We want to put in place a long-term management plan there to protect the rock art and the environment but allow the very important LNG industry to continue its expansion. We know in this government that LNG exported to China, to Japan and, let us hope, to North America, where it will replace coal and oil burning, will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by between 30 and 70 per cent.

There will be transformational reductions in greenhouse gas emissions if we can export that LNG, and yet we have the Greens saying that they want to see that development stopped. The Greens say they care about climate change, yet they say that they do not want to export LNG from the North West Shelf. They do not want to expand that operation. They want to stop Woodside’s export of LNG to the world market, which would actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 50, 60, 70 per cent. They are saying, ‘We cannot do nuclear.’ I do not know why they say that. It is just a 1960s hang-up or hangover, I guess. They are also saying, ‘We cannot do carbon capture and storage, because we cannot do it quickly enough.’

I remind you, Mr Acting Deputy President, of the seven core technologies to address climate change. There is carbon capture and storage, there is a significant enhancement of the world’s nuclear capacity and there is fuel-switching to natural gas. I think that Professor Socolow at Princeton University said that to achieve a billion tonnes of abatement per annum, you will need 1,400 power stations to switch to natural gas. There are energy efficiency measures, which this government has addressed through world-leading legislation to require the 250 largest energy users in Australia to mandatorily audit their energy efficiency and energy use and mandatorily publish energy reduction plans.

For energy efficiency in the household sector, we have brought in world-leading legislation to put energy efficiency labels on every single appliance. That is for the people of Australia who care so deeply about their environment and who actually take practical action, as opposed to the Labor Party and the Greens, who think that you can just sign a protocol or legislate away greenhouse gas emissions by putting a law through the parliament. They say: ‘Let us stop some coalmines. Let us stop the coal industry, and we will save the world. Just legislate. We will put a line in the legislation, whack it through the Senate and, hand on heart, look the people of Australia in the eye and tell them we have fixed that problem and are on to the next thing.’ It is very lazy and ineffective.

There has been great action on energy efficiency by the Australian government, working in partnership with industry and, of course, working in partnership with the mums and dads of Australia. Every time they go down to Retravision or Harvey Norman to buy a clothes dryer, a dishwasher or a washing machine, they can look at the label and make a decision that is good for Australia, good for the world and is saving greenhouse gases. That is very good. We know that we have to get a 50 per cent improvement in the world’s energy efficiency of its transportation fleet. That is another really important part of the plans that we have in place to abate carbon across the globe. We need to achieve that to get another billion tonnes.

We need to transform the way we use our land. We need to stop deforestation right across the world, and we need to massively increase the planned planting of new forests, so we need to move to zero tillage. As the Minister for Fisheries, Forestry and Conservation, who happens to be in the chamber at the moment, knows, in Australia we are doing very well in that. Under this government, in the past 10 years, we have gone from being a net deforestation nation to one that is moving in the direction of planting more trees than we are cutting down.