Senate debates

Monday, 1 September 2014

Bills

Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Amendment (Bilateral Agreement Implementation) Bill 2014; Second Reading

7:43 pm

Photo of Anne RustonAnne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I, too, rise to speak on this EPBC Act amendment bill. I find it quite interesting that we seem to be debating the idea that some terrible thing is going to happen instead of focusing on coming up with a situation where regulation does not become a burden to the productivity of our country going forward. This immediate assumption that every time we do anything we have to have some level of regulation for regulation's sake is quite silly. I think we should be approaching regulation on the basis of asking, 'What is it that we need to do to ensure that we protect'—as Senator Whish-Wilson just talked about—'our environmental assets and to make sure that we are looking after our communities?'

It strikes me as odd that we jump to the immediate assumption that, if we are going to try and reduce the level of regulatory burden on a process, it is necessarily bad. I think that we can have a reduction in regulation that will be of no detriment to our environment and at the same time will allow our economy, our communities, our businesses and our country to move forward.

I was reading this a minute ago:

The truth is business regulation is now right out of control. The quantity and complexity of regulation today is eating away at the entrepreneurial spirit of Australian business.

You might ask, 'Who said that?' Kevin Rudd said that in an address to the National Press Club in April 2007. It is very interesting that even the previous Prime Minister understood the burden of regulation. It is also really interesting that, subsequent to that, we went on to see, in the six years that Labor were in office, the introduction of 21,000 additional regulations. The result of that was that Australia's position in global competitiveness rankings actually fell—so you cannot have it both ways.

According to the latest data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, multifactor productivity, assessed using quality-adjusted hours worked, fell by three per cent in Australia from July 2007 to June 2012. A study by The Economist's Intelligence Unit in August 2012 ranked Australia as the second worst of 51 countries for productivity growth, ahead of only Botswana—Australia is actually regulating itself out of the marketplace. You have to wonder what particular benefit is being generated for Australia by doing this. All we seem to be doing is making our businesses totally non-productive. When the previous government was in office it did not sit down and look at ways to address the issue of why Australia was going backwards so rapidly in this space. That is exactly what we are seeking to do here.

We understand that there are regulatory requirements to ensure that we do not end up damaging our environment so that we can be sustainable into the future, but let us not put our sovereign position in such a state that nobody in the world wants to undertake any developments in Australia. We have to realise that capital is mobile and that it is becoming more and more mobile as time goes by, so now we have a situation where a company has the choice of undertaking an investment in Australia or undertaking an investment somewhere else in the world. They will, of course, weigh up the complexity of the environments they are looking at to determine where that investment should be made. I do not need to remind senators in this place that Australia does not have the kind of capital available to meet the development needs of our country going into the future, so we do have to rely on this mobile international capital. If we continue to add regulatory burden at the rate we are adding it at the moment, we are going to see a lot of this capital dry up and go somewhere else. That is not going to be good for our country, our economy, our people, our communities and the prosperity of this nation into the future.

You can look at the reviews, reports and investigations into establishing what is happening in this space. The Productivity Commission found that there are multiple layers of environmental regulation for many, many projects. They went on to say that it is not uncommon for major projects to need 70 different types of approval. If every single one of those 70 different types of approval actually had a different and specific benefit, and addressed something different with no duplication, I do not think it likely that anybody in Australia would have a problem with this. The biggest problem we have is that, with these massive numbers of approvals, many of them are duplicated. If we are seeking to ensure that a project proponent only has to deal with one approval process—and deal with it only once—on a particular issue, I cannot see how that can be a bad outcome for Australia or a bad outcome for our environment. The Business Council of Australia identified a recent major project development which required four different assessment processes by four separate government agencies, federal and state, and all of them requested similar information. So you can understand why businesses in Australia and businesses seeking to be involved in the Australian marketplace are very, very keen to reduce the level of regulatory burden.

Another piece of evidence that was found in the Productivity Commission's report was that meeting the regulatory requirements for one major project cost its proponent $25 million. It involved 4,000 meetings and resulted in a 1,200-page report—and, after two years of assessment, the project was subject to 1,200 state conditions, 300 Commonwealth conditions and a further 8,000 subconditions. The company actually had to employ an extra 50 people for a period of two years just to meet the environmental regulatory requirements that Australia demanded of this particular project.

As you can see, it is not that anybody here is seeking to create a situation where we are going to shortcut regulation, shortcut compliance and shortcut protection; all we are saying is: let's not do it one, two, three, four, five, six or, in this case, 70 different times. Let's do it once. Let's get a one-stop shop and let everybody speak to each other so we can actually facilitate the efficient, effective and responsible approval of projects without actually putting so much burden on the proponents that many of them choose not to go ahead with their projects in Australia.

And it is not just in the mining space. We seem to hear so much about the mining space, but we have environmental and regulatory burdens. You have only to look at the impact on the Great Barrier Reef of the speculation and misinformation in relation to the marine parks. With the lack of certainty, people just are not going up there anymore. So we need to have a look at regulation in the broadest possible sense to make sure Australia is not turned into a Second or Third World country simply because we have scared everybody away.

One of the things I have said many times before in this place is that it always terrifies me when our Greens senators on the other side in particular get up and talk about the idea of the federal government and federal politicians knowing best. I do not profess to know any more or any less than anybody else. I have been put here to make judgements in relation to matters that are under federal jurisdiction, but for us to believe in centralised control and that we somehow know more and better than people who are closer to the coalface, I think, shows a level of contempt that I do not think is very complimentary of us. I know that those opposite have a more centralised viewpoint about how we manage what we do, but I am a great believer in decentralisation. I am a great believer that the people who are closest to the coalface have the best information about what is going on. That is not to say that we do not have to have some very strict and very robust structures, conditions and processes in place to make sure we protect the assets of all Australians, but to say that everything has to happen at a national level simply because we know better than everybody else is the height of arrogance and conceit. I certainly do not believe that I do.

The other issue in this space is that it is very easy to get people in the general public to become scared if you actually work up a campaign of scaremongering. I am sure the public out there, from all the hoo-ha that has been going on around this environmental approval process, probably think that the federal government actually wants to put in some approval process that is going to have a detrimental impact on the environment. I think it is irresponsible for us standing here to be misleading the public in that way. What we need to be doing is telling the public the truth: that we are trying to strike a balance with sensible, responsible, environmentally responsible development without scaring everybody away. I am really disappointed at the level of scaremongering and this absolute assumption that, just because we want to reduce regulation, we are somehow going to end up with a worse outcome. I think that is entirely irresponsible.

The idea is a one-stop shop slashing unnecessary—I emphasise the word 'unnecessary'—red and green tape. We are not slashing red and green tape for the sake of slashing it; we are only slashing red and green tape that is unnecessary. It is the responsibility of government not just to protect the environment, as some in this place would think, but also to protect jobs. We need to protect Australian businesses. We need to protect Australian communities. In making policy decisions in this space we need to be mindful of a whole raft of things. You cannot just say that one thing gets priority and everything else just gets shelved; that is not the way a responsible government behaves. For us a one-stop shop is there to get rid of unnecessary red and green tape. It is to get rid of duplication of requirement, whether it be at federal, state or local levels in terms of the processes. We need to try to remove cost from the proponents getting their projects to a point of approval. We need to make sure that, at the same time, we maintain high environmental standards. I do not think anybody has ever suggested that we should reduce our environmental standards. All we are saying is that we do not believe we need to continue on with this ridiculous duplicated situation. I think it is very important that we establish the fact that that is what we are trying to do with this particular bill. We are simply seeking to streamline a process that at the moment is cumbersome, time consuming and has massive levels of duplication.

I was listening to Senator Whish-Wilson earlier when he was talking about his favourite state, Tasmania, and the wonderful natural assets that Tasmania has to brag about. There is certainly no doubt there are some beautiful areas of Tasmania; but, in the process of turning more than half of Tasmania into a national park, what has happened to Tasmania? There have been numerous reports written about how the green tape is basically strangling Tasmania. It is strangling its economy; it is strangling its farmers. I think we need to get a much better balanced approach to this because Tasmania has suffered at the hands of the overregulated green environment over there. Independent studies have been commissioned, and they suggest that the compliance burden on Tasmanian businesses probably exceeds $1.3 billion annually. I come from a small state myself, and $1.3 billion is an awful lot of money in the economy of a state with a reasonably small population. I know Senator Whish-Wilson wants to look after his environment, but he also has to look after his community and the people who live in Tasmania.

In South Australia of recent times we had a very disappointing situation where the Olympic Dam mining expansion did not go ahead. For a state like South Australia, that was a massive blow. That project was projected to create 10,000 jobs in South Australia. Ten thousand jobs in a regional area would be a massive injection of prosperity, commitment and long-term opportunity, especially for a state with a population base as low as South Australia's. There were to be 6,000 construction jobs in building the expansion of the mine and 4,000 permanent jobs attached to the mine expansion operation itself.

This was to be a $30 billion investment in South Australia. There would not have been just the investment by BHP Billiton and the jobs created directly by this development; there would have been huge knock-ons for the regional communities that would have supported the activities. I was in Whyalla a few months ago. On the back of the belief that the expansion was going ahead there was huge investment in the development of housing in the area because people were thinking that the area would start expanding and people would not necessarily want to live on site. It is a community that is reasonably close. So they made huge investments because of the opportunity that was to be generated by the Olympic Dam mine expansion. So of course there was huge regret and great disappointment in South Australia when we found out that the expansion was not going ahead.

I speak about this project in South Australia because obviously anything that happens in South Australia is of particular interest to me as a South Australian. This kind of issue has been replicated across Australia. Our country's sovereign risk is permanently put under pressure simply because we have got in place an uncertain and challenging environment. Proponents are choosing not to invest in Australia because they are not sure what is going to happen. They are never sure when the rules are going to change. So we need to be very clear here. When we put rules in place we need to make sure they are entirely transparent so everybody knows what the rules are, everybody knows what they have to comply with and all the people of Australia can see whether those conditions and rules are protecting the very assets they want to see protected. At the same time we need to make sure that we have not got the ridiculous situation where we are continuing to put burden after burden on our developers and businesses and continue to push them offshore.

As you would know from the discussions during your time in this place, Madam Acting Deputy President Peris, there have been many instances over the last two years where Australian policy has scared off businesses from investing in Australia. I commend the establishment of a streamlined regulatory process in relation to developments in Australia. As I said before and will say again in front of my Green colleagues on the other side of this place, there is no way in the world that I and my colleagues are going to support a process that is going to damage our environment. We are merely seeking to have a process that is fair, responsible and not overly burdensome and that still delivers the outcome without the ridiculous, unnecessary and continued duplication of activity that we have seen over the past six years as our regulatory environment went berserk.

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