Richard Di Natale (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I too would like to commend the work of our spokesperson on this issue, Senator Larissa Waters, who has been a tour de force on the issue of protecting our environment and using our environmental laws to enable us to continue to protect the wonderful Australian environment.

When it comes to this specific bill, it is so bureaucratic and so dense that you almost need a hatchet to get through the thicket of bureaucratic complexity. The Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Amendment (Bilateral Agreement Implementation) Bill 2014—it says a lot, doesn't it? That is why we have a debate that has been reduced to a few slogans. We hear words like 'streamlining', 'duplication', 'certainty' and 'abolishing bureaucracy'. We hear about 'green tape' and 'red tape'. All I know is that this government is giving everyone the blues.

We hear about a 'one-stop shop'. What is a one-stop shop? If this bill is effectively creating a one-stop shop it has to have a drive-through so that any proponent can come into the shop, without getting out of the car, and have their approval waived through without having to do so much as the smallest bit of work. The simple message here is this: 'Let's cut through all the nonsense; let's cut through the slogans and the one-liners. Let's have an honest debate about what's going on here.' The coalition thinks that environmental protection has gone too far. They want to wind it back and they want to make it easier for business. That is the honest debate that we need to have.

Let's get beyond this nonsense around 'one-stop shops' and 'simplifying overburdensome regulation'; this is simply about whether our Australian environment needs to be protected or whether those protections should be weakened to allow developments across a number of industries to proceed. That is what it is about and that is the debate we should be having.

John Howard did not have the same view as this government—that is why these laws were introduced by the former environment minister Robert Hill. They did not believe that states would provide the protection that threatened species needed. That is why these laws were introduced. I do not think that handing over powers to the states is a bad thing because states are evil. There is a reality here: we have state governments with limited capacity to raise revenue who are always going to favour developments that they see might bring a few extra dollars to their state.

You do not need to look too far to see this. Look at what is going on in New South Wales with some of the scandals at the moment around a whole range of approvals. You do not need to look too far to know that when state governments are faced with these rivers of gold they find them very hard to turn down. That is why federal laws were introduced. It was because we recognised that a continent with the worst rate of species extinction anywhere in the world needed to have laws in place at a federal level that recognised the reality of what state governments do when faced with the prospect of a bucket of money through a development proposal versus protecting the environment. That is why these laws were introduced.

In my own state of Victoria right now we are having a debate about the unconventional gas industry. It is a boom that is going on apace. It is a boom that, if it has its way, will turn some of the most productive and important farmland anywhere in the country into an industrial wasteland. We have some of the best farms anywhere in the world. We have wonderful dairy country. We have a whole range of progressive farmers who are involved in closed loop systems and reutilising a lot of the waste that is produced on their farms. We have a wonderful agri-forestry industry. We recognise that we can have environmental benefits and productive farms going hand in hand. We have shelterbelts being planted to produce shelter for stock but also to control soil erosion and salinity. There is huge biodiversity. This is bringing in bird species that have not been seen in these areas for a long time, and there is timber to be potentially harvested down the track. We have some great things going on in western Victoria and yet here we have an industry that is looking to turn this farmland with its very precious water supply into an industrial wasteland. That is why we need these laws. We need these laws because we know that state governments will never stand up for the environment in the way that a federal jurisdiction will.

You only need to look at the current state government in Victoria and Premier Napthine's contribution to the review of the renewable energy target to see that. In the state government submission we saw a request to recognise gas as a renewable resource. Just think about that. It is a fossil fuel, millions of years in the making, and a state government wants an independent panel to recognise it as a renewable resource! You need look no further than that submission to understand what is driving the Victorian state government right now and what has been the driving force behind many state governments over the decades.

We should not be weakening our protections. We should recognise that we do not have a good record in this country when it comes to protecting our biodiversity, with among the greatest loss of species of any continent anywhere in the world. Instead, we should be beefing up our protection. Rather than seeking to get rid of the water trigger that was introduced in the last parliament, we should be expanding that to ensure that it is not just coal seam gas but all unconventional gas that is subject to the water trigger. Why not add a greenhouse trigger to the EPBC Act so that any further developments that are proposed are tested by that measure? After all, there is no greater threat to biodiversity on this planet than climate change.

This is a very backward-looking measure. It undoes the work of previous Liberal governments that recognised that these laws were important. It is hard to believe that here I am, standing up and defending the environmental record of the previous Howard government. At the time, I thought things could not get much worse, but I was wrong. They are getting worse. This is not a debate about regulation. It is not a debate about red tape or green tape. It is not a debate about whether we have a one-stop shop. It is actually a debate about whether we want to protect our environment. That is what this is about. We have one party that says, 'We need to make things easier for big business,' and then we have those of us on this side of the chamber who think our environment needs to be protected.

The reason we are not having the debate in those terms is that the coalition know what the Australian people's view on protecting the environment is. They know that when measures come forward that mean we are going to put further pressure on our precious natural environment the Australian people do not like it. That is why we have had to have this phoney debate with this maze of complexity about what these laws actually mean. It is very straightforward: this is a choice between making things easier for big business and putting further pressure on our already strained natural environment. It is about whether we will protect what we have—building on it and making it stronger. Those of us on this side of the chamber will always stand on the side of making sure that our environmental protections are the strongest of any country anywhere in the world.