Karen Grogan (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Deputy President. I will refrain from responding to my colleagues around the chamber.

In addition to the great strides on emissions we are making as a Labor government—great achievements in only three short years—there is the issue of the environmental impacts that Senator Hanson-Young was referring to earlier. But we are doing more to protect the environment than has been done in an excruciatingly, painfully long time. We are protecting more nature than was being protected before. We have plans to improve that further.

One of the things that many of us have been talking about—I know for myself since 2013—is the EPBC, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, which is cited by so many scientists and eminent people, including in a fantastic presentation from the amazing Ken Henry at the Press Club last week. Our environment laws don't suit anyone. They do not protect the environment. They do not assist us in any of our developments. Often in this chamber you would think that the EPBC Act only dealt with mining approvals, whereas that is very much a minor part of its work. A significant amount of the work that the EPBC does is in housing developments. And, just in case anyone missed it, we've got a bit of a housing crisis going on.

We need these laws to work, and what we went through in the decade under the coalition government was nothing short of horrendous. We came into government and were thwarted on every side in trying to do our piece of reform. But the numbers have changed a bit up here, and they've changed a bit in the other house, so the minister is adamant and determined that we are going to get a new set of environment laws within the first 18 months of this government. If we're lucky it might be sooner, but there are a lot of views and it is a very complex piece of legislation. We need to make these changes. We must have stronger environmental protection, we must have a more efficient and robust project assessment system, and we must have greater accountability and transparency in all of our decision-making.

The EPBC agenda is going to be rattled out in this place. There will be standing up and yelling at each other, I'm sure, about too much or not enough. How about everyone taking a breath and thinking about the future, and not just about the bit of the future you care about—whether it be only the environment over here or only business over there? How about we recognise the fact that every single one of us in this chamber was elected by the people of this country. So both views need to be taken into consideration, and there needs to be balance in how we make our way through this whole agenda and finally get an outcome—an outcome that is going to protect our environment, work towards our targets on climate change and reduce our emissions even further, noting that we have reduced them quite significantly already. Let us get an outcome that will see a long-term future for this country with a robust environment—a zero-emissions future—and an economy that can grow on a sustainable zero-emissions basis.

The future is there; we can see it. We know the pathway forward. We know that there is a perfect opportunity for us to build a manufacturing industry into the future that is not emissions-intensive and actually gives us things like green steel—manufacturing that is built for a future that deals openly with climate change, recognises the science, recognises what's happening to our country and actually takes meaningful action that protects our society. And protecting our society means taking those things into consideration together. So, no, we will not be supporting the bill. We will be working as hard as we can to try to find that pathway through for a reformed EPBC Act, and we will continue to meaningfully reduce our emissions and transition our environment, transition our energy system and build an Australia we can all be proud of that will be sustainable into the future.