Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I stand in ardent support of the Environment Protection Reform Bill 2025. This is a landmark reform. It's generational, a word we throw around too often, but it is truly generational in every sense of the word—not only for current generations but for future generations. Many of us came into this parliament, leaving behind jobs that were far easier, to be good ancestors. This is a true moment of being the good ancestors that we wish to be, that we aspire to be.

From the outset, I want to thank the Greens political party. I want to thank Senator Waters and Senator Hanson-Young for their collaboration and their leadership in supporting the passage of this bill. I know that, for many Greens supporters and, indeed, Labor supporters and advocates, we all care for nature. We love nature. We are nature. We are embedded in nature, and we recognise that. People across our political spectrum have spent a lifetime fighting for nature—years and years, decades and decades. This is meaningful reform for our nation and for this parliament, and it is vindication of those decades of work by stakeholders in the community, both on the Labor side and on the Greens side.

It is disappointing that we were unable to garner the support of the coalition, but the coalition, honestly, have departed the field on so many fronts. They style themselves as an alternative party of government, but I think their decision today not to support this landmark reform only underscores that they can no longer hold the mantle of being an alternative party of government. But they're not the story. The story today is about the environment.

This bill builds upon the work of the Samuel review. Professor Graeme Samuel is the architect of this bill. I want to thank him and the team that delivered the Samuel report five years ago, in 2020, under the then coalition government. That report laid it all out. It laid out the state of the environment. It was in a poor state of health and it was deteriorating, and there was a real sense of urgency in that report that we needed to get this work done. Professor Samuel presented evidence to us during the committee inquiry, and he laid it out for us that we just can't wait any longer—getting 80 per cent there is going to be good enough. It highlights the fact that passing landmark laws in this place always involves trade-offs. We know that the bill is not perfect, but perfect is the enemy of the good.

This is a whole lot better, light years better, than what we currently have, which has led to the destruction of our beautiful landscape and a list as long as my arm of threatened species, with 2,245 threatened species. Australia has this ignominious moniker of being the extinction capital of the world for mammals. How did we get here? We got here because we have had outdated environmental laws for the last 30 years. This is a moment now to completely recalibrate and to close those loopholes that have allowed our koalas and other precious little Australians to fall through the cracks.

How does the bill do that? It covers three pillars. The first is protecting and repairing nature. The second is cutting red tape so that we can address those national issues that are bearing down on us—things like housing and renewable energy, which is essential if we are to reduce our emissions and thereby truly act on climate change, which is the elephant in the room. Climate change is the No. 1 threat to biodiversity and to species in our country and in the world. Not talking about renewable energy means that you are not going to act on climate change, and indeed the coalition don't want to talk about climate change. They hate renewable energy and they also hate environmental reform. Today just confirms that. They have departed the field and abandoned Australia. In terms of the third pillar, this bill bakes in transparency and accountability. It does this with regard to the first pillar—protecting and repairing nature—by introducing national environmental standards. This is the first time ever that we're going to have clear legislative standards that spell out what is acceptable and what is not when it comes to matters of national environmental significance.

Right now the rules are opaque and, frankly, a bit too discretionary. They're very much dependent on who sits in the minister's chair. God forbid that one day we end up with a terrible government. One thing I have learned as a relatively new parliamentarian—I was elected only in 2022—is that, as much as we wrangle in this place to create good laws that will protect and conserve, no law is bullet proof. This is what I've learned: no piece of legislation is bullet proof against a bad government. I say this to the Australian people: ensure you do your homework when you go to that voting booth, because so much rides on the quality of the government of the day. With a terrible government, you end up with robodebt. With a good government that is here for the right reasons, you end up with a bill like this. You end up with generational reform, whether it be in Medicare, aged care, the NDIS or, now, the environment.

The standards will deliver certainty for business and a floor for protection for nature. The bill will introduce 'unacceptable impacts' for the first time. This is redline stuff—go/no go—where we ensure we're not developing or threatening World Heritage sites or Ramsar wetlands. It will also introduce a net gain approach. This is about repairing and restoring nature. It's saying that it's not good enough to just go to the minimum; we're saying you need to go beyond the minimum and start to repair nature and restore biodiversity. That is what we are seeking with this change.

The second pillar is of course about cutting red tape. Right now we have a system that is duplicative, achingly slow and often completely incoherent. We've had six different assessment pathways overlapping federal and state laws, and timelines that blow out. All of this bakes cost and delay into those pressing national issues that I outlined earlier. For example, with the housing affordability crisis, which is driven by a housing supply crisis, right now in Victoria there are 310,000 homes that are sitting on the back shelf, the backburner, unable to progress, because our environmental laws are broken. There is a type of dragon, a lizard, that may or may not be threatened by the building of these homes. We haven't been able to resolve this for 10 years. As a result, we don't have enough homes. That's what this means.

We have climate change bearing down on us. Australia is on the frontline of climate change, yet it takes between seven and 10 years to get wind farms up. That's completely unacceptable. We need clarity, business needs clarity, and so do the Australian people who put us here to get results. At every single ballot box, we are going to be judged on one thing only, and that is outcomes, so we need to deliver. If we say we want to have cleaner, greener energy, we need to deliver. If we say we want more housing, we actually need to deliver. This legislation enables that delivery.

This bill also introduces an accreditation system. What does that mean? Between the federal and state governments, there's too much duplication. You've got federal administration, and then you've got state administration. We are moving towards an accreditation scheme whereby we accredit the state governments around the country to do this kind of administrative paperwork and thereby cut the red tape. This will modernise these bilateral two-way agreements between the Commonwealth and state. This is how you also deliver productivity gains. Cutting red tape means speeding up approvals where appropriate and reducing cost. That reduction in cost will ultimately be passed on to the consumer, and that is a good thing. I'll be watching carefully to see how we can quantify that. Will homes become a little bit cheaper? Maybe. Let's see. Right now there is a lot of cost and delay baked into the system.

This bill also hardwires climate into the bill by forcing proponents to declare their scope 1 and 2 emissions. This means that the big matters will be forced to outline their emissions and their emissions reduction plans. It will not necessarily capture property developers and people who are trying to build housing. I just want to make that clear.

Interestingly—this is a really important point—this bill will also deliver certainty to those young Australians who are thinking of entering apprenticeships, whether they be in the electrical trades or in construction. We heard testimony about this a week or two ago. Right now young people who are aspiring to become sparkies are walking away because there isn't continuity of projects. There isn't a continuous pipeline of projects; it's coming in fits and starts. I speak, of course, of renewable energy projects and transmission bills. It's just too slow. We need 40,000 sparkies by 2030. It's not trivial. This is nation building. For us to attract 40,000, if not more, young Australians—men and women, I might add—into this high-demand, well-paid career, we need to ensure that the pipeline of delivery of renewable energy projects is full. This environmental reform will enable that to happen.

The final pillar is around accountability and transparency. We will be establishing, for the first time ever, a national environmental protection authority. This will be a watchdog with real teeth, and it comes with severe penalties. The last time I checked, the penalties were sitting at around $825 million. I'm not sure where the amendments will fall there, but that's a substantial amount of money if you do the wrong thing. And it shifts some of these regulatory functions away from the minister to the EPA—long overdue.

We'll also be installing the Environment Information Australia body. This is to ensure that we have data driven decision-making. Everyone—whether it be regulators, government, the Australian people, proponents—need data, and that data is disbursed and fragmented between three layers of jurisdictions: Commonwealth, federal and local. So the task of Environment Information Australia will be to collate that data so that decisions can be data driven, rather than based on a vibe.

I want to conclude by saying that Labor has a proud legacy in the environment space. It was a Labor government that, with Bob Brown and his advocacy years ago, saved the Franklin, passed World Heritage legislation and went on to protect Kakadu and the Daintree. And it was under Whitlam—what a visionary!—that we introduced Landcare. This Labor government also expanded our marine parks in the last term. I want to thank the current minister, Minister Watt, who builds on the work of Minister Plibersek, for delivering this landmark reform. I thank the Senate.