Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Environment and Water) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, the new provisions regarding agricultural land clearing and the enforcement of those provisions will certainly be a priority for the new National Environmental Protection Agency. This is a good example of why it's important to have a national environment protection agency, which we don't currently have. In colloquial terms, it will be a strong cop on the beat, with strong powers and real teeth to enforce environmental laws in a way that we haven't seen to date at the national level, despite the good efforts of officials in my department to do so.

I might quickly elaborate on the provisions regarding agricultural land clearing, which I addressed in some detail earlier on in the committees stage in answer to Senator Roberts. We know, and the science tells us, that one of the biggest causes of biodiversity loss in Australia is unregulated agricultural land clearing. I want to be clear: I'm not saying that all farmers do the wrong thing or anything like that, but at the moment we lack national regulation of agricultural land clearing even where it impacts in a significant way on threatened species. And so that is the major motivation for lifting the exemption from the act which currently applies.

Similarly, we're proposing in these amendments to lift the exemption that currently applies to agricultural land clearing that, effectively, occurs within 50 metres of the rivers and creeks in the Great Barrier Reef catchment. Again, the motivation for that change is that we know that one of the major threats to and impacts on the Great Barrier Reef is sediment run-off, which occurs at least partly through some of that clearing that takes place on riverbanks and creekbanks. Again, there are people who deliberately do the wrong thing. There are others who don't necessarily recognise or realise that that sort of clearing can have those major impacts. Before the scare campaign starts about this, it's not about saying that farmers can't clear their land; it's about saying that, if that kind of clearing in those sorts of circumstances is going to have an impact on a nationally protected matter, then farmers and the large corporates that own farmland will need to seek EPBC assessment and approval in order to undertake that clearing. They may very well get that approval. They may get that approval subject to conditions. But it's really about levelling the playing field across all industries. In the same way a mining company, a housing developer, a windfarm developer or a solar-farm developer currently, under the law, need to seek EPBC assessment and approval if their activity is going to significantly impact on a nationally protected matter, as a result of these changes, that will also apply to the agricultural land clearing that I was talking about.

I'm not sure if you were in the chamber earlier, Senator Hanson-Young, when I made the point about those exemptions that were included in the original legislation passed in 1999. One very interesting submission that was made to the Senate inquiry was from Robert Hill, the former federal environment minister whose legislation we are now amending. He was, in fact, a former federal Liberal Senate leader. Even though he was the minister—in no way do I mean this as a criticism of him; quite the opposite—for reasons that probably related more to his party room at the time, his own legislation included those exemptions, for agricultural land clearing and for regional forestry agreements. He made a submission to the Senate inquiry saying those exemptions should be lifted. When the former federal Liberal minister for the environment whose legislation was passed in 1999 is telling us that we should revisit that and remove those exemptions, that's probably something worth listening to, quite apart from all of the other groups who made submissions to similar effect.

Just to bring it back to the compliance and enforcement point, as I said, it would be our intention that enforcing these new provisions around land clearing would be a priority for the new National Environment Protection Agency. I might also make the point that, while many of the provisions in this bill will not commence for roughly 12 months time—there are a few others that will start sooner than that—we will be commencing the provisions relating to agricultural land clearing and removing the exemption that currently applies on the date of royal assent. So that is probably in the next week or two. The reason we've done that is that we have seen, in other circumstances where particularly state and territory governments have sought to regulate land clearing, what's known as 'panic clearing' occur. That is where people, for either good reasons or bad, decide to get in there and start clearing land urgently in a way that is about to be prevented by legislative change. We want to make sure that that doesn't happen, and that's why we are commencing the provisions around land clearing and removing those exemptions as quickly as we possibly can.