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

Thanks, Senator Pocock. I'll provide a little bit of background to begin with. Again, I may have said this in the earlier committee stage today. One of the really important changes to this legislation which were recommended by Professor Samuel was to state in law for the first time that project proponents would be required to avoid and mitigate their environmental impacts before moving straight to offsets and that, where environmental offsets were to be delivered, they had to produce a net gain for the environment. I think I was just saying before that that's an improvement, from an environmental perspective, on the current test, which requires no net loss to the environment. Of course, what we're talking about there is offsetting residual significant impacts after those impacts have been avoided or mitigated.

The net gain test will apply when the minister of the day considers whether to approve an action that has an residual significant impact on a protected matter, considering any conditions attached to an approval, and it will also apply to accredited arrangements and landscape-scale approaches, such as regional plans. The net gain test requires that any residual significant impacts to a protected matter be fully compensated and have an increase or improvement to that matter to achieve a net gain. This helps address environmental decline by ensuring that offsets do more than just deliver no net loss and improve the viability of protected matters. To give you an example, if a development project removes 20 hectares of habitat for a threatened species but delivers more than 20 hectares of equivalent or higher-quality habitat elsewhere, then we would consider that to be a net gain for the species.

We're not proposing to define in the act the amount of net gain required for a protected matter. As I've undertaken consultation on this over the last few months, there are definitely some groups that would like us to specify, for example, a percentage increase in environmental terms as what we would mean by 'net gain', but our judgement was that it wasn't necessary to do that. What was necessary to do was to insert the requirement that there is a net gain for the environment, and that in itself is an improvement in environmental terms compared to the current legislation. So, instead of doing that, instead of defining the term 'net gain' in the act, the minister will be able to prescribe requirements relating to net gain or offsets in the regulations. The regulations will contain detailed requirements for the net gain test and exemptions to the net gain test for certain protected matters and prescribe the amount of net gain required for a particular protected matter.

Again, I think I made the point earlier today, Senator Pocock, that we have heard from stakeholders on all sides of the debate that there is probably more that could be done to provide clarity around what would be considered 'net gain', and it is my intention to further clarify the department's view of what net gain is when we come to finalising the national environmental standard regarding environmental offsets. So there is more to come there. That will be fully consulted on. That will be disallowable by the Senate, as will every other national environmental standard. So there is more we can do in this space as well.