Ellie Whiteaker (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Today is an historic day in our parliament, and I am so proud to be a part of this Labor government, which is delivering historic reform to our broken environmental laws. This parliament has a really clear choice to make over the next few hours: to keep the broken, outdated laws that fail the environment, that make it tougher for business and that slow down major projects, or to back a modern, balanced package of reform that delivers better protection for our environment and backs faster and clearer decisions for business.

This bill, the Environment Protection Reform Bill 2025, responds to Professor Graeme Samuel's independent review of the EPBC Act. It delivers on the core pillars of his recommendations, and it is well overdue. The bill reflects countless hours of advocacy and hard work from many environment groups, from Labor members and branches right across the country, many in my home state of Western Australia, from community stakeholders, from First Nations organisations and from industry. I want to thank every single one of those who spent time—not just in the lead-up to this bill but over many years—advocating for these reforms. We need laws that allow us to protect and restore our environment but also to build the housing we so desperately need in this country, to take us further down the path of a renewables transition and to deliver on our promise of a future made in Australia.

These laws deliver our country's first ever national environmental protection agency—a strong and independent agency that will have real teeth. It creates a definition of 'unacceptable impacts' so that clearly harmful projects can be stopped early. It strengthens penalties for serious breaches to deter wrongdoing and ensures that environmental harm is not treated as a cost of doing business. The bill also sets a more efficient and robust project assessment process to cut delays. It is estimated that this will save more than half a billion dollars across our economy, with the potential to save even more as the system matures. It allows states and territories to carry out assessments on behalf of the Commonwealth where they meet national standards, reducing duplication but maintaining a high bar for environmental approvals.

To those opposite, the Liberal and National parties, who are so furious and outraged by the decision that we will make in this parliament today, I say: you are to blame for your own irrelevance on this issue because you have taken away any scrap of credibility with the Australian public that you had. You have shown that you deny the science. You have certainly shown very little, if any, interest in actually protecting our environment. You stand in the way of our new housing projects. You stand in the way of our attempts to build the houses that we need. You stand in the way of our renewable energy rollout. You stand in the way of our Future Made in Australia agenda. And so I repeat: you are to blame for your own irrelevance on this issue. But today we will get the job done and we will pass long-overdue reforms, the first major overhaul of our environmental laws in more than 20 years, to protect our unique environment—what makes our country great. This is a balanced package that balances environmental protection and economic opportunity. It sets up our nation for the future.