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

Thanks, Senator Pocock. We the government, and we the members of the Labor Party, have really held up the creation of the National Environmental Protection Agency as one of the most important aspects of this reform. It's a historic achievement in its own right, and the point of it is to strengthen the compliance and enforcement activities regarding environmental law, in addition to other roles that the federal EPA will have, including providing advice to a minister about whether or not to approve a project and including the assessment of projects which will be undertaken by an EPA.

We have begun the work around the implementation of these reforms. Of course, our highest priority has been finalising the drafting of this legislation and getting it through the parliament, but I've already mentioned that we've begun work on things that, frankly, we weren't required to do in order to get this law passed, such as starting the drafting of standards, and we've also begun the work around implementation of the reforms, with some early thinking being done about the structure and resourcing of an EPA. I'm not going to pretend that we've got that all solved yet. The new EPA won't start until 1 July next year, so there remains time to finalise that thinking, finalise resourcing and finalise the structure. But, certainly, that work has commenced.

It may well be that there are new resources required for the national EPA to undertake some of its activities, but equally I would expect that some of its resources would be found through savings generated in the department in the sense that some of the roles that will be performed by the national EPA are currently performed by officials in the department. It's reasonable to expect that some, many, most—whatever it might end up being—of those officials currently in the department would move across to the EPA. It's not as if it needs to be set up as if it has no staff; there would be staff who would move across. But it's quite possible there may need to be new resources—and, unfortunately, the finance minister is no longer in the chamber for me to prosecute my case about that. I'll do that offline.

We agree with your broader point about the need for active compliance and enforcement of these laws. That is actually one of the motivations for setting up the national EPA in the first place.