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

Thanks, Senator Ghosh, for this question. Can I put on record my extreme gratitude to Senator Ghosh, as the Chair of the Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee, for so ably steering the inquiry into this bill to date. While I'm at it, I thank all senators, regardless of party, who've contributed and participated in this process. I recognise that these reforms and the legislation behind them are complicated, contentious and far-reaching in their effect, and I really do appreciate the immense amount of work that senators have put in over the last few weeks since the bill was introduced in the House, conducting an inquiry and providing an opportunity for a very broad range of stakeholders to be heard as to their opinion on the legislation. I note that the submissions made to that inquiry, both written and verbal, have very much influenced the government's thinking in terms of the amendments that have been provided and inserted here. Again, I really do thank all the senators, including Senator Grogan, who sits behind me, for the work they did on that inquiry.

In answer your question, Senator Ghosh, one of the reforms that we're driving through this legislation is to enable what are referred to as landscape-scale assessments. This particularly comes up in the context of regional planning, which is, again, something we're reforming in this legislation to make better use of it. What regional planning really comes down to is—the way I describe the usual situation is that an individual project might be seeking approval, might be assessed for its individual impacts and might have to find its own environmental offsets, and every project is assessed in its own right.

One of the downsides of doing things that way—there are a few—is that, first of all, we don't make use of the information that is provided by proponents and considered by assessors to think about what the impact of that particular project might be in a local landscape or local region in combination with other development that are occurring. While one individual project in its own right might not have a particularly significant impact on nationally protected matters, if you put together that individual project with the five others that are planned for the next couple of years in the same area, that could have a very dramatic impact on the environment in that local area. But because at the moment the system operates in a way that considers every individual project in its own right, that might mean that you're not considering the cumulative impacts on the environment of all of those projects put together.

To get back to regional planning, that is an alternative way of considering and approving projects that does take into account that cumulative impact of a combination of projects on the environment. Through the regional planning mechanism that we want to be using a lot more often, and will be able to as a result of these reforms, that will mean we can work with state governments, local governments, local communities, local industries, local scientists, local environment groups to nominate, first of all, with a state government a particular region where we want to do a regional plan. We can then work with all of those different parties and include community consultation around where, within that region, the areas are that have very high environmental values and so where we shouldn't be approving developments—what I call no-go zones—and, equally, what are the areas within that same region where the environmental values are quite low and where development could happen. And not just happen, but be approved much more quickly because we've already assessed what the environmental value of that part of the region is.

Of course there are a lot of other areas that are in between, that aren't necessarily a go zone or a no-go zone, and they're the sorts of areas where development might be able to occur with offsets in that region in order to gain an approval. That process allows us to think about the landscape in that region as a whole, rather than that one-off individual project impact, and to think about the cumulative impacts of several projects in a region. It allows us to consider what the environmental impacts of what those several projects might be when considering whether they should be approved, and when considering whether there are areas within that region where that combination of developments could go ahead without causing massive damage to the environment.

It's an alternative way of thinking about environmental impacts and planning. You'll think about where can you have a combination of projects happening that will be okay because we've already done the work upfront to identify that there are limited impacts in that area. Or where are the areas where one project in its own right might not be a problem, but a combination of projects might be a real problem. So it's a different way of approaching this, and I think it will be a really exciting way to approach these issues in the future.