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

Thanks, Senator Ghosh. Again, one of the other important reforms in the Environment Protection Reform Bill 2025 is to revamp the approach towards what are known as bilateral agreements, agreements between the federal government and a state or territory government. Currently, under the existing law, we do have the capacity to enter into an agreement with a state or territory which allows them to assess—sorry, I was just confirming.

Under the current legislation, there is capacity to enter agreements with states and territories whereby they would either assess a project for its environmental impacts or potentially approve projects. But, in practice, those agreements haven't worked very well. The system is, frankly, just too complicated to allow those agreements to work effectively. What that has meant is that there's only one state in Australia, New South Wales, where we have an effective bilateral agreement with the state government that sees them assess projects not only against their own laws and requirements at state level but against our requirements as well. We want to be able to do that with more states.

The benefit of that goes to the point that we've talked about a lot in this reform process: removing the duplication in the system and speeding up decision-making about projects not by sacrificing environmental standards but by improving our processes. In essence, how this would work is that, if we can enter into those kinds of agreements with state and territory governments where they not only assess and approve a project against their own laws and requirements but also do so against ours, that can massively reduce the amount of time it takes to assess and approve the project overall, because, rather than having a state assessment and a state approval and then doing a federal assessment and a federal approval, they can both happen at the same time and be done by a state government.

Your question is a really important one, and I know that there are people in the community who are concerned that, if a state government were to go rogue and not have the kinds of standards that we expect, there would be a risk that that state might approve projects that otherwise might have been rejected or heavily conditioned at the federal level. Some of the safeguards that are built into that process so as to avoid that kind of thing happening are, firstly, that the states would be required to assess and approve the project against our national environmental standards. So, if you did have a state or territory with lower environmental standards than ours, getting an approval from the state against their standards wouldn't be enough; they would also have to meet our standards.

The second safeguard in the legislation to prevent states doing the wrong thing—to put it simply—is that any bilateral agreement between a state government and a federal government around assessments or approvals of projects would need to be approved by the federal minister based on advice from the federal EPA that the state's processes meet our standards. So, before the agreement is approved, there's effectively a check that the state processes meet our standards. In addition, the federal EPA will be able to audit the state processes every five years to ensure they are up to scratch. We're also proposing the legislation be amended so that the EPA can provide advice to a minister about whether the state processes meet federal requirements if there's a substantial change to state laws or policies within that five-year period. Say there was a change of government in a particular state and the new government had radically lower environmental standards or got rid of public consultation processes or something like that. There's the capacity for a federal EPA to give the federal minister the power to say, 'We have a problem here and the accreditation of that needs to be reviewed.'

Finally, the other safeguard that's built into the system through the amendments to the bill are that, now, every bilateral agreement between a federal government and a state or territory that allows the state to do approvals of a project will have to include, effectively, a call-in power. That is where the federal government still has the ability to say, 'Even though we've got an agreement with you that you will assess and approve projects, if there's a particular project that comes along that's so important environmentally, nationally'—whatever it might be—'the federal government still has the ability to call that project in and say, "It's going to be approved by the federal government instead."'

As I'm talking, I'm thinking about additional safeguards. We've also said, through the amendments, that the approval of water trigger projects—so projects that trigger the water trigger in the act and, in essence, have an impact on the water table, particularly unconventional gas or coal projects—has to be done federally. The argument for that, and why that makes sense, is, if you think about those projects that have an impact on the water table, that's going to be an impact that crosses state boundaries; the water table doesn't stop at a state boundary. Our view is there's a pretty compelling argument that the federal government should retain the power to approve those projects, given the environmental impacts might go beyond the state that's doing the original assessment.

There are a number of different safeguards in there, built into the system. But it is an important change to allow more of these bilateral agreements to occur, because, again, it's a key way we can speed up the assessment and approval of projects and remove the duplication in the system.