Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Amendment (Board of Management Functions) Bill 2025
Senator DUNIAM (Tasmania—Manager of Opposition Business in the Senate) (19:49): It's a delight to be able to make a contribution this evening on the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Amendment (Board of Management Functions) Bill 2025. It's been a long time coming, but it is great to be here finally making this contribution. Australia's jointly managed Commonwealth reserves, including Kakadu National Park, Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park and Booderee National Park, are located on Aboriginal land.
These reserves are managed by the Director of National Parks, under a lease with traditional owners, and through a board-of-management arrangement which allows for majority Indigenous representation, which of course, given the nature of these parks, is extremely important. These boards make decisions in accordance with the current management plans, which have a 10-year timeframe.
Currently, if a management plan expires, the board cannot make decisions until a new plan is in place. This legislation currently before the Senate gives powers to the boards of those Commonwealth reserves to allow them to make decisions under the expired management plan until the new plan is in place. The board management plans for two of these three national parks are due to expire—one later this year, in November, and one early next year, in February—with no new management plans set to be approved or implemented prior to the expiry of those plans.
As discussed, without this legislation these boards will be unable to make any decisions until much later in 2026, so they'd be without powers to make decisions about the management of country for potentially up to six months. This does raise questions and concerns as to why this government has failed to oversee the implementation of new board management plans in time before the expiry of the current plans, especially given, as we know, there have been almost four years of this government.
It's just one example, sadly, of how this government has failed in its management of the environment, just as Labor has failed on the algal bloom event occurring in South Australia and just as this government failed in the last term in its broader EPBC reform agenda, which we do have before the parliament yet again—hopefully with a slightly more positive outcome, perhaps partly because there's a minister who's more willing to work with other parties on potential outcomes.
When the coalition were in government we commissioned and introduced sensible legislative reforms, which the now government blocked when they were in opposition. Now, after more than three years, we are still waiting for the full package of reforms. The full detail of what is to be debated in the other place and this chamber is not yet before the parliament.
This legislation was, at first go, a complete debacle. The legislation was friendless, and stakeholders on the conservation side of the debate and stakeholders on the industry and business side of the debate wanted nothing to do with the legislation as it was drafted. This was after countless secret, locked-door, non-disclosure-signed meetings where no-one knew what was going on.
This is of course a debate on legislation that was supposed to govern something in the public good—the environment. It's the national parks, the waterways we depend upon and the forests that we use for resources but also preserve for biodiversity reasons. A public good is something that belongs to the public, yet the public were not in any way invited into the closed-door, lockout sessions that the government conducted with high-end stakeholders in the last term: big environment, big business and sometimes big union.
The opposition are willing to work with the government on what is going to be put forward, and we'll examine the detail of that when it's provided in its fullness, but what they've released to date doesn't meet the grade. There are a range of concerns that my colleague the member for Moncrieff and shadow minister for the environment, Ms Bell, has outlined and that have been echoed by a number of people on both sides of the debate—the conservation and business communities.
There are a range of risks around certain provisions of what has been described publicly, and there's definitely a lack of clarity around a range of definitions the government may be adopting and what implications may be in store for proponents of projects if those definitions are not met. It is also clear that Labor's new environmental laws risk being nothing but a gift to our overseas competitors and a blow to Australian industry, businesses and workers—that is, if we make it harder to do business and harder to invest, of course it will go offshore.
People sitting in boardrooms around the world making decisions about where they want to invest will look at Australia and say, 'It is still too complicated to do business there, so we will decide to invest elsewhere.' That is not good for the global environment. That is not good for the economy. It is not good for jobs or the cost of living, because all we're doing is offshoring all of that.
We said this in countless iterations of this debate in the last term and, of course, in this term as well. So getting the legislation right—and I do commend the minister for the speed with which he has approached this current iteration of the debate. It will be inside the parliament inside the first 12 months of this term of this government, but it's far from perfect.
The real losers are not the political players here but the people of Australia, who either love their environment and want to protect it or want jobs and investor certainty to ensure we have a functioning economy. As we have already discussed in other places the potential inclusion of a climate trigger, which the minister begrudgingly ruled out at Senate estimates, unworkable definitions littered throughout proposed legislation; the unclear net gain proposition, the requirements of which are not clear in any way whatsoever—who defines what the baseline is for environmental standards, who defines what needs to be achieved in order to get a net gain, who measures that, what is the objective measure that is deployed, what qualifications are there for those who assess these matters?
We don't know, and all of this remains very much unclear and opaque at this point in time. Again, I'm hopeful that there are some good things to come in this debate and that we might have clarity and get some good outcomes. I certainly know that, as I say, my colleague the shadow minister for the environment is pushing for that.
Excessively large penalties and a big new bureaucracy in the EPA—interestingly, this Environment Protection Agency is touted as some entity that's going to be able to take out of the bureaucracy the decision-making process and somehow do things in a different way, but, as far as I can tell, based on every question that's ever been asked in committee hearings and at Senate estimates, it's just the same people in the department moving out of the department into the EPA.
Now, I'm not 100 per cent sure how that changes things, given many of these very well meaning officials have been doing this for many, many years now. Of course, the application and administration of the act is the cause of the need for reform, and part of that does lie at the feet of those who administer it and apply the laws. The reality is that, if we're just moving those very same people across to the new entity, giving them nice new business cards and new email addresses—we'll be able to put them in new offices, no doubt at great cost as well, because it's got to be separate from the department.
It is not going to fix the problem; it is literally just another big new bureaucracy. It is also worth pointing out that, across Australia, seven of the eight state and territory jurisdictions already have an EPA, so why do we need another giant green bureaucracy to administer business in the country and perhaps, I suspect, make it harder to do anything here and make it even harder to get good environmental outcomes?
That's not what the EPA will do. As I say, it's going to risk being a handbrake on investment and is very much a red light to jobs in this country. In any of the debate that's been had so far on this legislation—the instruments that will be put in place, the agencies that will be tasked with doing this work—no-one from government has talked about what activity.
No-one has talked about efficiency. No-one's talked about timeframes and achieving outcomes we need as a country, with a catalyst for reform—the catalyst for the Samuel review. And of course it was the last government that referred, as is legislatively required, the EPBC Act and its functions and performance for its full statutory review.
That review, of course, was the basis for the 2021 reforms that then environment minister, now opposition leader, Sussan Ley brought into this place—again, blocked by the now government, then opposition, the Labor Party. And so, if it is as important— Debate interrupted.