Environment Protection Reform Bill 2025, National Environmental Protection Agency Bill 2025, Environment Information Australia Bill 2025, Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (Customs Charges Imposition) Bill 2025, Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (Excise Charges Imposition) Bill 2025, Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (General Charges Imposition) Bill 2025, Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (Restoration Charge Imposition) Bill 2025
Dr RYAN (Kooyong) (20:55): The Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act has a special place in the governance and the conscience of this country. What other legislative protections do we have for nature and for heritage? What protection exists against human interests, human actions and human greed other than our nature laws?
Most of the legislation in this space is aimed at facilitating, not limiting, human induced threats to our environment—to the land, sea and air; to the species with which we so uneasily cohabit. That is why I welcome reforms to the act aimed at strengthening our existing nature protections. I very much welcome the fact that this new version of the EPBC Act includes the ability to make, vary and revoke national environmental standards and that these standards bind proponents to a set of requirements.
It inserts a new definition of unacceptable impacts on protected matters, a new definition of a net-gain test and provisions requiring approved actions to pass that net-gain test. It introduces a new framework for delivering restoration actions, comprising a restoration contributions holder, a restoration contributions advisory committee and a restoration contributions special account.
It expands the criteria for acceptable and unacceptable environmental impacts such that it will now be more clear where projects can and, more importantly, cannot proceed. Regional go and no-go zones will identify areas of high conservation values and others suitable for development, enabling faster and more decisive yeses and noes. After years spent with virtually no projects threatening vulnerable regions or species having been opposed on environmental grounds at the national level, facilitating faster noes is most welcome.
So too is the prospect of expedited approvals for utilities-scale clean energy and housing projects. However, there are loopholes and carve-outs in the Environment Protection Reform Bill 2025 and related bills which render them unacceptable in their current form. The bills have to be considered as a whole.
Speeding up approvals and establishing an environmental protection agency will be meaningless unless the legislation is underpinned by strong, legislated national environmental standards—which have to be applied consistently across the nation. The Environment Protection Reform Bill 2025 is riddled with vagaries, such as the proposal that decisions under this new act can be delegated to the states and the territories.
This raises the possibility of inconsistent application in different jurisdictions and the challenge of administrative oversight of projects which cross state and territory borders. In recent years we've seen that the Northern Territory government in particular cannot be trusted to protect its citizens from highly polluting oil and gas projects. If we hand environmental decision-making to jurisdictions like the Northern Territory, which have appalling environmental track records, we will be giving the fox the keys to the henhouse.
It's for this reason that I will be moving an amendment to this legislation to compel the minister to consider the impact of project approvals on air and water standards nationally—to take responsibility for the protection of the health of the nation in the face of increasing heatwaves, extreme weather events, worsening air quality, the spread of infectious diseases, food and water insecurity and the increasing mental health impact of climate change in the face of species and habitat loss.
The most alarming issue contained in this bill is the introduction of extensive and undefined exemptions for national interest proposals. This allows the minister, on their own initiative or in response to a proponent's application, to approve an action even if it has unacceptable impacts, is inconsistent with the national environmental standards and does not meet the net-gain test.
National interest is not defined in their statutes, providing the minister with unfettered discretion, which could permit the destruction of nature for any reason that the minister feels is in the national interest. The explanatory memorandum lists a few possibilities, such as renewable energy or social housing projects. But the obvious concern is that, with such extensive discretion granted to the environment minister, any new mine or exploration could get waved through on national interest grounds, irrespective of its impact on nature.
Could a rare earth project trump a rare and endangered species? Could a new gas project get greenlit in the name of maintaining our relationships with our trading partners? The current minister might tell us that he won't do that.
He and his government are claiming that this act will actively improve our environmental protections. But this government's subsidies for the Middle Arm industrial facility, its subsidies for dodgy carbon capture and storage projects, as well as its support for fracking of the Beetaloo basin and its approval of the North West Shelf gas facility's long-term extension offer little reassurance.
My constituents lack confidence in the intentions of future environmental ministers, particularly if they're entrusted with national interest exemption powers. If Barnaby Joyce becomes environment minister, he might well confuse the national interest with the Nationals' interest, in which case heaven help our environment and heaven help our threatened species, because this legislation will offer them inadequate protection.
As things stand, the national interest exemption contained in this bill is so big that the minister could drive a forest harvester through it. These provisions have to be revisited. They have to be reviewed and refined so that our environment is genuinely protected and our biodiversity is genuinely conserved.
There are other glaring deficiencies in the bill. In requiring projects to disclose only the scope 1 and 2 emissions, the bill fails to include what is often the largest share of their climate pollution, the scope 3 emissions, which are released when fossil fuels are burnt in Australia or overseas. This bill purports to be a generational improvement on our environment protections, yet the government plans to continue to fail to accurately measure and consider the full extent of the climate harm that results from these projects.
We're continuing to rely on fossil fuel companies to accurately estimate their emissions without independent assessment, in the face of innumerable examples of their failure to do so in the past. This bill will do little to stop polluting gas and coal projects from going ahead. The government claims that domestic climate pollution from new or expanded fossil fuel projects is covered under the safeguard mechanism.
But the safeguard mechanism doesn't prevent projects from going ahead; it only kicks in after a project is approved and operating, and it only covers some polluting projects. We still don't have adequate legislative oversight of the climate impact of major polluting projects, despite the recent opinion of the International Court of Justice that we should consider that impact when assessing new fossil fuel projects.
In the end, climate change is absent from this bill, despite the fact that it remains, and will always remain, the biggest threat to our environment. The same conspicuous absence applies to forestry. The carve-out applied to forestry operations, the exemption of the regional forestry agreements, RFAs, has long been a weak point in Australia's environmental laws.
Since these laws were first passed 26 years ago, logging has been repeatedly linked to declines in threatened species, like the greater glider and the Leadbeater's possum. This led the Samuel review to recommend ending exemptions that undermine environmental protections and which enable weak forestry standards. It's inexplicable that the minister has failed to act on these key recommendations at this time.
He needs to do that now, if for no other reason than as a show of faith to those who care about our forests and to those who care about the species that rely on our forests for survival. The bill also fails to address the loophole related to the EPBC Act clause allowing grandfathering of ongoing deforestation programs. This exemption has enabled the ongoing large-scale destruction of native woodlands, forests, wetlands and grasslands, most notably in the catchment areas for the Great Barrier Reef.
Agriculture and native forest logging remain largely exempt from oversight by the EPBC Act, especially in respect to their cumulative impact. The bill still has offsets front and centre of the government's response to environmental damage and biodiversity loss. It presents some improvement on conservation grounds, requiring projects with significant impacts on matters of national environmental significance to meet a net gain test, ensuring that projects which cause an unacceptable impact cannot be approved through offsets, and enforcing that contributions to nature restoration can be managed through an independent fund.
That should result in measurable improvements to environmental outcomes, but it doesn't require project developers to explore avoiding or reducing damage before they move to offsets under its mitigation hierarchy. The minister has to consider the hierarchy but is not obliged to apply it. The bill establishes a fund for environmental restoration, but it doesn't require consideration of whether offsets are actually feasible for the project.
Similar schemes in states like New South Wales have collected such funds but have been unable to spend them on suitable replacement habitat. Offsets should only ever be an option where habitat is replaceable with a like-for-like option. Australia's nature laws are the most powerful protection we have against environmental destruction and species extinction.
They hold a special significance to millions of Australians. These reforms deserve to be considered very carefully. Australia's nature laws are broken; unfortunately, so too is this bill, which was purportedly designed to fix them.
Nothing is more in Australia's national interest than preserving our nature. That's why we need to see these laws strengthened. I ask the minister and the government to do that—to accept the great responsibility given to them by the millions of voters who have entrusted them with government and to work with those of us who care desperately about our environment, in this House and in the Senate, to improve this legislation.