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

Mr BIRRELL (Nicholls) (21:17): I too rise to speak on the Environment Protection Reform Bill 2025 and the six related bills before the House. I acknowledge and congratulate the member for Casey on his excellent contribution, coming from an electorate that has both stunning natural features and thriving industry. That's what can happen when you get legislation such as this right.

This bill does not get legislation such as that right. There is an old saying: if at first you don't succeed, try and try again. This reform has been problematic for the Albanese government from day one.

During the last term, then environment minister Plibersek proved completely unable to deliver Labor's promised full overhaul of the EPBC Act. It was friendless then, it was overreach then and it ultimately failed to gain support and was shelved. So here we are again, with a new environment minister but with many of the same problems in both framing and consultation.

There's another wise saying: insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. The explanatory memorandums for these bills run to 1,500—I'll say that again: one thousand five hundred—pages. That's more than is typically published on budget day.

This is such a complex piece of legislation with such a huge explanatory memorandum, and we have a Labor government just trying to ram it through. Here we are. We're going till 10 o'clock tonight, just trying to ram it through before the end of the year.

The new Minister for the Environment and Water has been consulting with industry groups for six months, but the feedback from industry has not been taken into account. Rather than fixing the problems, the government is just ploughing on and ploughing through. I think these reforms will make it worse for industry, to the point where they are saying that, without amendment, the legislation as it stands would be better than Labor's reforms.

So we are back to where we were last term, with the government trying to force the passage of legislation that is, once again, absolutely friendless. Labor's environment reforms discourage economic activity, and that's a real problem given the difficulties we face with the economy—the growing problems with the economy and the fact that we need to be competitive in a more unstable world.

But the Albanese government doesn't have a plan to lift productivity. It's presided over the worst productivity performance in decades. Since coming to office, productivity has fallen five per cent.

Businesses are buried under more than 5,000 new regulations and 400 new laws, costing $5 billion. When you get a government full of people that have never run a business, they don't understand that regulation equals cost. Sure, you have to have some regulation, but the more you have the more it costs because you need more people to see if you're complying with the regulations.

The productivity roundtable proved to be totally unproductive, and now we are faced with more green tape to add to an existing pile of red tape. The coalition has a strong track record on the environment, but what that government was able to do was balance it with productivity. We got the balance right between protecting the environment while supporting economy-boosting projects.

Under the coalition, Australia's investment in renewable energy continued to break records, with renewables ultimately making up almost one-third of our energy mix. Australia had the world's highest uptake of rooftop solar, with one in four homes with rooftop solar panels. We led the way on waste and recycling.

Our $280 million Recycling Modernisation Fund drove a $1 billion transformation of the waste recycling sector, and our plan significantly increased recycling rates, tackled plastic litter, improved battery recycling and lowered food waste. We invested billions of dollars improving the health of the Great Barrier Reef. Our threatened species strategies protected vulnerable plants and animals, and we invested billions in threatened species, habitat restoration, marine conservation and environmental projects.

Labor's environmental reforms have many, many issues. This legislation is riddled with problems, and it paints a very grim picture for jobs, investment and productivity in our country. There's a raft of unacceptable impacts that needs to be removed and too many grey areas.

Grey areas are terrible in legislation. Grey areas lead to courts fighting over definitions that are poorly defined. The definition of 'unacceptable impacts' will significantly constrain development.

Industries propose that the definition needs to be removed from the legislation into standards with some further adjustments in the standards. This legislation has 37 definitions covering eight pages, defining what is an 'unacceptable impact', and none of it makes a lot of sense. Definitions—and I'm going to talk about the Murray Darlin Basin Plan soon.

When I was younger, my dearly departed father, who was a lawyer, and I always talked about analysing legislation. He said that if the language in legislation is precise, it makes it easier for everyone because we can clearly understand what was the intention. He used to say to me that every word in a piece of legislation should carry some weight or do some work.

Every word is critically important to establishing the intent of what the legislation is so that, when lawyers come and look at it later on, it's fairly clear. If you have definitions for things like 'net gain' and 'national interest' but not much more than that, then we're going to be stuck in court battles for years and years working out what those things mean.

I think there will be limits to the number of projects that will be possible and I think it will mean that some current projects will not be granted approval under the proposed reform. We want unacceptable impacts to form part of the environmental standards that sit outside the legislation as per the Graeme Samuel review. But one of the most important things and one of the sticking points in this piece of legislation is the responsibilities, role and powers of the CEO of the EPA.

We think that there must be ministerial oversight for the CEO of the EPA, and that is a principle. In the Westminster system of democratic government, the buck needs to stop, and ultimate responsibility needs to rest, with an elected official—someone the public has chosen. If people who have been appointed and not elected get too much power, then we end up moving away from the democratic intentions of our fine Westminster traditions.

The definition of 'net gain', as I said earlier, needs greater clarity, and there need to be guardrails, because industry needs certainty. In its current form, this legislation is completely unworkable, and our stakeholders across industry and environment agree. The coalition remains committed to achieving a balanced outcome for jobs, productivity and environment, and achieving that will require substantial change to this legislation.

Passing these reforms has become a pressing issue for the Albanese government—I note the hour at which we are debating them—and there's a danger that they will negotiate with the Greens political party to do it. The Greens can only make this piece of legislation worse, and there is deep concern that these reforms are already more pro-green than pro-industry. Labor doing a deal with the Greens should worry every Australian.

We don't need that green handbrake on the economy. Even before these reforms, Labor had already applied the handbrake. They put off the decision on the North West Shelf until after the election, and then they sacked the minister who was involved in that.

Labor is completely divided on whether they support the jobs and wealth created for our nation by the resources sector, and I fear that not only are they divided on it but the division is weighted against the jobs and wealth created for our nation by the resources sector. As the new member for Grey said earlier—I think this was an outstanding insight and contribution to the debate—all of the services that Labor are so fond of bragging about delivering for people come from money from hardworking Australians and critical industries like mining and agriculture.

If you damage them, you damage the ability to deliver those services. Industry and business need certainty so that they can invest in Australia with confidence, creating jobs and boosting our economy. Additional red and green tape are making it harder for businesses to apply, and large project applications will take longer and cost more and will likely be rejected.

Mining and agriculture are critical to the Australian economy, and there's no better example of bad legislation which was intended to drive environmental outcomes but instead had the perverse impact of hurting industry, economic activity, jobs and communities than the Water Amendment (Restoring Our Rivers) Bill passed by this Labor government. The restoring our rivers bill is the canary in the coalmine, showing what can happen when the intended green side of Labor gets control of legislation.

The Murray-Darling Basin Plan had already recovered significant amounts of water for the environment, under both governments. And the reform wasn't without pain—particularly in my electorate of Nicholls, but all across the Murray-Darling Basin communities. There was a loss of water from productive agricultural use and a drop in production for key sectors, including dairy.

Jobs were lost and regional communities shrank. A lot of water was gained through efficiency projects, and farmers adapted and innovated to be productive with less water. And we thought the deal had been done.

We thought that, despite the fact that we'd been given some pain, and the state governments had come on board, certainty had been restored—until the election of the Albanese government. The then environment and water minister came in and said, 'No, we're going to throw it all out—throw out all the previous deals, throw out what people were happy with—and go back into the water-buyback business.' So they'd go back into the 'wrecking regional Australia' business, the business of destroying and damaging jobs and the economy in the Murray-Darling Basin communities.

And there was the additional 450 gigalitres that was protected by socioeconomic tests and was agreed to by Labor many years ago. But then it got thrown out and, all of a sudden, we had water buybacks again. I can't tell you the damage this caused and the lack of confidence this inspired in basin communities.

That came about because Labor decided that there were only two things that were important: depleting the Basin Plan by an arbitrary deadline and 'the environment'. The socioeconomic test was axed and water buybacks recommenced. The worst part of it and the perverse outcome was that it damaged the environment.

Now, to get all that water through the river system down towards South Australia, they have to run the river higher and damage and erode the banks. I've seen that on my own property. The beautiful Goulburn River, which I love and grew up next to, has been damaged because someone is trying to fix an environmental problem somewhere else whilst damaging our environment by turning a river into a channel.

This is what happens when a government acts on ideology, fails to properly consult and doesn't bother to listen when the problems are pointed out to it. They are doing it again with this tranche of so-called reform. We are no more advanced on the environmental reforms than we were in the last parliament.

On these bills before the House, there's a Senate inquiry, due to report in March. We could wait for that and get better information to draft better legislation. But better legislation is not what this government is interested in.

They're interested in getting a political win. The bills have many problems but very few friends. They face going nowhere unless the Minister for the Environment and Water gets serious about addressing the concerns of the coalition and stakeholders.

We want to see really good environmental protection laws. We want to see thriving industry. You can have it.

You can get it right if you listen to the experts, understand what's going on with the inquiry and operate in good faith with the coalition. I wish that was happening, but, unfortunately, it's not, so I can't support the legislation.