18 April 2024
Topics: Federal Environment Protection Agency, Tanya Plibersek’s disastrous environmental law changes, Toondah Harbour
E&OE
Bill McDonald:
Is this a win for our environment or another example of project shifting, bureaucracy, delays? Joining us this morning to discuss it is Shadow Minister for the Environment, Senator Jonathon Duniam. Jonathon, good morning to you first of all.
Senator Duniam:
Good morning, Bill. Thanks for having me this morning.
Bill McDonald:
My pleasure. This multilayered approach – is the EPA just another layer of costs and green tape that’s added for businesses?
Senator Duniam:
You betcha, Bill. There is nothing good in this for the environment or for business. And I think it’s important to wind back the clock to just before the election or indeed just after the election, when Tanya Plibersek, in announcing her Nature Positive Plan which sounds like a great thing, where it would be better for business, better for the environment, that we have an extensive public consultation on the proposed laws, and it would all be in Parliament before the end of last year – 2023. None of that has happened. We’ve had closed door, secretive, selective consultation with a few hand-picked stakeholders, mainly from the environmental movement, and we certainly don’t have the laws before Parliament. All we do have is this new bureaucracy which is going to cost over an extra $100 million of hard-earned taxpayers money going into Canberra to do all the things you talked about before, to have enforcement powers to stop those nasty big mining company from creating energy generation projects, from developing broad scale housing estates in terms of development companies. This is a ridiculous approach being taken by the government here. It will not be better for business and it certainly won’t be better for the environment. So it’s a fail on all counts I have to tell you and there is no timeline moving forward on when we will see these new laws which, frankly, are needed. No one disagrees with that. Not the Greens, not the Liberal Party, not the LNP, not the Labor Party, but frankly the Government’s doing nothing about it.
Bill McDonald:
Why the delay is? Why is it being kicked down the road by Minister Plibersek and her Department?
Senator Duniam:
Well, I asked her very senior officials at a Senate committee yesterday these very questions. Now these are people who are paid close to half a million bucks a year in some cases and they refused to tell me exactly what the problem was, other than it’s very complex. Now anyone could tell you that reforming 1000 pages of legislation is a complex matter. They set down the timeline, they set down the promise that they’d have the laws in Parliament by the end of 2023. It was in fact Tanya Plibersek herself who told us we did not have a minute to spare, we needed to act urgently, reform these laws to prevent further extinctions, protect and repair our environment. But here we are and I think this Government has put it in the too hard basket. We all know you’re never going to please everyone when it comes to decisions like how best to manage our environment. But at the end of the day the approach should be this and this is what is lacking from the government – they should be looking at projects that don’t make it any harder, or laws rather, that don’t make it any harder to do business in this country. Already with increasing labour costs, increasing energy costs, businesses are looking overseas to develop their business ideas and make investment choices. If we make it any harder here, and already we hear it’s something like 16 years on average to get a new mining project up in this country, well why would you invest those hard earned dollars here if it takes you more than a decade and a half to get a project up? These laws should make it easier for business. They promised us it would, but I am not seeing anything that takes us in that direction at all and all we have is this new bureaucracy with powers like the Australian Federal Police, where they can dish out fines of in excess of three quarters of a billion dollars or seven years in jail if you happen to breach the law. Madness.
Bill McDonald:
So you don’t think there there’s actually anything that’s going to improve environmental outcomes in this Nature Positive Plan?
Senator Duniam:
No, not at all. I mean, Professor Graeme Samuel, the bloke who authored the review of the EPBC Act which is the current set of laws that govern federal environmental approvals, said the current laws are, in his words, an abysmal failure and that they should be torn up and chucked on the bonfire. Now, where Labor have taken us, where Tanya Plibersek and Anthony Albanese have taken us is they’ve put over $100 million into a new bureaucracy with a new name and a new logo to administer those very same laws. So if the laws are broken, why aren’t they changing them and instead just putting in a new bureaucracy? And you know what’s worse, I talked before about businesses that want to invest here under our world leading standards, we have high standards for environmental protection generally. The laws aren’t perfect, but we do it better than most of the rest of the world. Those companies who don’t do business here might go to countries where they don’t care about the environment, where they dig big holes in the ground and never actually remediate once the project’s completed, where they denude entire landscapes of all vegetation, deforestation which is actually a bad thing. We don’t do that here in Australia, contrary to the claims of the Greens. That is bad for the environment globally and no one wins. So, Bill, there is no net positive for the environment here. It is in fact very negative for the environment. And I’ll tell you what else against the worst industrial relations laws, more expensive power, this increased amount of green tape businesses have to comply with is bad for our economy and it will mean less jobs in states like Queensland, where our resources industry is something to be proud of and makes a massive contribution. So this is bad news all round.
Bill McDonald:
Yeah, well I suspect I know what your views are going to be, I just want to ask you this question before I let you go. Minister Plibersek announced, of course, her plans to reject the Walker Corporation’s proposal up here for a $1.3 billion residential shopping and marina development at Toondah Harbour in Redlands. Is this the expected path of this proposed EPA and the loss of opportunities and jobs that’ll go with it.
Senator Duniam:
All we are going to be seeing as a result of the establishment of the EPA is that it won’t be Minister Plibersek’s name on the bottom of a decision like this, it’ll be some unelected bureaucrat in Canberra who will never be held to account for these decisions. The benefit of the Minister making these decisions now, whether it is the right one or the wrong one, whether you agree with it or not, at least then the Minister can be held to account and people in her electorate can vote accordingly. But with an unelected bureaucrat in Canberra who gets paid every fortnight, no matter how much economic carnage they cause, I think that is a recipe for disaster and the EPA would make things much worse when it comes to important projects getting up.
Bill McDonald:
I have to agree with you. Nice to talk with you, thanks very much for your time.
Senator Duniam:
Bill, thanks for that. Have a great day.