Extract from The Guardian
Document given to Senate crossbenchers outlines plan to transfer environmental decision-making powers to states and territories.
Last modified on Thu 11 Feb 2021 22.11 AEDT
The Morrison government is preparing to reject a recommendation it introduce strong national environmental standards to improve protection of Australian wildlife, opting to instead mimic the failing existing laws.
A document, seen by Guardian Australia, sets out the proposed standards the government will introduce to underpin its plan to transfer environmental decision-making powers to state and territory governments.
The standards have been given to Senate crossbenchers, as well as industry and environment groups, as the government looks to build support for its environmental streamlining bill in the Senate.
But the interim standards look nothing like those put forward by the former competition watchdog chair, Graeme Samuel, in his final report of a once-a-decade review of national environmental laws.
That report called for an overhaul of Australia’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act, which was found to have been ineffective in protecting the country’s wildlife due to failures by successive governments.
It made 38 recommendations, the centrepiece of which was a set of new legally-binding national environmental standards that would underpin any transfer of environmental approval powers to the states and territories.
Samuel drafted a set of interim standards, which were developed with a group of experts, and recommended the government adopt them immediately.
Samuel’s standards describe in detail the environmental outcomes that Australia’s laws should achieve, including maintaining and improving environmental conservation; maintaining and improving habitat for all listed threatened species; avoiding destruction of habitat critical to the survival of endangered wildlife; and using environmental offsets only after all steps have been taken to avoid or mitigate environmental damage.
All of this has been stripped out of the government standards given to the crossbench and replaced with descriptions of existing processes in the EPBC Act, which Samuel found had failed.
The document also does not address the review’s recommendations for a new national environmental standard for Indigenous engagement and participation in environmental decision-making, and a standard for environmental compliance and enforcement.
Crossbench senators who spoke to Guardian Australia were concerned the standards proposed did not reflect Samuel’s recommendations.
“Blind Freddy could see that there’s daylight between what Samuel recommended and what the government’s come back with,” the Tasmanian senator Jacqui Lambie said.
“If the government is asking me to support its standards over those recommended in the Samuel review, it’s got to explain to me why they’re an improvement.”
The independent South Australian senator Rex Patrick said the government had watered down Samuel’s standards substantially. “My initial view is that they are substantially weaker and they present a problem.”
Patrick said he would seek community and stakeholder feedback and was prepared to negotiate, noting that rejecting the bill would mean the status quo would remain, which was also unacceptable.
“I am open to negotiating but the standards must be robust,” he said.
Centre Alliance, which is represented by Stirling Griff in the Senate and Rebekha Sharkie in the lower house, said the party was “of the view that national standards should be aligned to the values set out by Professor Samuel”.
“This is a golden opportunity to strengthen our environmental laws not weaken them,” Sharkie said.
Labor’s environment spokesperson, Terri Butler, said the government had turned the Samuel review into a farce.
“After spending millions of dollars of taxpayer funds and countless hours on the independent review, the Morrison government have landed back at square one,” she said. “They have been dishonest with the Australian people yet again.”
Nicola Beynon, of the Humane Society International, said the government’s proposed standards were a major retreat from those recommended by the independent review.
“In fact they are not genuine standards, they are the clauses of the EPBC Act rearranged on another piece of paper,” she said. “They make no attempt to pull Australia out of its declining environmental trajectories.”
Rachel Walmsley, the Environmental Defenders Office’s policy and law reform director, said the government had not addressed any of the problems identified by Samuel.
“Putting the word standards on the top of a document that describes the current weak legal settings is ignoring the Samuel review,” she said.
She said she feared the standards the government had proposed would “only facilitate greater uncertainty for business and risk entrenching poor outcomes for our biodiversity”.
Guardian Australia asked the environment minister, Sussan Ley, why the government had not used the Samuel standards and whether it would negotiate changes to the standards before a vote in the Senate.
A spokesperson for Ley said: “Prof Samuel highlighted the importance of a standards framework.
“The standards framework and accreditation process will strengthen the application of the current act as the minister continues to work through all of Prof Samuel’s recommendations with stakeholders.”
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