Thu Nov 13

Murray Watt on the compromises to pass new environmental laws before Christmas

Written by: Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra

Finding the best balance between the environment and development is vital but often contested. Renewable energy projects, housing and mining approvals are all important, while Australia’s unique natural environment also requires defence.

The Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act ^[1] is crucial on all those fronts – but it’s long been seen as not properly serving either the environment or business.

The Albanese government tried to make changes last term with Tanya Plibersek as environment minister, but the effort failed. This term, new Environment Minister Murray Watt has made a fresh push to pass the reforms. He’s hoping to push legislation through by Christmas – even though there’s just one sitting week of Parliament left, at the end of this month.

Watt has to make a Senate deal with either the Greens or the Coalition and both want substantial amendments to different parts of the legislation. To discuss the likelihood of striking that deal, the Coalition’s shifting position on net zero emissions ^[2] and actually achieving Australia’s climate targets, Watt joined the podcast.

He argues the proposed environmental law reforms:

are a balanced package that’s designed to deliver wins for both the environment and for business, not one or the other.

[…] From an environmental perspective, what the laws do for the first time is provide a clear definition of what would be considered to be an unacceptable impact on the environment, meaning that a project just would not get approved. It couldn’t be offset. It couldn’t be altered. It just would not get approved.

[…] From a business perspective, the problem we’re trying to solve is the incredible delays and duplication of processes that currently happens in the system where we need projects to be usually assessed by a state government and approved by a state government, only then to be assessed by, and approved by or rejected by, a federal government.

On the progress of his discussions with Greens and the Liberals, Watt says both still remain open to negotiation and that everyone will need to compromise:

My view is that both of those pathways very much remain open to us. You will have heard the Coalition say that they think this legislation is too pro-environment. The Greens are saying that it’s too pro-business. You might take from that that we’ve probably got the balance right.

[…] I’ve said all along that no one is going to get everything they want in this legislation, there’s got to be some compromise from everyone involved, and that includes from me. So I’m very confident that we can still find a pathway this side of Christmas but it’s a little too hard to predict yet which way that will be.

On one of the controversial aspects of the bill – a “national interest” override ^[3], giving the environment minister the final say in approving significant projects – Watt defends its inclusion but says he’s willing to compromise:

This was a direct recommendation of Graeme Samuel in his review [of the current act]. What Graeme said was that we needed to introduce for the first time strong, clear national environmental standards for decision makers to consider when deciding whether to approve or reject a project. But he also said that elected governments should have the ability in rare circumstances to approve a project even if it doesn’t meet those environmental benchmarks, if it’s in the national interest to do so.

[…] Now obviously there’s been a lot of criticism of that aspect of these reforms since we tabled that bill, and I’m prepared to listen to that and think about whether there’s ways that we can minimise the risks of that kind of a power.

Watt remains optimistic that Australia can reach its climate targets, including net zero emissions by 2050, while admitting the difficulties:

I think that it will be difficult to meet our 2035 targets of 62% to 70%, but where we landed there was to make sure that they were ambitious but achievable. It will require a policy change, it will require new technology, but I do think that those targets are achievable, just as I think it’s achievable to get to net zero by 2050.