TRANSCRIPT
The last week of parliament delivered the first major overhaul of Australia's environment laws in over two decades - but stakeholders like Innes Willox say the work has just begun.
"This is a lot like a drawing, where we've got the outline, and now we need to fill in the colours."
He's the CEO of the Australian Industry Group.
"We're at that point where we now do have an outline, we have a structure, a road map of where to go from here."
That new structure includes Australia's first National Environment Protection Agency, and a new body called Environment Information Australia, responsible for collecting and sharing data.
"But there is an enormous amount of detail that has to be worked through and the old saying is always that the devil is in the detail."
The detail includes a set of regulations known as National Environmental Standards.
Environmental Justice Australia Senior Lawyer Nicola Silbert says they'll be the key test for the practical impact Australia's new laws will have on the ground.
"When we're talking about national environmental standards, we're talking about a universal set of rules that set minimum expectations for decisions affecting nature and the environment in Australia. So they're intended to be a clear line in the sand that says anything below this isn't good enough."
Lis Ashby spent 15 years working within state and federal governments on biodiversity policy and regulation.
She's now the Biodiversity and Innovation Lead at the Biodiversity Council, which brings together experts from 11 universities.
Ms Ashby says the legally-enforcable standards are designed to provide the clarity conservation groups and business groups have been calling for.
"So if you are a developer or a proponent who's going to have a large impact on biodiversity, a really clear standard might make you go, 'oh, it's not worth my time preparing an application or buying this property to develop it because the biodiversity impact is so significant that I know that it's going to be rejected."
National Environmental Standards were the cornerstone of Professor Graeme Samuel's review into the omnibus Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (or EPBC) Act.
This landmark review formed the blueprint for the reforms, which aim to protect nature while speeding up project approvals, partly by reducing duplication between jurisdictions.
Draft documents outlining two of five promised standards have now been published.
Innes Willox says the Australian Industry group is happy with where the conversation is headed.
"Well, the first two standards we've seen, the drafts are looking directionally okay. There is more to come. There'll be the subject of further consultation among different groups and interest groups. As we work through the process. We don't think this is easy or straightforward."
He's right. Environmental groups have raised concerns with the draft standard that covers Matters of National Environmental Significance - like threatened species and ecological communities.
Professor Brendan Wintle is an ecologist with the University of Melbourne Biodiversity Institute, and a lead councillor with the Biodiversity Council.
"So one of the things that was suggested or recommended through the decadal review of the EPBC Act is that we actually have outcomes based standards, and that we require environment-related outcomes, and those need to be measurable outcomes."
He says the draft standard for Matters of National Environmental Significance - which include things like threatened species and world heritage properties - are too subjective.
"At the moment, the wording under the draft standards for MNES, for example, says things like 'provide for the protection and conservation' or 'contribute to the enhancement of a matter' - you know, habitat for a threatened species, for example - but you can provide a way, you can contribute all sorts of things and never actually improve the outcome for the species or for the ecosystem."
Professor Wintle says the wording needs to be clearer and more quantitative.
"I mean, these are incredibly vague concepts. We can do much better than that." TEE: "Give me some examples of how you quantify that and make it tight." WINTLE: "Yeah. So we would say if you are reducing the abundance of a threatened or critically endangered species, if you are reducing the area of a threatened ecological community, if you are degrading the condition of a threatened ecological community - and these things we can measure. They're areas of habitat, they're areas of ecological community, they're numbers of animals, there's areas of habitats for those critically endangered animals, and we can set thresholds on what's an unacceptable loss, and then we can measure whether or not you've achieved a positive outcome in the area and condition of those matters."
Many conservationists worry the new laws leave too much to the discretion of the environment minister, who ultimately determines whether a project gets approved.
ANU ecologist Davide Lindenmayer says he's doing work with the government to support the new standards, but he's deeply concerned they won't be effective.
"It's not clear to me what a national environmental standard actually will be because we are dealing with very diverse systems in Australia, often with many endangered species and threatened species, and often the process of logging has multiple threats associated with it. For example, when we log a forest, we make it more flammable and that means that animals and plants are threatened not only by the logging itself, but also by the extra fire risk."
Innes Willox says that business, on the other hand, doesn't want the laws to be too prescriptive.
"There will always be those who want rigidity as it were, and others who want a little bit of flexibility. I think from business's perspective, we have to understand that each scenario or each case where this law is going to be applied will be different. There will be some very clear obvious cases around what is and isn't permissible, but there's always in this going to be some shades of grey and we would caution against being too prescriptive because each case is different and each scenario is different."
Australian Climate and Biodiversity Foundation Executive Director Lyndon Schneiders accepts there are limits to how prescriptive the test in the standard can be.
But he believes the compromise Labor and the Greens reached to pass the laws also elevated important elements beyond the status of regulations.
"Some of the key concepts have now been hardwired into the legislation itself. Probably one of the most important is this idea around unacceptable impacts of development on the MNES, and that has now been put in the primary legislation."
The definition of 'unacceptable' has been criticised as overly ambiguous from both sides - which Environment Minister Murray Watt argues means the government got it right.
Environment groups have also raised concerns there are loopholes in the offset standard - which provides a pathway to compensate for damage that can't be avoided.
Standards for information and data, First Nations engagement and community consultation will be put out for consultation once they've been developed.
Lyndon Schneiders says the real work starts now.
"We've got a new framework, we've got the resources in place, we've got the institutions in place, we've got a new rule set, but the real work is now going to be translating that into concrete action, and that's ahead of everyone over the next 18 months 24 months as we set up a system that's going to work."
A Senate inquiry looking into the laws is due to report next March.
