What is your one big idea?
We must reform Australia’s broken national environment laws, as they have failed to protect the environment. Projects critical to our future prosperity are bogged down in slow, opaque, duplicative and contested environmental planning and approvals processes based on poor information, and mired in administrative complexity.
Matters of national environmental significance (MNES), such as world and national heritage areas and the Great Barrier Reef, must be protected and restored.
Protecting the environment while facilitating faster project decision-making demands several important changes to the existing commonwealth legal framework. First, we need regional plans, developed cooperatively with state and local governments. Second, we need stronger resourcing of the newly established Environment Information Australia to identify MNES and monitor the goal to stop and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030. Third, we need national environmental standards to provide a basis for the commonwealth to accredit state decision-making processes, permitting the streamlining of project approvals. And fourth, we need an expert, independent and trusted decision-maker in the form of a national Environment Protection Agency.
What are the benefits?
There is no chance of Australia meeting stated targets for net zero, renewable energy, critical minerals development, housing and transport infrastructure without robust national laws that set clear environmental standards for major projects, along with a strong national regulator respected by all parties and significant improvements in commonwealth and state and territory environmental protection systems.
Reformed laws will be critical to enhancing economic resilience and lifting flagging productivity growth, which underpins intergenerational equity and opportunity.
What are the downsides?
Commercial and political vested interests are always tempted to exploit the moments of uncertainty generated by proposed reform. This has been a feature of all previous attempts to achieve reform.
For some, the stakes at play in environmental law reform are high. After all, we have whole industries with business models built on the destruction of the natural world.
How practical is it?
It can be done. But it will take a lot of work over many years to put in place new architecture to protect the environment while also facilitating efficient and transparent project approvals.
How politically risky is it?
Reforms of the sort outlined here were recommended by Graeme Samuel’s review, published five years ago. The recommendations have enjoyed bipartisan political support. They have also had the support of major business and environmental groups.
But when it comes to the details of the legislation, stakeholders have invariably found themselves in deadlock. Generally, developers have favoured the fast-tracking of reforms that reduce complexity and facilitate the accreditation of state approvals systems. Environmental interests have favoured stronger protections.
The deadlock must be broken. Reforms will be delivered if there is genuine cooperation and a shared purpose among the commonwealth, states and territories, businesses and environmental groups – to prioritise the interests of future generations.
Ken Henry is an economist, policy adviser, former Treasury secretary and chair of the Australian Climate and Biodiversity Foundation
