Environmental Procedures Bill

Extract from Hansard

Legislative Council
11 April 2001

Mike Elliott
Leader Australian Democrats
Member of the Legislative Council

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The Hon. M.J. ELLIOTT: On behalf of the Democrats I express support for the second reading of this bill. I can understand a desire to avoid duplication of effort such that when developers are seeking to get a project up they would not want to have to go through two essentially similar procedures to produce two sets of documents, which could have significant cost implications.

I do not have problems with the existence of federal legislation in areas which, it could be argued, are really the province of the states in the first case, other than that there are times when South Australia leads the rest of the nation-in some areas of legislation at least-and I would hate to think that federal law could give us something that was inferior. When addressing duplication of environmental procedures, one could fear that a bill of that sort is accepting what happens under federal jurisdiction which perhaps has the potential to be weaker than the legislation we have in the state.

On my reading of this bill that is not the case because, whilst a document is perhaps created under the federal act, any process which is necessary within South Australia must also be complied with. Therefore, although one might have only one set of documents, the requirement, as I understand it, would be that, in seeking to fulfil the requirements of the federal legislation and produce the relevant documentation, if there is a requirement under state legislation which may be more rigorous, one would need to have complied with the state legislation at the same time in the creation of that document. Once that is done, that document would then be acceptable, or I presume otherwise. The minister might care to respond at the close of the second reading stage. If the document did not fulfil all requirements under state legislation, they would still have to be fulfilled in some other way: whilst the state might accept that document, it might then have additional requirements.

I note that some of the bits of legislation to which this bill is sought to apply are acts on which I think this parliament needs to spend much more time. The Development Act, Environment and Protection Act and the Native Vegetation Act, in particular, all are proving to be inadequate as they currently stand. I have been a longstanding critic of the assessment processes under the Development Act, and I think the failings of those development assessment processes, particularly in relation to major projects, have been underlined by what is now happening at Glenelg. In my view, we have a significant environmental disaster, which also has significant economic implications for this state-all because, in my view, the environmental impact assessment process is inadequate. I will not talk further about that at this stage, but people who have heard me talk about the Development Act on other occasions will remember that I have gone into this at some length.

I note that the state government has moved partly along the track that I suggested in terms of creating an assessment panel, but at this stage the assessment panel only determines what level of environmental assessment is necessary-whether it be an EIS, a PER or a DR-and also, as I recall, produces a document which states the questions that need to be addressed. Unfortunately, at that stage the assessment panel plays no further role. I think that, if the government chose to let the assessment panel monitor the progress of an EIS from beginning to end, we would have a far better result, but I will not go into that further at the moment.

In relation to the Environment Protection Act, I note that the Environment, Resources and Development Committee of this parliament made a number of recommendations for change last year when it reported to this place and, until this time, there has been no response to that report that I am aware of, in an administrative or a legislative sense. However, the report from the ERD Committee clearly identified a number of significant weaknesses in the way the Environment Protection Authority currently functions.

Finally, in relation to the Native Vegetation Act, we know that illegal clearance is still going on in South Australia now. In some cases, the illegal clearance is ratified by the government even after the event. There have been very few prosecutions, despite the fact that illegal clearance appears to be happening on an ongoing basis.

I suppose one important question is how much is a deficiency in the legislation and how much is a lack of will on the part of the government, reflecting a lack of resources for the Native Vegetation Council to be able to carry out its work. I indicate that, in terms of allowing the use of a document for both federal and state requirements, the bill does not cause a problem so far as any existing South Australian standards are not undermined, but I indicate at the same time that I think that, in relation to several pieces of legislation, South Australia's current legislative framework is inadequate.