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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 10 Hansard (30 August) . . Page.. 3848 ..

MR MOORE: I have.

Mr Osborne: Not people in your office.

MR MOORE: No. They are concerned about mandating somebody else. This is a serious issue about mandating other people to do this sort of reporting. Such mandating is unacceptable. It is important for us to monitor the environment and to encourage people to report environmental or threatened environmental harm. But mandating somebody to do it and imposing 50 penalty points if they do not is unacceptable.

MR CORBELL (8.51): Mr Speaker, the Labor Party will be supporting this amendment, after carefully considering the issues Mr Moore has raised. On the face of it, you would have to have some concern about a requirement that someone must report environmentally damaging activity if they witness it. Ms Tucker's amendment provides for circumstances where a person does not have to comply with this new requirement for reporting an environmentally damaging activity if they have a reasonable belief that the Environment Management Authority is already aware of the activity or if they do not understand the consequences of what they are witnessing. We believe there are satisfactory safeguards.

Let me put a hypothetical situation to members to demonstrate the scenario I think Ms Tucker is trying to address. Say a person operating a piece of machinery for a company is doing something which is causing environmental harm. There may be other employees around not undertaking the action which is causing environmental harm, but they would be aware that the person doing that harm had no authorisation to do that; that they were doing it illegally.

If you see something happening and you know it is happening illegally, you have a general environmental duty to report that that harm is going on. That is what this amendment seeks to achieve. We are comfortable with the approach, because it provides for sufficient defences. If people are genuinely unaware of the circumstances in which harm has taken place, that is a reasonable thing. We will be supporting the amendment.

MR SMYTH (Minister for Urban Services, Minister for Business, Tourism and the Arts and Minister for Police and Emergency Services) (8.54): The government will be opposing the amendment. The current section 23 puts an obligation on the person conducting an activity to report it if it is causing or is likely to cause serious or material environmental harm and it is not authorised.

This amendment broadens the obligation to anyone who becomes aware of the situation. There is no need to cast the net so wide. The person conducting the activity will know and will be committing an offence by keeping silent. Other citizens will be able to report it if they wish. But making it an offence for them not to do so is broadening the legislation too much. It is not reasonable.

Mr Corbell put a hypothetical. What if there is an oil spill on the Adelaide Avenue? Everybody who drives past it and sees it but does not report it can in theory be charged under this amendment.

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