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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 10 Hansard (30 August) . . Page.. 3854 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

Secondly, I think the criteria for when notification is not necessary are too broad. The whole point of environmental protection agreements is to minimise environmental harm. If some agreements being made are still causing environmental harm, then the public have a right to know about them. The only agreements that should not have to be notified are those where no environmental harm will be caused. I am therefore moving to delete paragraph (b) from this clause.

MR SMYTH (Minister for Urban Services, Minister for Business, Tourism and the Arts and Minister for Police and Emergency Services) (9.16): We oppose this amendment. It would mean that the existing level of advertising and consultation would virtually be unchanged from the existing provisions. There is no need for an environmental protection agreement if there is no level of environmental harm. There are so few requests for this information that we feel our position is justified in leaving our provision in the bill and not supporting Ms Tucker's amendment.

MR CORBELL (9.17): When the Labor Party first supported the establishment of the Environment Protection Act in 1997, there was a debate about the level of notification required. At that time the Labor Party supported broad notification requirements for agreements and authorisations, including notification in daily newspapers. It is now three or four years since the act was passed. The whole point of the review was to look at both the objectives and principles of the act and whether they were being achieved but also to look at the workability of the legislation.

On balance, the Labor Party is prepared to support the government clause, because on balance it is quite clear that the level of notification which currently takes place does not achieve any significant useful purpose. Hundreds of protection agreements and environmental authorisations have been publicly notified over the past four years. The number of occasions on which these have been sought for examination can be counted on one hand, I understand.

In the interests of making the implementation and the administration of the act more straightforward, we think this is a reasonable reform. We believe that public interest continues to be protected through the provision of the disallowable instrument. That allows the minister to outline the circumstances in which a notification or an agreement does not need to be publicly notified.

That approach will allow the Assembly to keep an eye on exactly what types of agreements the minister is prepared to exempt from the notification requirement, and it is subject to the veto of this place. We think that is a satisfactory arrangement, given that the existing notification requirements advertise many things for what appears to be no immediate purpose.

Amendment negatived.

Clause 8 agreed to.

Proposed new clauses 8A to 8M.

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