Page 6084 - Week 14 - Thursday, 9 December 2010
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The Greens would prefer legislation that does not rely on exemptions as a matter of course, as it means that originally intended processes are not being followed. Exemptions should be used as exceptions, not commonly. However, there were 15 section 211 exemptions from an EIS being carried out in the 2009-10 year alone. For this reason, we do support the concept of improving or refining the triggers to ensure that EISs are carried out when necessary but not called for when it is merely an expensive and burdensome process which does not add to the information sought or needed for a proposal.
This bill allows for a development proposal to go into the merit track instead of the impact track in these circumstances, which means that the proposal still undergoes a full public consultation process. The bill also allows the Conservator of Flora and Fauna, or another relevant agency, to have the power to make a decision on whether it is likely that a proposal will have a significant adverse environmental impact in some instances.
This is a new level of decision making introduced by this concept, and we need to be careful that it is set at the right level, and applied well. As described earlier, we understand that it may sometimes be preferable to avoid a full EIS, but given that the conservator, or in some cases the Heritage Council, may be doing a sublevel of impact assessment, it is imperative that we assess the process that the conservator uses to assess whether or not it is likely that there will be a significant adverse environmental impact caused by the process.
At this point, I will note that very shortly—given the timing, it will be after lunch—I will be introducing a number of amendments. I will be having a more substantive discussion about those amendments, unlike this sort of semi-in-principle speech. I will briefly go through the rest of my speech; I have only got two minutes remaining before lunch time.
We are very pleased that the government has taken on quite a lot of our suggestions through the exposure draft process. I would like to extend my thanks for the cooperative and collegiate way in which we were able to deal with ACTPLA in terms of this process. Obviously, not all the changes we would have liked to see are there, but we are, nonetheless, very pleased that it was a quite positive process as far as we were concerned. We thank ACTPLA and the minister for this.
Let me go to some of the suggestions the government has taken on through the process. One is de-concessionalisation. We are now going to get a social, cultural and economic impact study. That is the issue. De-concessionalisation is a change of the ownership of land. Although it often leads to a change in the use of the land, it is not in itself a change in the use of the land, so that would seem the more important thing to deal with.
There is the issue of strategic environmental assessment. This, we hope, will have some more public process involved in it. Strategic environmental assessment is the process carried out by the government in the early stage of the planning processes. The outputs coming from the strategic environmental assessment are used by the government for planning for most suburban developments.
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