Page 2898 - Week 09 - Thursday, 18 September 2014
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The Environment Protection Act 1997 is the primary legislation that protects the ACT’s environment. The act is an integrated legal framework to regulate activities that have the potential to generate pollution and cause environmental harm, promote environmental awareness, and encouraging progressive environmental improvements. The framework follows the central tenet of protecting and enhancing the quality of the territory’s natural and built environment by preventing environmental degradation and adverse risk of harm to human health and the health of the environment. This framework recognises the need to achieve an effective integration of environmental, economic and social considerations.
The act is supplemented by the Environment Protection Regulation 2005 which contains environmental standards for emissions and includes specific offences and penalties for breaches of the legislation.
The bill will simplify and modernise the objects of the act and enhance enforcement options such as the introduction of enforceable undertakings that are proportionate to the environmental harm. The amendments to the act will also introduce strict liability offence provisions for specific actions. This includes circumstances where a person has failed to implement or maintain appropriate pollution controls for an activity that has the potential to cause environmental harm.
The amendments to the act will further facilitate a proactive approach to protecting the environment through expansion of the definition of environmental harm to now include the concept of “likely” or “potential” to cause environmental harm, thereby providing an objective approach to determine the seriousness of the offence. This approach will bring the ACT in line with contemporary environment protection legislation throughout Australia, particularly New South Wales, within which the ACT is, of course, a key regional partner.
The amendments to the act will facilitate a proactive approach to protecting the environment through a number of modernisation changes, ensuring that the legislation remains responsive to the changing needs of our community.
The government has long recognised the importance of having contemporary laws that are effective and achieve their objectives whilst ensuring that the legislation remains responsive to the changing needs of our community. During 2012-13 the act and the regulation were reviewed as a proactive approach to ensure that the law remained contemporary and responsive to the changing needs of our community.
The amendments to the law include consideration of submissions received from the public and also from analysis of the general legislative framework for environment protection across various jurisdictions in Australia.
The comparative analysis with environment protection laws in other Australian jurisdictions showed that the ACT’s Environment Protection Act would benefit from amendments that will further support the effectiveness of the legislation and strengthen environmental safeguards to achieve good environmental outcomes.
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