Page 3013 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 23 September 2014
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The bill requires the planning authority to keep an electronic public record of all offsets in the territory. It should also be noted that offsets should never be used to justify development that would otherwise not be appropriate.
In conclusion, the opposition will be supporting the adjournment of this bill in the in-principle stage. As I have frequently said in this place, planning systems should encourage innovation rather than stifling development. However, there are many questions with this bill today that need to be addressed; Ms Lawder, I believe, will be speaking further to this shortly.
I hope that the amendments included in this bill and the commonwealth government one-stop shop policy remove some of the hurdles that are currently in place in the system and do so in a reasonable way. It is important that the approvals process is thorough, but it should not be so onerous that it delays projects unnecessarily. As I said, the opposition supports the adjournment of this bill.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (10.27): This bill is a key part of the implementation of the federal one-stop shop for Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act environmental approvals in the ACT. The Greens, both locally and nationally, are opposed to the move towards a one-stop shop for approvals in principle.
This process was started under the Rudd Labor government and has been continued with great vigour by the Abbott government, which seems intent on watering down the role of the commonwealth under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, the EPBC Act. It is certainly not the best piece of environmental legislation, but it does deliver a minimum level of national environmental protection for our biodiversity, and we cannot afford for it to go backwards. Members may not know it, but I was involved way back in the 1990s when John Howard and Robert Hill, as the then environment minister, sought to push this through the federal parliament. I stated my strong opposition to the EPBC Act at that time because I felt that it was not moving it forward from an environmental protection point of view. Further efforts to water this legislation down and to move away from a federal role in environmental protection simply reinforce the misgivings that we had on this issue in the late 1990s.
We need the federal government to continue to apply their bigger picture perspective to environmental approvals, noting that states do not always have the broader interests at the centre of their decision-making. Often state and territory governments are actually the developer, or have an interest in seeing a development go ahead, and are not best placed to be the decision-maker when it comes to protecting nationally significant environments, habitats and species.
For example, without the EPBC Act the Stanhope Labor government would have likely proceeded with building the road over the Molonglo River in the new Molonglo development, through an area that was endangered species habitat in the Molonglo development. This was an important habitat area for the pink-tailed worm-lizard; at the time, we were told that there was no option but to build the bridge in that place. Fortunately, the matter was required to go to the commonwealth government for their
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