Page 3014 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 23 September 2014
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approval, and in that process the commonwealth government said it was not acceptable to impact that habitat in that way and that the road needed to be moved. It turned out that the road could be moved. A new alignment was found and the damage was significantly reduced through simply that act of commonwealth intervention.
That highlights the importance, particularly in the ACT, where so often the local government is the proponent, of having a level of oversight from somebody who does not have a direct interest in the project.
The ACT Greens do not want to see a situation where that oversight may not have been available. As a result of the parliamentary agreement, the ACT will be the only jurisdiction to defy the Abbott government’s attempt to remove the commonwealth from its obligation to oversee proposals that may affect matters of national environmental significance.
The assessment aspect of this has already been in place in the ACT for a number of years, and we just finalised our second assessment bilateral agreement in June this year. The assessment agreement is somewhat like a mutual recognition agreement, which first aligns the needs of the environmental matters to be assessed, and then allows an environmental impact statement, or a strategic environmental assessment that has been written to meet the ACT’s planning and environment assessment systems, to also meet the needs of the federal environmental assessment system. This makes sense. An environmental assessment report is the same. There is no need to duplicate that assessment process, and I do support that part of the process whereby information that has been prepared can be used for the different steps in the environmental assessment. That is quite appropriate.
However, it is the approvals bilateral agreement for matters of national environmental significance that we are discussing today. This is the proposal to allow an environmental approval made by a state jurisdiction to also be ticked off as a federal environmental approval. This is not a simple process, as it requires the state processes to encompass the federal environmental approval requirements, and for that state process to be accredited by the federal environment department.
Gaining a national perspective on environmental values was a long and hard-fought battle, probably most notably through the commonwealth’s first national environmental inquiry into sandmining on Fraser Island in the mid-1970s; and, perhaps even better known, the fight in 1983 to save the Franklin River from being dammed, culminating in a High Court challenge from the federal government, who won the right for the federal government to overrule a state government on environmental protection matters, particularly in relation to wilderness and world heritage of national value—and of course, in that case, of international significance.
These were key turning points that demonstrated to all Australians that state governments could not always be trusted on the environment and that some places needed national protection. It was recognition of the fact that some areas were so significant, both nationally and internationally, that local interests, the pressure from local developers and the pressure from donors to local or state governments meant
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