Interview with Andrew Clennell, Sky News Sunday Agenda

ANDREW CLENNELL, HOST: Murray Watt, thanks for your time. I'm going to start on this Nauru issue.

MURRAY WATT, MINISTER FOR THE ENVIRONMENT AND WATER: Good morning Andrew, good to be with you.

ANDREW CLENNELL: I'm going to start on this Nauru issue. What's the Government's intention here? Is it to send all 200 or 300 NZYQ criminals to Nauru?

MURRAY WATT: Well, certainly, Andrew, this arrangement with Nauru now does provide the opportunity to remove numbers in the hundreds of the NZYQ cohort.  We need to remember that these are people who have no visa right to be in Australia, and for any functioning migration system has a principle which is that if you don't have a right to be in a country, then you can expect to be removed.

This cohort have already had access to judicial review, to merits review, to ministerial intervention, and really now that we have reached this arrangement with Nauru, it does allow for the removal of people who have no right to be in Australia.

ANDREW CLENNELL: Are you expecting smooth passage of the legislation around this from the Opposition, and how do we know it still doesn't get tied up in the courts, all these cases?

MURRAY WATT: Well, we would certainly, of course, expect support from the Opposition, but of course they'll need to work through their processes. We would like to get this legislation passed as quickly as we can, but we respect the fact that the Opposition needs time to get their heads around it and pursue questioning in the Parliament.

We also need to remember, I think, Andrew, that where this comes from, this whole NZYQ issue started with legislation passed by the former Coalition Government that was found to be unconstitutional by the High Court, so what we've had to do as the replacement government, the following government, is come up with legislation that does stand up in the courts.

We have been seeing some of the members of the NZYQ cohort challenge the legislation passed last year that would have enabled removal to Nauru, but that's on grounds like procedural fairness rather than the constitutional basis of that legislation. There hasn't been a constitutional challenge to the laws that we passed, which is very reassuring, and as I say, we would obviously like to see this legislation passed as soon as it can be.

ANDREW CLENNELL: Previously we've had the Howard Government and at the end the Rudd Government sending asylum seekers to Nauru to dissuade them from coming to Australia; the argument was you've got safe haven there. But this time you're basically dumping a bunch of crims on a poor country and paying them to take them. That's a fair summation, isn't it?

MURRAY WATT: I wouldn't put it that way, Andrew. The way I would describe it, as I did earlier, is that we're talking about a relatively small cohort of people who have no right to be in Australia. Australia has every right to remove people who have no right to be here. Nauru has agreed to accept a substantial number of the cohort that we're talking about, and we have agreed to provide payment to assist with management of that cohort.

You know, Nauru is an independent sovereign nation, it can make its own decisions about what it wants to do, and the fact that they have reached that agreement with Australia does solve this issue which has proved difficult for governments of both persuasions to deal with.

ANDREW CLENNELL: And you spoke before, as I did, about maybe a couple of hundred being sent there. If the legislation gets through, over what time period could that occur, do you think?

MURRAY WATT: Well, certainly it's not the intention to send the entire cohort in one group. The plan is to scale the number up and allow Nauru to put in place the systems that allow for the number to increase over time. So I couldn't give you an exact timeframe over which we would expect that entire cohort to move or even the sort of numbers that we're talking about this morning, but the idea is that it can be scaled up rather than being done in one hit.

ANDREW CLENNELL: I wanted to ask about the situation now with the knowledge of Iranian attacks on foreign soil. The Government, I understand, was briefed that this Iranian link was being investigated for some time. Given that, was it wise to announce you would recognise Palestine on August 11; was it wise for the PM to do that? Is there a contradiction there when Iran funds Hamas?

MURRAY WATT: Well, what the Prime Minister and others have said, Andrew, and I think the Director General of ASIO has confirmed, is that the Government was only briefed on Monday last week about the conclusion of ASIO that Iran had been directing at least some of these attacks, and an announcement was made the very next day by the Government with its decision to expel the Ambassador and make the other changes that were announced.

So I think that's pretty quick movement. I couldn't speak to what other sort of briefings had occurred before that, but I guess the point is that the moment that there was conclusive evidence from ASIO that Iran had been directing those attacks, we took action.

In terms of the recognition of Palestine, we see that as an entirely separate matter, again a number of Ministers are on the record saying that our decision to recognise Palestine is being done in conjunction with a range of other like minded countries, Canada, the UK, others as well, and we see it as an important step towards achieving peace in the Middle East.

So we see these things as entirely different, but what we're shown this week is that if we get evidence of other countries encouraging violent attacks in our country, then we will take action.

ANDREW CLENNELL: Is this enough punishment for Iran? They still have diplomatic staff here. We don't have any in Tehran, for example.

MURRAY WATT: Well, I guess, as you're aware, the reason we have removed our diplomatic staff from Tehran is really out of concern for their safety. As an employer we have to take seriously the safety of our employees, and the decision was that we couldn't guarantee their safety if they remained in Tehran, so that explains that decision.

But what we have done is remove, as you know, the Ambassador, first time that's occurred since World War II, that we've expelled an Ambassador from Australia and the other political staff. The reality is we need to be able to have some contact with Iran, and as you've mentioned yourself, there will be visa matters that the Iranian Embassy needs to consider. So that justifies, you know, not kicking out the entire staff of the Embassy.

But I might just repeat the point that Minister Wong has made that week, is that we absolutely discourage Australians from travelling to Iran. For some time now, it has had those sorts of warnings on the Smartraveller website, so I wouldn't be encouraging too many people to seek visas through the Iranian Embassy right now.

ANDREW CLENNELL: The Opposition has criticised you for not prescribing this Revolutionary Guard two years ago when they called on you to do so. Don't they have a point?

MURRAY WATT: No. I mean we've always said that we would act on security advice when dealing with these sorts of matters, Andrew, and as I say, within 24 hours of receiving the advice from ASIO that Iran were definitively behind some of these attacks, we've taken this action; expelling the Ambassador and saying that we will amend the law so that we can list the IRGC as a terrorist body.

As you would be aware, but your listeners may not be aware, we haven't been able under Australian law to list a body that is essentially an arm of another country's government. That will change now by amending this legislation, and of course I'd make the point that Andrew Hastie revealed in interviews this week that he and other Coalition members had pushed for the IRGC to be listed as a terrorist organisation when the Coalition Government were in power, and that didn't occur either. So

ANDREW CLENNELL: Amazing foresight

MURRAY WATT:  you know, I can't explain why the former government

ANDREW CLENNELL: amazing foresight Andrew Hastie and James Paterson seemed to have had that your government didn't have on this issue, Murray Watt.

MURRAY WATT: Well, I mean you could make the point that at least some of them had foresight when their own government was in power and that decision wasn't made.

But what I'm saying is that we've acted in accordance with security advice. This is a major step to amend the legislation to allow for the listing of a body attached to another government from overseas. That's what we've committed to do, and we've acted on the security advice.

ANDREW CLENNELL: I'm going to move to your portfolio in a minute. But do you have a reaction to the Trump Administration barring Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas from attending the UN General Assembly where the PM is set to recognise Palestine in a couple of weeks?

MURRAY WATT: Yeah, I did see that news break yesterday, Andrew, and look, we're not going to express judgment on another country's decisions about who it issues visas to, but it won't deter us from taking the stand that we have already made clear in saying that we will be recognising Palestine at that meeting a little bit later next month.

ANDREW CLENNELL: All right. Let's talk about your job, and this big job you have to deliver, new environmental legislation, revising it from Robert Hill's old bill 25 years ago.

One of the key aspects is this Federal Environmental Protection Agency. Why do we need a Federal EPA?

MURRAY WATT: So more broadly, Andrew, the way we're approaching these reforms is very much in the spirit of Graeme Samuel's Review that was handed down about five years ago when Sussan Ley in fact was the Federal Environment Minister, and what he recommended was that we needed a significant overhaul of these laws, that they weren't working for the environment, they weren't working for business, and what we needed was stronger environmental protections, quicker and more efficient approval processes for business, and thirdly, and relevant here, is greater transparency around the decisions that are made around environmental approvals.

We've gone to two elections saying that we would deliver a federal EPA as the way of providing that kind of transparency and confidence in the system and in the decisions that are being made. I think unfortunately at the moment the system that we have doesn't have a huge amount of confidence in the decisions that are made about the environment. So having a stand alone Federal EPA, we believe, will deliver that confidence and the transparency that people are looking for.

ANDREW CLENNELL: Except you're talking about less red tape. Doesn't this creating a new agency cause more green tape?

MURRAY WATT: No, I don't think so, Andrew. And I think what you'll find in practice is that some of the personnel who currently sit within the Department of Climate Change and Environment would move across to a Federal EPA, but they'd be approaching the role in a different way.

And the other point about a Federal EPA is that it does allow for much stronger compliance and enforcement activities than what we see at the moment. I think most people acknowledge that there isn't a strong enough approach to those who break our environmental laws and don't comply with the conditions of their approvals, and having a tough cop on the beat like a Federal EPA would enable that to happen.

ANDREW CLENNELL: I mean the sell from your government is this will speed approvals up, but it sounds like it might slow things down for business.

MURRAY WATT: No, we wouldn't see it that way, Andrew, and I guess that goes to the second of those three pillars that I was talking about; having quicker and more efficient approvals processes. One of the key ways that we want to achieve that is by reducing duplication of the assessment and approvals processes that occurs at the moment where you have the states undertake lengthy assessment and approvals processes only to be followed by the Federal Government doing their own assessments and approvals.

We think there is a really big opportunity to reduce that duplication, which would in our minds reduce the approval timeframes from a decade to years, or years to months.

The other thing that we want to do is make sure that the new system does enable much faster yeses and faster nos by giving really clear guidance to companies before they put applications in about whether the area that they're looking to develop is likely to attract significant concerns from an environmental point of view, and therefore, take more time, or if we can more clearly define the kind of areas where the environmental issues are so significant that development just should not happen, then that saves everyone the time and bother and expense of even bothering with an application in the first place.

ANDREW CLENNELL: So just to the start of your answer, this is partly about overriding the state environmental approval processes, replacing them?

MURRAY WATT: No, I wouldn't put it that way, Andrew. In fact what's more likely to be the case is that we would more often accept state processes, state assessment and approval processes rather than having to do our own, but the other key part of that is that in doing so we would be looking to apply National Environmental Standards, setting our expectations of what needs to be achieved in a project approval and assessment, because the sorts of things the Federal Government regulate for in the environment are matters of national environmental significance, things like world heritage sites or the Great Barrier Reef, or threatened species, quite different to what states assess for, and what we want to do is line up the types of issues that states have to consider when they're doing assessments and approvals; it's not about the Federal Government overriding the states.

ANDREW CLENNELL: Can you confirm that under your model the Minister will be the final decisionmaker on projects, not the EPA?

MURRAY WATT: It's probably a little bit early to be expressing a final view on that, Andrew. That is one of the points that we're consulting on at the moment, and it won't surprise you to hear that there are different views amongst the stakeholders about this.

To speak generally, industry groups do want Ministers to be able to still have decision making powers, environmentalists generally speaking want those sorts of decisions to be made exclusively by an EPA.

You know, I think that there are some options in the middle as well where some powers are held independently by an EPA and other Ministers still have an opportunity to be involved in, but they're the kind of issues we're consulting on at the moment, and obviously I'll need to go to Cabinet with a position on that.

ANDREW CLENNELL: Briefly, can you give me an example of what benefit this new approvals process will have? In other words, can you think of projects that would have got approved quicker through this process than the current process?

MURRAY WATT: Yeah, I can, Andrew, and in fact I can probably give you two examples; one where we could have had a quicker yes and one where we could have had a quicker no. You may have seen recently I approved a large residential development around and right next door to the Queen Victoria Markets in Melbourne. There's a lot of development around those markets that's occurred over the last five years, but there was a particular development that was put to us that potentially had some heritage impacts on the Queen Victoria Markets.

It had to go through a lengthy Victorian Government process before then having a process with us. If we can remove that duplication, that could have enabled that project to be approved substantially sooner than it was. It involves 2,200 dwellings that can accommodate over 3,000 people in Melbourne, and at a time when we need more housing, speeding up those kind of processes could have delivered that project sooner.

The faster no example I can give you is a project from my state, Toondah Harbour. It was a proposed residential development that was going to involve building apartments in the middle of an internationally recognised wetland that had international protection. It should have been clear to everyone that that kind of development just would never have been approved in the way it was being proposed, and the proponent could have got a much quicker no to that project, saving them time and money as well.

So they're just two I can think of where we could have had a quicker yes or a quicker no, and that's exactly the kind of outcomes that we want to have under these reforms, while of course making sure we strengthen our environmental protections as well.

ANDREW CLENNELL: Who are you hoping to get to help you pass this through the Senate; the Coalition or Greens?

MURRAY WATT: Well, I've said before, Andrew, that we are open to working with either the Coalition or the Greens. You know, what we are seeing is a broad Coalition of support for these reforms emerge between mining and other business groups and environmentalists as well.

You know, there are some issues that they disagree on, not surprisingly, but something that they agree on is that our laws as they stand are broken.

Now I would have thought that Sussan Ley, as the Environment Minister who brought down Samuel's review a few years ago, might be interested in supporting reforms that started under her watch. It's a great opportunity for her to demonstrate that she is trying to move the Liberal Party more towards the centre on these sorts of issues.

And of course from the Greens' point of view, I would like to think that they've learned the lesson at the last election, where if they continually block Labor's attempts to make reforms in areas like the environment, then they'll pay an electoral price for doing so.

So I think there's really strong incentives for both the Coalition and the Greens to support this bill, and we'll keep working with them closely once the Parliament considers the legislation.

ANDREW CLENNELL: But I assume you're not going to consider a climate trigger that the Greens want in there?

MURRAY WATT: Well, what I've said is that, you know, we're not ruling things in and things out at this point in time, but what we do need to recognise is that Graeme Samuel gave a pretty clear recommendation in his report that a climate trigger shouldn't be adopted.

Of course we want to be reducing our emissions, including from these big industrial projects, when they're seeking approvals, but that's why we've got things like the Safeguard Mechanism in place, which is requiring things like coal mines, smelters, other big industrial activity to reduce their emissions every single year.

So our preference is to rely on those kind of climate measures to reduce emissions

ANDREW CLENNELL: All right.

MURRAY WATT: from these sorts of projects rather than duplicating in these laws as well.

ANDREW CLENNELL: I was told last week by someone in government that the prospect of securing the COP Climate Conference in Adelaide next year is looking doubtful, it's on thin ice. Would you agree with that assessment?

MURRAY WATT: I wouldn't put it that way, Andrew. I know Chris Bowen in particular is working overtime to secure this for Australia, and we still consider it would be a really great opportunity for Australia to host that.

Unfortunately we haven't yet seen Turkiye withdraw its bid despite the fact that I don't think there's a single other country around the world who supports their bid, whereas Australia has huge support, particularly given we are looking to host this bid in conjunction with countries in the Pacific as well.

So I wouldn't put it that way, and we're going to keep fighting to host it.

ANDREW CLENNELL: Does Turkey have to withdraw for you to get it? Is that the rule?

MURRAY WATT: Yeah, that's pretty much how it works, Andrew. Basically the COP that we're bidding for is to be hosted by the Western Europe and others group, which we are part of, as is Turkiye, but the decision is made by consensus among that group, and unfortunately sometimes when decisions need to be reached by consensus, you can't get a decision quickly. But we'll keep fighting for it.

ANDREW CLENNELL: On Friday it was announced you'd given approval to a large wind farm project on Robbins Island in North West Tasmania. The Government says it will give power to 422,000 homes. This has been opposed by Greens icon Bob Brown amongst others. Are you expecting large scale protests here?

MURRAY WATT: Oh, look, Bob Brown has talked a big game about that, but it wouldn't be the first time that people from the Greens Party over egg things. Going into the last Federal Election they were going to win a whole bunch of seats across Australia, and what do you know, they actually went backwards.

So it's a matter for Bob Brown what he wants to do protest wise, and it's not exactly the first renewable power development or other development in Tasmania that he's opposed.

You know, we're very confident that in making this decision we've got the balance right. We do need more renewable power like this to be able to reduce our emissions and to provide a better environment for the kind of species that people care about.

But at the same time we've applied really strong environmental conditions, 88 conditions in total have been attached to this approval, including a range of extra conditions that weren't imposed by the Tasmanian Government.

So what we think is that you can have renewable power developments like this, providing cheaper, cleaner energy, helping the environment, but at the same time manage the kind of environmental impacts that could arise. And that's the balance that we think we've struck here.

ANDREW CLENNELL: Finally, speaking on protests, Murray Watt, there's a March for Australia protest on in Sydney today with a Refugee Action Coalition protest set to counter it. Do you have any comment concerning any fears around these protests occurring?

MURRAY WATT: Well, you will have seen, like other government figures, we absolutely condemn the March for Australia rally that's going on today. It is not about increasing social harmony. We think, and I think the vast majority of Australians think that multiculturalism has been a good thing for our country. We don't support rallies like this that are about spreading hate and that are about dividing our community.

I sincerely hope that there's no trouble that arises from these events today, but the fact that this is being organised and promoted by Neo Nazi groups tells us everything we need to know about the level of hatred and division that these kind of rallies are about.

ANDREW CLENNELL: Murray Watt, thanks so much for your time.

MURRAY WATT: Thanks Andrew.