Interview with Sally Sara, ABC Radio National

SALLY SARA, HOST: Well, a long-awaited overhaul of federal environment laws passed the Senate yesterday after the government struck a deal with the Greens. The bill is expected to be approved in the House of Representatives this morning. Murray Watt is the Minister for Environment and Water and joins now. Minister, welcome back to Breakfast.

MURRAY WATT, MINISTER FOR THE ENVIRONMENT AND WATER: G'day Sally, twice in a week, I'm a lucky man.

SALLY SARA: There you go. You made it quite clear, Minister, that you wanted this legislation to pass the Parliament this year. Do you believe that the urgency has delivered the best outcome?

MURRAY WATT: Yes, I do, Sally. As I've said many times, there's simply no more time to wait to get these reforms passed. It's now more than five years since Graeme Samuel produced his review and recommendations for overhauling these laws. And remember, he said in his report that the current law was fundamentally broken, that it was failing the environment, failing business, failing the community and we had to get moving. You can't keep waiting and putting off something in search of perfection. And what you will have seen yesterday is that a very wide range of stakeholders in the business community, in the environment sector, have acknowledged that this is a good step forward.

So I think it would have been a mistake to keep kicking the can down the road on these reforms. And I'm very pleased that we've been able to pass it through the Senate. And obviously, we'll be able to pass it through the House of Representatives today, and it will be the law.

SALLY SARA: But not all business groups and industry are happy, to be fair. What immediate impact will this have on the development pipeline? How much faster, for example, will new homes, renewable projects and other important infrastructure be built?

MURRAY WATT: Well, I think, and I accept that not everyone is universally supportive of exactly the model we've put forward. And as I say, I don't think you ever make a big change like this, where 100 per cent of people are 100 per cent happy. But what you will have seen yesterday is positive comments from the housing sector, the renewable sector. I heard Innes Willox from the AI Group on your program earlier, broadly positive about this. The biggest changes that we'll see in terms of the development pipeline and processes is a real streamlining of those processes and removing some of the duplication that currently sits in the system where proponents of projects have very often got to get a state assessment and approval followed by a federal assessment and approval, which simply drag the process out in some cases for years.

So, I don't want to pretend that we're going to see an overnight change with every single project approved in two days and the system shouldn't do it that way because we do need to monitor environmental impacts. But what we expect in the short to medium term is a much quicker process for considering what the environmental impacts of projects and working towards getting them approved where appropriate as quickly as we can.

SALLY SARA: Minister, Bran Black from the Business Council of Australia says while significant changes have been made to the unacceptable impacts provision, there is concern that there's still ambiguity and risk which may shut out projects before a proper assessment. What do you say to that?

MURRAY WATT: Look, I understand that some of the large business groups might have liked to have seen further changes, but one of the conditions of the agreement we reached with the Greens was not only that we accept amendments that they were seeking, but that they accept amendments that we were seeking. And some of those were key concerns for the business community. We were able to make amendments to the definition of what is an unacceptable impact on the environment and they were issues the business community had raised with us and we convinced the Greens to accept those.

Similarly, the business community was concerned about things like the open-ended nature of stop work orders under the new legislation. We got the Greens to agree to put some time limits around those kind of things. And what that means is that we have ended up at that balanced package that I've been talking about for months, where we've actually delivered wins for both the environment and for business. It's never been about one or the other, and we've been able to achieve both.

SALLY SARA: Minister, the Opposition Leader Sussan Ley says that these reforms will, quote, put energy prices up because you gave the Greens what they wanted. Will these reforms put up power prices?

MURRAY WATT: No, they won't. And if anything, they will assist with getting energy projects online more quickly, which will help with the supply of energy. Now, I'm not going to make promises about what that means for bringing power prices down. But obviously, if we can have more supply in the system more quickly, then that is going to help moderate prices when it comes to energy. And I'm afraid Sussan Ley has got to just accept the fact that her own side of politics was completely incapable of reaching a deal with us. I've lost count of the number of meetings, phone conversations I've had with numerous Coalition frontbenchers, not just one, trying to work out some sort of arrangement with the Coalition, but in the end, they just couldn't be clear with us about exactly what they wanted. So, they've got no-one to blame but themselves if they're unhappy about a deal being struck with the Greens.

SALLY SARA: Minister, the latest forecasts from the Climate Change Authority show Australia is on track to reduce emissions by 48 per cent by 2035. That is well below the 62 to 70 per cent target range set by the federal government. The authority says you clearly need to make radical changes to hit the targets. What are you going to do?

MURRAY WATT: Look, we acknowledge that there's still a lot more work to be done in this space, Sally, and Chris Bowen is doing a power of work to drive a range of policies across government that are already seeing us, I think the most recent figures were a 2.2 per cent reduction in our emissions, so we are making progress. We're on track to hit 42 per cent by 2030, just shy of our 43 per cent target. But we do need to do more in order to reach those new targets. And as we said at the time, they are ambitious but achievable targets. To bring it back to these environment reforms, you know, if we can be getting renewable energy projects in the ground operating more quickly as a result of these that the parliament's passing, that will help achieve those emissions reductions targets.

But we know there's more to be done, whether it be about vehicle emissions. You know, the changes that we've introduced regarding agricultural land clearing in these reforms, they will help to bring down our emissions as well. But we know there's more to be done, but there's no-one more committed to the task than Chris Bowen and the Albanese Government.

SALLY SARA: The National Farmers' Federation says it's very concerned by the announcement of closer controls on high-risk land clearing, saying that the specifics are unclear. Can you provide any clarity to the farmers?

MURRAY WATT: Yeah, sure. This didn't get a huge amount of media coverage yesterday, Sally, so it is worth me just quickly stepping you through it. The issue that we've dealt with here is that under the current EPBC Act, agricultural land clearing in most situations is exempt from the EPBC Act. So farmers are currently able to clear agricultural land, even if it has a significant impact on threatened species or other protected matters, without needing any assessment or approval under the EPBC Act. Now, that's different to every other industry. If mining companies, if renewable companies, if housing developers want to clear land in a way that's going to have a significant impact on the environment, they need to get an EPBC assessment and approval. And what we've done is remove the current exemption for that agricultural land clearing to bring it in line with other industries. If we're talking about land clearing of regrowth, so land that's previously been cleared and has grown back, regrowth that's been there for 15 years or more. And equally, we're also lifting the exemption for land clearing that is within 50 metres of rivers or creeks in the Great Barrier Reef catchment.

And the reason for the second one to do with the Reef is that we know that one of the major impacts on the Great Barrier Reef is sediment runoff that occurs when trees are cleared very close to rivers and creeks in the catchment. So this will assist to reduce that sediment runoff. And what it really comes down to, and it's very similar for the changes that we've made to forestry as well, is that those two industries have not had to follow the same rules as every other industry and now they will, which I think is only fair.

SALLY SARA: Murray Watt, we'll need to leave it there. Thank you for your time this morning.

MURRAY WATT: Thanks, Sally.