SWITCHED-ON REPORT, SWITCHED-OFF CLIENT

Once in each decade, Australia’s national environmental law, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act) is subject to comprehensive independent review.

Although commissioned by government, these reviews are required by law, which can leave the government, and certainly the current government, as something of a reluctant ‘client’.

As the EPBC Act is 20 years old, there have been two such reviews. The first review, by former Defence Department head Dr Allan Hawke, was received with enthusiasm by environment Minister Peter Garrett in 2009, but later drowned in the turbulent waters of the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd years and sank almost without trace.

The second review, by Professor Graeme Samuel, a lawyer, business person and former competition regulator, was handed to the Morrison government in October 2020 and earlier this year yielded an announcement which appears to adopt several of Samuel’s key reforms.

All is not what it seems however. The proposed reforms to this major piece of legislation, which had already been brought to its regulatory knees by swingeing budget cuts, are in my view but a fig leaf for the Government’s primary agenda, which is to get the federal government out of the business of environmental impact assessment and development decisions (EIA for short), after some 47 years of operating in this space.

The EPBC Act and its Antecedents

It was the Whitlam government that got the Commonwealth into EIA, passing Australia’s first EIA law in 1974. Two