D-day looms for nature overhaul but final deal elusive
Zac de Silva and Dominic Giannini |
Major reforms aimed at better protecting the environment and speeding up the approvals of crucial projects hang in the balance as the government races to strike a deal on the overhaul before Christmas.
Environment Minister Murray Watt says he has offered concessions to both the coalition and the Greens in a bid to win their support in the final parliamentary sitting week of the year.
Labor wants to pass the legislation this year, and has just four days of parliamentary sitting to strike a deal.
The government doesn’t have the numbers in the Senate to pass the bill on its own.
In the hope of winning over the Greens, Senator Watt said he was prepared to impose tougher regulations on native forest logging, and scrap a provision which could’ve allowed coal and gas projects to bypass the main approval process if they were deemed to be in the national interest.
Senator Watt said he’d also offered concessions to the opposition, which has been calling for a number of pro-business changes.
“We are prepared to make some changes, as long as they deliver to both the environment and to business,” he told reporters in Brisbane.
While some states have banned the logging of native forests, in others the practice is still allowed and exempt from regulation under federal environment laws.
Greens environment spokeswoman Sarah Hanson-Young said it was good Labor was negotiating but more detail was needed.
“We haven’t seen any detailed amendments from the government or any anything that kind of spells out exactly how this would work,” she told the ABC’s Insiders program.
Senator Hanson-Young also questioned Labor’s suggestion of a three-year transition period for the new forestry rules, saying urgent protection was needed for native forests.
Senator Watt said he’d met with representatives from both the coalition and the Greens on Saturday and remained open to working with either party.
Opposition Leader Sussan Ley has indicated she’s open to passing the reforms in the coming days, on the condition a number of changes are made.
The coalition wants to axe reporting of a project’s carbon emissions, reduce fines and keep decision-making powers within the government’s environment department.
But that has raised concerns a future minister could use their powers to tick and flick environmentally damaging projects – a possibility the Greens have leveraged in their attack on the proposals.
Labor’s laws would allow the agency to halt projects if it believed environmental destruction was imminent, but the coalition warned this provision was too broad.
AAP
