Albanese strikes deal with the Greens to pass environment protection bill

The Albanese government has secured a historic deal with the Greens to pass major reforms to national environment laws.

Not since Bob Hawke’s 1983 intervention to save the Franklin River from being dammed has a Labor government enacted reforms to increase the federal government’s power over state governments.

The reforms to the Environment Protection Biodiversity Conservation Act were led by Minister Murray Watt, who delivered on the instructions from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to gain the necessary support of either the Greens or Coalition to enact the legislation in the Senate by the end of the year.

Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations Murray Watt and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese during the election campaign in April. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Watt offered competing deals to the Greens and opposition, as he sought support from either side to create new laws in the Senate before the end of the year.

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Concessions offered to the opposition addressed business groups’ demands, such as ensuring a new environment watchdog agency can only act under the instructions of a minister.

But Watt also offered amendments to the Greens that would stop coal and gas projects being fast-tracked through environmental assessments.

Labor’s deal with the Greens comes despite the lobbying of the powerful resources sector, which had pleaded with the Coalition to cooperate with government to secure a more business-friendly reform.

This is a major rebalancing of traditional power structures, given the previous deal with the Greens was sunk by Albanese after a backlash from the WA mining lobby.

Former PM John Howard created the EPBC Act in 2000 and since then nearly every federal government has attempted to reform it, over concerns it failed to address Australia’s ailing ecosystems.

Since colonisation, about 100 of Australia’s unique flora and fauna species have been wiped out, with more unrecorded and unknown losses of invertebrates to boot. The rate of loss, as significant as anywhere on Earth, has not slowed over the past 200 years.

Watt’s reforms draw on the 2020 Samuel Review, which recommended sweeping changes to protect nature from spiralling losses.

A centrepiece of the reform is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which it said would bolster nature protections with an independent eye on development decisions and regulation enforcement.

It delivers Albanese’s overdue election commitment for a new national watchdog agency as well as “streamlined assessments” to speed up assessment of major projects like housing and renewable energy.

The reforms will also include tougher rules for land clearing, a leading cause of extinctions, carves out the proposed fast tracking of mining projects and new rules for emissions reporting on big polluting companies.

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It also establishes powers for the government to create the first set of national standards on the environment, with legally enforceable rules to protect endangered wildlife and ensure ecologically sustainable development. This will include strong guidelines like an “unacceptable impacts” test to rule out significant harm from major projects, but the full suite of rules are yet to be written.

Former Labor Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek last year nearly cut a deal with the Greens to to create an EPA, but the PM made a last-minute intervention to scupper her deal.

Plibersek had agreed to terms with her Greens counterpart Sarah Hanson-Young but Albanese, siding with WA Labor premier Roger Cook, ruled out any concessions in a move that disappointed Labor’s large base of environmentally minded grassroots members.

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