Kate Chaney
Curtin · Independent · Australia
“Digital platforms will have a legal responsibility to prevent harm, but the design of this commitment matters enormously, and I want to flag three things that the government must get right. First, there must be a single overarching duty.”
“The government gave stakeholders representing millions of Australians affected by gambling harm a single 45-minute consultation session on the exposure draft, with written submissions due the next day. Emeritus Professor Mike Daube, who took part in that session, described it afterwards as a charade.”
“A doctor who uses the phone, internet, fax, email or video conferencing to provide lawful VAD care risks prosecution and fines greater than $300,000. This means seriously ill patients must attend every consultation in person, travelling long distances while gravely unwell, often more than once, to make and confirm their request.”
“I rise to present a petition signed by more than 13,000 Australians. The petition has been considered by the Petitions Committee and found to be in order. It calls on this House to amend the Criminal Code Act so that it no longer applies to voluntary assisted dying, VAD.”
“She lived in one half of a single house divided into two separate dwellings. She got on well with the quiet single working man next door. This particular morning she was devastated and in shock. The man had hung himself in the shed where she found him, and left a note listing all the people he owed money to including the amounts.”
“No avenue to call up customer service at these companies and request this person be denied an account. Our nightmare never ends. There's nowhere to help us. The only option presented seems to dissolve the marriage and the family.”
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“The 2013 Hawke review, the 2015 Shergold review, the 2019 Thodey review and the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee inquiry in 2023 all called for a comprehensive independent review of the entire FOI Act. It's important to note that none of these listed reviews performed a comprehensive review of the FOI system, so this would not be duplicative. Instead, every previous review that has at least partially looked at the FOI system has pointed out its complexities and the importance of it actually getting a comprehensive assessment. The reason we need a broader independent review of the act, as opposed to just a committee inquiry into this bill, is that this bill only addresses the problems that are solved by less transparency. This is, at best, half of the problem.”
“Timing of review (2) The persons conducting the review must complete the review before the end of the period of 6 months beginning on the day this section commences. (3) The persons conducting the review must give the Minister a written report of the review as soon as possible after the review is completed. Minister to table copy of report of review (4) The Minister must cause a copy of the report of the review to be tabled in each House of the Parliament within 15 sitting days of that House after the Minister receives the report. These amendments would ensure that there is a broad review of the Freedom of Information Act before this bill comes into force. A broad review is the only thing that all previous reviews have agreed on.”
“(3) Page 3 (after line 2), after clause 3, insert: 4 Review of operation of Freedom of Information Act 1982 (1) The Minister must cause an independent review to be conducted of the Freedom of Information Act 1982 , with terms of reference to provide recommendations on how best to: (a) encourage greater proactive disclosure of information to the public, and thus reduce the need for formal FOI requests; and (b) maximise accessibility, transparency and efficiency for genuine and lawful FOI requests, including through setting an appropriate fee structure; and (c) improve the timeliness of dealing with FOI requests, including review processes; and (d) ensure that exemptions to disclosure requirements do not go further than is required for good government; and (e) create a robust system for the resourcing, training, auditing, and oversight of authorised officers responsible for FOI decisions; and (f) manage vexatious and frivolous requests; and (g) address the potential impact of artificial intelligence, both to improve FOI processing and to mitigate the impact of its use in generating vexatious and frivolous requests; and (h) provide structural support for public servants to provide frank, honest, timely and evidence-based advice.”
“by leave—I move amendments (1) to (3) as circulated in my name together: (1) Clause 2, page 2 (table item 1), omit "Sections 1 to 3", substitute "Sections 1 to 4". (2) Clause 2, page 2 (after line 3), after subclause (1), insert: (1A) The Minister must not advise the Governor-General to make a Proclamation for the purposes of item 2 or 3 of the table until after the Minister has tabled a copy of the review of the Freedom of Information Act 1982 in accordance with subsection 4(4).”
“One of the things put forward by the government in explaining the need for this bill is that there are 500 full-time equivalent public servants filling FOI requests. That sounds like a lot, 500 people. But is this really too many? If we are thinking about balance, do we have that balance? There are 213,000 federal public servants and 500 of them are focused on making sure that government decisions are transparent—that is, 0.2 per cent of the public service focused on public accountability. I think that this concept of introducing factors that count against a greater disclosure is completely the wrong way for the legislation to be headed in, and I thank the member for Mackellar for her amendment.”
“Adding more exemptions to what can be disclosed is not in the spirit of the legislation as it was originally intended. It might be painful for government to actually have to be transparent in its decision-making, and I recognise that, but it is a small amount of pain to bear for a system of democracy that actually retains the trust of the people. This part of the bill that the member for Mackellar is seeking to amend was going to introduce new factors to be considered that would say 'let's keep this secret'. But let's think about the concept of balance and whether balance is an appropriate thing to be looking for in this bill. We are balancing transparency for the benefit of the public versus a bit of inconvenience for public servants.”
“I rise to support the member for Mackellar's amendment. FOI is a fundamental tool of accountability in our democracy and the default option should be disclosure. Adding more factors that count against disclosure is heading in the wrong direction to where the whole framework should be heading. FOI was developed in 1982 with a clear purpose to open up government, to shift that default from secrecy to transparency and to ensure that decisions made in the name of the public are actually visible to the public. It has generally worked. It ensures that the public find out what the government is doing, it exposes corruption and waste, and it allows the public to participate in government decision-making and exercise some power as citizens.”
“Many experts would say that frank and fearless advice is far more likely to be protected by protecting the tenure of those public servants and ensuring that they are able to speak up without fear for their jobs than by avoiding the fear that someone might find out what they have said. In fact, they might feel more comfortable if they know that they can give advice. Ultimately—it may be one or two inquiries down the track—that advice will become known, and the public will know that they did their best. I will be supporting this amendment. I think the expansion of cabinet exemptions is absolutely heading in the wrong direction. We need greater transparency. The way to rebuild trust in government is for people to understand what decisions government are making and why they are making them.”
“The commissioner says that raises the real question of whether the protection of cabinet documents as a class of disclosure ought to be maintained or whether when access is sought, disclosure should be given unless there is a specific public interest in maintaining its confidentiality. One of the things I'd like to add to that is that I'm unclear as to how this will actually increase frank and fearless advice anyway. If you move from a dominant-purpose test to a substantial-purpose test, I'm not convinced that that actually would make a significant difference in a public servant's decision about what to say to cabinet.”
“I would like to just reiterate the issue that has come out of the robodebt royal commission and that is being ignored here. The excuse being used is that public servants will be more likely to give frank and fearless advice. In the robodebt royal commission, one of the quotes from Commissioner Holmes was this: Nothing I have seen in ministerial briefs or material put to Cabinet suggests any tendency to give full and frank advice that might be impaired by the possibility of disclosure … The commissioner goes on to say that, had there not been the exemption from freedom of information, the activity would have been uncovered earlier and dealt with much more effectively.”
“Had the government consulted more widely than with just public servants, had it consulted with some of the journalists who use the FOI process to hold government to account, I think that it would have heard more about the impact of fees on public accountability. I think, then, the government would be much happier to support this amendments and make sure that we are not creating extra barriers for the public to find out what decisions government is making and why it's make those decisions.”
“I rise to support the member for Indi's amendments. I think it is worth pointing out that the 2013 Hawke review explicitly recommended no application fees. This is the same review that the government is repeatedly referring to as back-up for other changes in the bill to show they have actually been supported previously. This is just another example of previous comments about the FOI legislation being cherry-picked, all in one direction and all towards making it harder for the public to access information. It may be that fees would prevent bad-faith actors from introducing large volumes of requests, but it is also likely to deter public interest journalism.”
“It's grown into a $24 billion fund yet it disperses only around $650 million each year, which is far less than originally intended. The coalition, when it created the MRFF, envisioned spending a billion dollars a year once the fund reached maturity at $20 billion. We have passed the milestone, and that's why I'm here backing the call from the member for Kooyong to increase disbursements to a billion dollars a year. It's time to unlock the potential of the MRFF to back researchers in Curtin and across Australia who are working every day to change lives.”
“Alzheimer's Research Australia, based in Curtin, is continuing the fight against Alzheimer's through groundbreaking work on how we can slow cognitive decline. But despite their incredible work, they have only received limited funds from the MRFF simply because of the cap on MRFF spending. More broadly, researchers in Curtin have had products rated highly by the MRFF but turned down simply because of the funding cap. This includes research into rare childhood diseases, Indigenous children's health, diabetes, heart disease detection and cancer therapy. These are exactly the kinds of projects the MRFF was created to support. Get this: the funding cap is arbitrary. The MRFF was established with bipartisan support to provide a sustainable funding stream for life-changing medical research.”
“Continued investment in medical research is vital to saving and improving lives. I'm proud to represent a community, Curtin, that punches well above its weight in medical research. Curtin is home to the University of Western Australia, the Harry Perkins Institute for Medical Research, the Parent Institute, the Kids Research Institute, the Raine Medical Research Foundation, the Ear Science Institute, the Lions Eye Institute and a number of other medical research institutions. WA has been responsible for seven of the 17 Australian drugs that have been approved by the US FDA but we only receive four per cent of federal medical research funding. It was researchers in Curtin who first identified the toxic amyloid beta protein that causes Alzheimer's disease, which affects 30 per cent of older Australians.”
“I rise today to call for an increase in funding for the Medical Research Future Fund for Australian and medical research. The Canadian psychologist Stephen Pinker described his favourite sentence in the whole English language. It was the start of a Wikipedia page that read 'smallpox was an infectious disease'—was. A disease that caused millions of deaths has been completely eradicated. Medical research is one of humanity's greatest success stories. Over the past few centuries we developed antibiotics, vaccines and public health systems that have transformed our lives. Life expectancy has soared and infant mortality has fallen. But there is still so much more to do. Every family in Australia has been touched by illness, by cancer, dementia, diabetes or rare genetic conditions.”
“Secondly, Commonwealth rent assistance is also calculated on income, compounding the financial disadvantage for providers to house homeless youth. Thirdly, youth housing projects struggle to compete for funding under the Housing Australia Future Fund, making them rare and underresourced. If we want to give young people a fair chance at housing, we need to fix these problems. The minister has informed me that the government is reviewing the issue, but that's not good enough for the kids that are currently sleeping rough. We must act now to remove the penalty and give our kids a chance.”
“Youth homelessness is a crisis across Australia. Nearly 40,000 children and young people aged 15 to 24 are alone and homeless every year. I'll just let that sink in—40,000 kids with no parental support nor a roof over their heads. This crisis is growing. I recently met with delegates from Home Time, a national campaign advocating to fix this crisis. They alerted me to the youth housing penalty: flaws in our social services system that make it even harder for young people to access social housing. There are three problems. Firstly, community housing providers are disincentivised to house young people. This is because the youth allowance is lower than other support payments. Community housing providers charge rent based on an applicant's assessable income, so providers receive significantly less rent if they house young people.”
“The government argues that many of these amendments are in line with recommendations made by a series of reviews over the past 12 years. The Federation Chamber transcript was published up to 20:00. The remainder of the transcript will be published progressively as it is completed.”
“This bill proposes to deal with these problems by: introducing an application fee for FOI requests; expanding cabinet confidentiality so that a document doesn't have to be produced if it was created for the 'substantial' purpose of being presented to cabinet, which is looser than the previous 'dominant' purpose test; amending the public interest test to introduce factors that weigh against disclosure, including if it may prejudice the frank or timely discussion of matters or exchange of opinions; introducing a 40-hour processing cap on FOI requests; introducing a pathway to reject vexatious or frivolous requests; preventing applicants from being anonymous; and other amendments to clarify and streamline the FOI process.”
“Public servants are increasingly reluctant to write things down. They fear that their internal deliberations will be exposed, misinterpreted and politicised. That fear undermines good governance. It weakens the quality of advice and it erodes trust within the Public Service.”
“Given that public interest journalists would make up a significant proportion of the remaining quarter, the vexatious proportion must be well under a quarter. The question is: what's an appropriate price to pay for transparency and accountability? We have the equivalent of 500 full-time public servants filling FOI requests. Is that too many in a public service with 213,000 people in it? That's 0.2 per cent focused on public accountability. I recognise that vexatious applicants may now be able to use AI to generate many and slightly varied requests. This is a problem that needs to be considered along with the many other ways AI will be used in both helpful and harmful ways. A second headache for the Public Service is the way the system might inhibit frank and fearless advice from the Public Service. The Shergold review made this clear.”
“In 2022-2023, for the first time on record, more FOI requests were refused than granted in full, defying the FOIA Act's presumption in favour of disclosure. And, when appealed, nearly half the decisions not to disclose are overturned. It's true that, as well as these flaws in the timeliness and fullness of disclosure, the FOI system causes efficiency headaches for the Public Service. No doubt there are vexatious and frivolous requests, although I have only heard anecdotal evidence of this. The 580 requests received by the eSafety team from a single entity must have been painful, but I have seen no data about what proportion of FOI requests are vexatious. The minister has said that three-quarters of requests are from individual seeking information about themselves, which presumably are less likely to be vexatious.”
“Twenty-five per cent of first-instance FOI requests take more than a month, and 10 per cent take more than three months. And, if you don't like that first-instance decision about what's disclosed, the time it takes to have such a decision appealed has blown out to more than 15 months. In many instances, this could render the information out of date and irrelevant by the time it's obtained. The royal commission into the robodebt scandal found that an FOI system with greater transparency would have uncovered problems much earlier and allowed for quicker resolution. As for secrecy, as well as the halving of full disclosures over the last 12 years, refusals have nearly doubled, from 12 per cent to 23 per cent. This has become significantly worse under this government.”
“It was FOI that exposed the machinery of a program that caused immense harm to vulnerable Australians. Robodebt is one of the worst misuses of government power in decades and, without the FOI system, the details of robodebt may never have come to light. This is the power of FOI. It ensures that the public can find out what the government is doing. It exposes corruption and waste. It allows the public to participate in government decision-making and exercise some power as citizens. It's about ensuring that governments act in the public interest and are held to account when they don't. But the FOI system is broken, and this is widely acknowledged. Given its purpose is transparency and accountability, some of the most worrying issues are about delays and secrecy.”
“I want to run through why the FOI system is important, the current problems with the system, why this bill is not the answer and the arguments for an independent review. The FOI Act was introduced in 1982 with a clear purpose: to open up government, to shift the default from secrecy to transparency and to ensure that decisions made in the name of the public are visible to the public. It has generally worked. Over the years, FOI requests have revealed waste, mismanagement and corruption. They have informed journalism, empowered whistleblowers and strengthened public debate. Perhaps the most powerful recent example is the robodebt scandal. It was FOI requests that helped uncover the internal advice ignored by ministers. It was FOI that revealed the legal doubts raised by public servants.”
“There have been findings that the system is driving a culture of secrecy, a lack of ministerial engagement and inconsistent exemptions. Journalists and legal advocates report administrative torture, with excessive redactions and delays that compromise public interest reporting. These really crucial problems, requiring greater transparency, are not addressed in this bill. That's why every major review that has touched on the FOI system has called for a comprehensive, independent review of the whole FOI Act. That's what we need before we make any significant changes. As we watch democratic institutions crumble in the United States, now is the time to safeguard our institutions of transparency and accountability, not undermine them.”
“Freedom of information, or FOI, is a cornerstone of our democracy. It's how we hold government to account. But the FOI system has room for improvement. There are arguments to reduce disclosure of information. It creates a lot of work for the public service. Anecdotally, it's full of vexatious and voluminous requests. Public servants are increasingly reluctant to write things down for fear of having their documents FOI'd. This bill addresses these problems by reducing disclosure, expanding cabinet confidentiality, limiting anonymous requests, adding new grounds to reject applications and introducing application fees. But there are also reasons to increase disclosure. Requests can take far too long to be answered. The proportion of FOI requests granted in full has dropped from 59 per cent in 2012 to just 25 per cent in 2024.”
“I move the amendment circulated in my name: That all words after "That" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words: "whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House: (1) acknowledges that we need to achieve better outcomes for business and the environment; (2) further acknowledges it is in the interest of the Government, Opposition and crossbench to work constructively to pass these reforms; and (3) calls on the Government to amend this bill to resolve significant flaws, including loopholes in the offsets framework".”
“These bills require significant amendments. This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reform the environmental laws that protect our environment and support our businesses. Let's get it right. I'll be working constructively with the government and others in the House and the Senate to come up with a package that can satisfy the twin imperatives of more certainty and timeliness for business and a better environment for our children and grandchildren. I will now move a second reading amendment acknowledging the need for better outcomes for business and the environment and the need to work together and pass environmental reforms and calling on the government to amend this bill to resolve its significant flaws.”
“We need to make our environmental laws work better so we can safeguard the environment and build a future that we're proud to leave to our children and grandchildren. I implore the Greens to act constructively and not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. This is an opportunity to show that you've learnt the lessons of the last election. People want outcomes, and you have a chance to deliver. I implore the coalition to show that they can be an effective party of opposition and to focus on the need to improve the laws for the environment and for business rather than use this as a pointscoring exercise. Australians are sick of the petty politics. They want to see constructive engagement and results. Perhaps most importantly, I implore the government to act in good faith to improve this legislation and get it passed.”
“They do not introduce a climate trigger or introduce climate considerations, even though climate change is the biggest threat to the environment. There are also huge uncertainties around key features of the reforms, including the safeguards for the bilateral accreditation processes, which could be an opportunity for reduced duplication if we get it right, and uncertainties about the independence and power of the national EPA, about the rigour of the national environmental standards and about the process of and community engagement in developing bioregional plans. Despite the ridiculous timeframes and the serious concerns in these bills, I would encourage every part of the parliament to contribute constructively to this process and accept that no-one is going to get everything they want.”
“I'll introduce an amendment to this effect. When the government does exercise its discretionary power to bypass environmental laws, there should be very strong transparency in relation to that decision. These reforms allow the minister to redact information from the statement of reasons required under the current EPBC Act when the national interest exemption is used. There's no reason for more secrecy under the new laws. If the minister is going to bypass the environmental laws, the public has a right to know why. I have a series of other concerns about these reforms that I don't have time to address. These reforms do not deal with land clearing or native forest logging. There's a huge amount of ministerial discretion. The phrase 'ministerial satisfaction' appears over 600 times in the combined bills and explanatory memoranda.”
“There's a real risk that a minister could use this exemption for political reasons. We don't need this additional separate pathway. It provides an opportunity for this or a future government to completely ignore the environmental protections and declare every project to be in the national interest. And it's not great for business. You can't make long-term investment decisions on the chance that the minister will consider that your project fits the vague definition of 'the national interest'. We should be accelerating approvals by streamlining the environmental assessment, rather than introducing a sneaky bypass that's completely left to the minister. If the government is unwilling to remove the national interest proposal then, at the very least, fossil fuel projects should not be able to bypass environmental protections.”
“It allows the minister to declare that a project is in the national interest and allows it to bypass all environmental safeguards. It's intended to be used for natural disasters and emergencies when we need to override environmental laws. This test has always existed and has mostly been used in good faith. But this package introduces a new exemption called the national interest proposal. This appears quite similar to the national interest exemption; it allows the minister to choose to bypass almost all environmental safeguards. But this new national interest proposal appears to be intended for a much broader range of projects, including housing or energy projects. There are no limits on what the minister can consider in determining whether a project is a national interest proposal.”
“I would suggest that the legislation should also specify that the restoration contributions advisory committee contain significant expertise related to threatened species and ecological restoration. There may well be other ways to improve the integrity of the offsets fund, and I'm very open to considering them, but we've seen, from a range of comparable jurisdictions, that these funds can often provide a cheap way out for developers at the expense of the environment. With this legislation as it is, this offsets fund represents a potential single point of failure for the entire reform package. We must get it right. My second major concern is about the national interest test. There are two national interest pathways. The first is called the national interest exemption.”
“I also believe the legislation should outline a set of factors that must be considered in the offsets price calculator, such as administration costs, logistical costs and accounting for the risk of failure. If we get the pricing wrong, the offsets fund becomes ineffective. Fourthly, we need greater transparency on what this fund is actually achieving through public reporting. If it's not working, it must be changed. The offsets fund reports on the progress of its offsets to the minister every year, and I'm introducing an amendment to ensure that this report is made publicly available. It will be vital that there is scientific oversight of this process.”
“Proponents should not be permitted to damage species and ecosystems on the excluded matters list and then make it the fund's problem by making a cash payment. Thirdly, we need to ensure that offsets are priced appropriately. There's a long history of underpricing environmental offsets, and it's always nature that cops the bill. Offsets need to be appropriately priced so that the fund has sufficient capital to purchase offsets that compensate for the damage caused and deliver a net gain. This legislation does not set out the price for offsets but provides for regulations that will determine the price. I'm introducing amendments that require a regular review of the offsets price calculator.”
“Both of these proposed solutions would reduce the use of the offset fund, minimising the risk that it's unable to deliver for nature. Secondly, we've often seen that offset funds are unable to find suitable offsets for the damage caused. The developer pays into the fund for damage to a wetland and passes on its liability. Then, when the offset fund looks for a suitable wetlands offset project, it discovers that none are available. I'm introducing an amendment to ensure that the offsets fund is used only when it's likely that appropriate offsets will be available. If they're not going to be available, the project should be revisiting the damage it's causing. A second amendment creates an excluded matters list—a list of species and ecosystems that are so close to extinction that the fund will never be able to find suitable offsets.”
“Effectively this introduces another layer into the mitigation hierarchy: first avoid damage, then mitigate, then directly offset, and only then can you pay into the offsets fund. Another potential solution would be to require large projects that have significant resources to directly offset rather than using the fund. While the offset fund is a great solution for small developers that don't have the capacity to find suitable offsets, large multibillion-dollar companies absolutely have the capacity to secure the offsets themselves rather than pay to pass the liability onto the fund. A cash payment is obviously easier than actually doing the work to offset damage. Without limitations on when the offset funds can be used, all proponents will go for the easy option.”
“At the end of the day, it's nature that bears the cost. Globally, funds like these are increasingly considered inappropriate to justify the destruction of intact native ecosystems like we have in Australia. I'll be proposing amendments to tighten up the use of this fund. If we consider the comparable funds in New South Wales, Queensland, the Pilbara and overseas, there are a number of consistent lessons to be learned. Firstly, we need to limit the use of the offsets fund. It should be a last resort for developers. Otherwise, the funds simply can't purchase enough offsets to keep up with the damage caused by developments. I'm drafting an amendment that requires projects to use the offsets fund only if they're unable to purchase offsets directly.”
“Funds like this have not worked in the past. We've seen funds in New South Wales, Queensland and the Pilbara that have failed to deliver real restoration of the environment. But why does this happen? It's not about idea and principle. You make it easier for businesses to compensate for their environmental damage by paying into a government fund that can then use its fund—and, hopefully, its expertise in conservation—to strategically and more effectively invest in environmental offsets. But in practice they just don't seem to work. Developers damage the environment and pay into the fund, but the funds always seem to underdeliver on offset projects. This leads to a situation where developers effectively pay to destroy. They pass on their liability to the offsets fund, which then is unable to find suitable offsets.”
“On offsets, if a project proponent wants to use offsets, where they've tried to avoid or minimise the damage but there's a residual impact, there are two ways they can approach this. They can invest in an offset project directly, or they can pay money into an offsets fund managed by the Restoration Contributions Holder. The intention is that this offsets fund is used to purchase offsets to compensate for the damage caused by the proponents. The EPBC reforms intend to include some good standards for direct offset projects, including requirements that offsets are like for like, additional, and ready to deliver compensation before the damage occurs. But it appears that these standards won't apply for projects funded through the offsets fund. This raises questions about how we ensure that this offsets fund delivers for nature.”
“And we'll have a clear, legislated mitigation hierarchy for the first time. This means that project proponents have to try to avoid negative impacts and then minimise the unavoidable impacts, and only then can they go to restore or offset the residual impacts. Projects can't just jump straight to offsets. When they do go to offsets, proponents need to show a net gain for the environment. So the overall impact must be better for nature, not just slow the decline. These are all good changes. But there are some very large loopholes that could undermine these benefits. The two I'm focusing on are the integrity of offsets and the national interest exemptions. I'm very open about how to deal with these problems, but they have to be addressed.”
“It's worth waiting a couple more months to get this right. There are some positive changes in this reform package for both business and the environment. For businesses, assessment pathways will be streamlined, with three different processes replaced by a single pathway. This will mean that businesses are spending less time and money on navigating the assessment processes and waiting for an answer. We'll have bioregional plans with 'go' and 'no go' zones. Not only does this more holistically protect nature; it also provides greater certainty and streamlined assessment processes for businesses. And there are some wins for nature. For the first time, unacceptable impacts have been defined. If the damage is bad enough, a project should not be able to go ahead. That's a positive step.”
“This is why EPBC Act reform is essential. With our natural world and ecosystem degrading and delays holding up vital developments, we need a change. Despite the importance and complexity of this issue, the government dropped 1,500 pages of legislation on us on Thursday for debate this week. It's now Tuesday. This makes a mockery of the role of the House of Representatives, which is to deliberate on legislation and hold the government of the day to account. Despite this, I have done my best to review the legislation, speak to a wide range of experts, identify what's good and not so good in the legislation and propose and draft amendments. The Senate is due to report back in March. While these reforms are urgent, I urge the government to wait for the Senate inquiry. We've been waiting for these reforms for 25 years.”
“Environmental protection is one of the top three issues constituents contact me about, with thousands of constituents writing to me in the last three years, concerned that the places they love are not being adequately protected. At the same time the timelines for development have blown out, in large part because of the duplication and inefficiencies in our environmental laws. To meet the challenges our country faces today—climate change, cost of living and housing—we need to be able to build, and build quickly. We need renewable energy to reduce our emissions and bring down the cost of electricity. We need more houses for Australians to call home. Yet we're consistently underdelivering. In the last quarter, zero large-scale projects reached financial close. Nationally, we continue to underdeliver on housing targets.”
“The Environment Protection Reform Bill 2025 and the six accompanying bills are part of a long-awaited package of reforms to fix our deeply flawed environmental laws. I want to talk about how we got here, the good parts of the bills and the most concerning loopholes that could undermine the bills' effectiveness. Our environmental protection laws were written last century. Everyone agrees they are not fit for purpose. It's rare to find agreement in this building, but on this matter there is consensus. Our environmental laws do not protect nature and do not work for business. More than 48 per cent of the continent is now degraded, and more than 70 per cent of our most diverse regions are devoid of native vegetation.”
“This question is to the Minister representing the Minister for the Environment and Water. The benefits in the current environmental protection reforms are at risk of being undermined by huge loopholes. Under the reforms, projects can pay for environmental damage into a centralised offsets fund, but in New South Wales, Queensland, the Pilbara and overseas these funds have consistently failed to deliver real environmental outcomes. Will the government consider amendments to put stronger safeguards around this offsets fund so that it actually delivers for nature?”
“To rebuild trust in our government and our politicians, we need transparency and accountability. They've failed to produce the ONI climate report. We can't make good, informed decisions about decarbonisation if the stark picture of what the alternative is is hidden. We also haven't seen a response to the Murphy report on online gambling reform. It's now 859 days since that report was tabled and 677 days since the report became overdue. This theme has continued in relation to lobbying and secrecy around the EPBC Act as well. To rebuild trust in our government, we need this transparency and accountability. It's time that this government fulfilled its promises on those fronts.”