EPBC Act submission by Redlands2030

Redlands2030 recently made a submission about Australia’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act which is currently the subject of an independent review by a panel of experts led by Professor Graeme Samuel AC.

Here is the text of Redlands2030’s submission to the independent review panel.

Introduction

Redlands2030 Inc. (Redlands2030) is a community organization based in Redland City, Queensland.

Over the past six years Redlands2030 has commented frequently about plans for development of 3,600 apartments on Ramsar wetlands next to Toondah Harbor in Moreton Bay. After three referrals under the EPBC Act the project proponent is currently preparing an Environmental Impact Statement.

This submission reflects the views of Redlands2030 about opportunities for improving the current EPBC legislation.

Environmental protection is not the objective of the current EPBC process

The current legislation and administrative process operate to facilitate economic development while giving lip-service to environmental protection.

Matters of national environmental significance are carefully defined to ensure that in nearly all cases the impacts of destroying part of the natural environment are not serious enough to preclude proposed developments from happening.

Cumulative impacts

It seems that it is nearly always OK to harm one more area and dispossess a few more threatened critters of their habitat. This enables the decision makers to say that inevitable extinction of a species is not their fault. There is no consideration of what has been lost already and the cumulative and contributory impacts of decisions being made at any point in time.

Plans for development of 3600 apartments on Ramsar wetlands next to Toondah Harbour would require the destruction of seagrass habitat which is used by various migratory shorebirds including the Eastern curlew, Bar-tailed godwit and Grey-tailed tattler. The Eastern curlew is classified by the Australian Government as Critically Endangered. The ICUN Red List estimates that the global population of Eastern curlews is in the band of 20,000 to 49,999 mature individuals.

Another species likely to be impacted by residential development at Toondah Harbour is the Koala. In this case it is expected that if development of 3,600 apartments were to go ahead the resulting vehicle traffic would wipe out a healthy colony of koalas living in the parks and streets around the Toondah Harbor precinct. The number of koalas in Redlands has dropped alarmingly by about 80% over the past three decades. It’s generally accepted that only a few hundred remain.

Environmental impact statements

The process of assessing the environmental impacts of proposed developments is nearly always done through an environmental impact statement prepared by the proponent of the development who has an obvious economic interest in finding that the proposed environmental is acceptable.

If an inadequate or biased report is prepared on behalf of a project proponent there is little scope for this to be identified and dealt with during the current process. The Federal Government has been steadily reducing and diminishing the role of its environment department. When a draft EIS is published for public consultation the community only gets four weeks to review and comment on a large technically written report.

EIS guidelines

It is noted that a project proponent is given ‘guidelines’ for the preparation of an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). In the case of the proposed Toondah Harbor residential project, the Federal Government was requested (by Redlands2030) to seek public comments on draft EIS guidelines. The Government acted on this request and the consultation process resulted in a small number of improvements to the Government’s guidelines for preparation of this particular EIS. Consideration should be given to ensuring that this process is followed regularly.

Offsets

The practice of allowing projects to undertake environmental destruction because of proposed actions to offset the damage should not be allowed as a matter of course. Clearly, the environment in place is a known quantity and should be conserved in accordance with the precautionary principle. Promises, undertakings or requirements that a developer undertake some offsetting action at some other place and time have far less credence.

As part of its review of the EPBC Act the independent expert should assess the actual performance of all offset conditions which have been imposed through decisions made under the current legislation and make this information publicly available.

Enforcement of EPBC approval conditions

In nearly all cases the current EPBC legislation approves environmental destruction but softens the blow slightly by imposing various conditions on the developer.

Once the conditioned decision has been made there is little transparency regarding the developer’s compliance with these conditions and the Department’s actions to assess and enforce compliance with these conditions.

The process should be amended such that project proponents are required to report at least annually on their compliance with EPBC approval conditions and the Department should be required to assess and audit the reports provided by developers. All of this information should be made public.

Freedom of information

At present when submissions are made to the Government about proposed actions that have been referred for EPBC approval these submissions are only made available if a party lodges a Freedom of Information request which can cost many hundreds of dollars. This information should be made publicly available as a matter of routine as should most other information relating to consideration of the proposed action.

Redlands2030 lodged a Freedom of of Information request for comments made in response to Walker Group’s second EPBC referral of its plans for residential development next to Toondah Harbour. The information obtained very usefully confirmed that there was miniscule community support for Walker Group’s plans to destroy Ramsar wetlands in Moreton Bay. In fact the Federal Government received 1,419 submissions with just eight submissions supporting Walker Group’s plans.

Political decision making

There may once have been a time when the community would believe that a Minister for the Environment would make decisions reasonably and impartially about matters such as deciding which environmentally impactful projects were clearly unacceptable and which ones should be allowed to go ahead as controlled actions.

But following the decision by the then Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg in 2017 to overrule departmental advice and declare the Toondah project a controlled action months after his party had received a massive political donation from project proponent the Walker Group, it has now become clearly unacceptable that politicians should be making these decisions.

This matter is discussed in some detail in an ABC Background Briefing story “The developer, the whistleblower and the minister” by Steve Cannane and Rebecca Trigger which aired on 9 November 2018.

The current Government’s decision making deficiencies exposed through the ‘sports rorts’ affair add further reasons for making important decisions about environmental approvals for major projects much less political.

Redlands2030 supports the proposals by Australia’s major conservation organisations such as the environmental Defenders Office for environmental decision making to be made by a statutory body – an Environment Protection Agency.

Strategic assessment

The notion of a strategic assessment being carried out to determine which environmental values should be conserved in a particular geographical area is superficially attractive, especially to prospective developers who like the idea that go and no-go zones have been sorted. It sounds good but the devil is in the details. Any strategic assessment would have to be done in extraordinary detail to ensure that a geographic area’s environmental values had been assessed sufficiently to enable up-front decisions about what habitats and critters could be sacrificed to economic development.

Planning decisions should be considered under the revised EPBC Act

A weakness of the current EPBC Act and associated administrative processes is that significant government planning decisions don’t trigger an environmental assessment process. For example, in 2013 the Queensland Government declared a Priority Development Area at Toondah Harbor which included about 40 hectares of the Moreton Bay Ramsar site. Proposed development in a Ramsar site is a trigger for EPBC assessment but a government decision to encourage such development does not. If the Queensland Government’s inappropriate planning decision in 2013 had been reviewed and knocked back straight away by the Federal Government this would have saved governments at three levels, a prospective developer and the community significant amounts of money, time and angst.

Costs and benefits

Consideration should be given to ensuring that environmental impacts assessed under the EPBC Act are taken into account by a comprehensive process for assessing costs and benefits of any proposed major project. We note that such a cost benefit assessment has not yet been undertaken for the proposed Toondah Harbor project.

More about the controversial Toondah Harbor project

A detailed account of decision making about plans for development at Toondah Harbor (including three referrals under the EPBC Act) is presented by Redlands2030 in Toondah Harbor – the illustrated history, available on the Redlands2030 website.

Redlands2030 – 6 May 2020