Anthony Albanese:

The key measures in the Government’s amended bill are: for the first time Australia will have a national Environment Protection Agency, a strong independent regulator with a clear focus on ensuring better compliance with and stronger enforcement of Australia’s new environmental laws. In another first, Australia will have national environmental standards to ensure clear, strong guidelines to protect the environment.

There will be higher penalties for the most significant breaches of environmental law, as well as environment protection orders for use in urgent circumstances to prevent and respond to major contraventions of the law.

We are removing and sunsetting the exemption from the EPBC Act for high-risk land-clearing and regional forestry agreements so they comply with the same rules and standards as other industries.

To complement this, today we are announcing that my government will establish a $300 million forestry growth fund to deliver a bigger forestry industry that supports more secure jobs, better pay and high-value output.

The timber fibre strategy developed with industry outlines how the forestry sector is increasingly relying on plantation timber which provides opportunities to improve the sustainability of the industry and move up the value chain for timber products. This is about using science and evidence to prove all forestry in Australia is undertaken at the highest standard.

The Government is backing forestry and timber workers through our Forest Growth Fund that will invest in new equipment and facilities to enable industry modernisation and reprocessing.

Things like re-tooling of timber mills that is so important for the industry going forward. We will require proponents of large emitting projects to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions and their emission reduction plans.

We will maintain federal approval of water trigger on coal and gas projects because the water table in areas like the Murray-Darling Basin obviously goes across state boundaries, and therefore the water trigger is absolutely essential.

We will respond to the business community’s main demand and that was we need to better define unacceptable impacts that were in the bill that passed the House of Representatives, to give more certainty to business and we will deliver that today.

We will clarify net gain as well to provide more certainty going forward. We will have stop-work orders limited to 14 days, with the potential for the minister to deliver an additional 14 days, should it be deemed to be appropriate. We will allow the extension as well of not controlled action decision decisions which has lapsed.

For example, if you had a not-controlled action such as a road to a particular project that hadn’t yet been approved because it was subject to assessment, then that could be extended so that a common-sense approach was taken. We will introduce all of these key measures to speed up decision-making for business and the community which Minister Watt will go through. This is a landmark day for the environment in this country. It is also a good day for business in this country by providing more certainty, reducing delays and making sure that we get better outcomes and improved productivity.