Does the Nature Positive legislation before parliament stack up for nature?

Professor Wintle from The University of Melbourne said, “The Biodiversity Council considers strong laws to protect nature as the keystone in a broader strategy to stem biodiversity loss and to create a stable and prosperous future for us all. Significant law reform is needed and every second counts.”

Although the Biodiversity Council supports the government's intention to reform laws under its Nature Positive Plan and to establish Environment Protection Australia (EPA) and Environmental Information Australia (EIA), the council has identified major shortcomings in the detail of the current proposal.

“We can't see how these proposals under the current bills are going to make any substantive change to our trajectory to stem biodiversity loss, because they depend so much on what remains to come in the third tranche,” Professor Wintle said.

Professor Martine Maron from The University of Queensland said that including an appropriate and unambiguous definition of nature positive in the bills was essential to meaningful and genuinely positive outcomes.

“The problem is that the current definition that's proposed is incomplete and currently could sort of mean anything at all.

“It doesn't have a baseline year against which nature positive is to be measured, and it doesn't even make clear that there will be a baseline year. It could hypothetically be a trajectory.

“So we wouldn't want to be saying that nature positive is merely for things to be declining, just not quite as fast as they are now.

“At the moment, they really leave the door open for continued decline of our environment,” said Professor Maron.

Professor Wintle said for the EPA to be effective in protecting nature it needed a truly independent governance structure. This includes having a CEO that is appointed by an independent board that properly represents interests and stakeholders across the community.

“In its current form the legislation will not establish EIA and EPA as strong national institutions, let alone achieve genuine, lasting and system-wide protection for nature,” said Professor Wintle.

“We really need to see a structure that would generate that independence. There are great precedents for this. It exists in states, it exists in New Zealand. There are good models for how this could work, we just need to see amendments to the current bills to actually reflect that best practice.

“If you have a CEO of an EPA that's appointed by a minister and essentially is answering directly to the minister rather than to an independent board then you will see decisions that are under undue influence of the Minister, we don't get away from the ministerial discretion that we currently see.”

Professor Wintle also called on the government to directly align the legislation with the words that have been stated in policy for years now and that reflect the commitments that we've made on the global stage.

Associate Professor Peter Burnett from the Australian National University said it is possible to make amendments to the EPBC Act now which would allow the government to progress urgently needed environmental standards ahead of tranche three.

“It is quite possible to insert a head of power for the Minister to make standards and to require that decisions comply with standards, then the Minister and the Government could get on with the job of making those standards and changing and improving the existing regime while the stage three amendments continue to be developed.”

Associate Professor Burnett also raised concern at how current ambiguity in the legislation wording could allow environmental approval decisions to be delegated to other bodies, even those related to fossil fuel developments.