‘Take a chill pill’: Graeme Samuel urges calm on environment law delay

The Greens and conservation groups argued change was needed to prevent increasing habitat destruction and species extinction.

WA is a crucial Labor as it seeks to stave off being reduced to minority government at the next election.

Both the EPA and the EPBC revamp were part of the government’s Nature Positive Plan, in which companies embarking on a project that disturbs the environment have to leave nature in a better overall position.

Ms Plibersek said there would be more consultation with all parties, and she would release a comprehensive exposure draft of the laws for public consultation before being introduced to parliament.

But she declined to put a timeline on it, and there is broad belief within political circles that it has been delayed until after the election because of the sensitivities in WA as well as Queensland, another state critical to Labor’s prospects.

Professor Samuel supported Ms Plibersek staging the plan, saying he had recommended it himself.

He said he did not know when Ms Plibersek would legislate the EPBC changes but, based on conversations with her office and the department, “I’m hopeful, indeed confident, we’ll see them before the election”.

Ms Plibersek has declined to nominate a timeline. Professor Samuel said the avalanche of criticism from the Greens and the environment movement over the delay was unwarranted because the change would occur.

“Just sit and wait, take a chill pill. What we are going to get will satisfy all their aspirations as set out in the Nature Positive Plan,” he said.

“We’re going through a complex process. It’s been an abysmal failure over the past 25 years, and we need to get it right.”

‘Utter rubbish’

Professor Samuel lashed the mining sector, especially the WA chamber of mines, saying its claims that the EPBC revamp would signal the end of mining were “utter rubbish”.

In doing so, he singled out a news website, The Nightly, funded by WA media baron Kerry Stokes, for opposing the changes and taking credit on Tuesday night for the delay.

Professor Samuel said the mining community needed to understand the proposed reforms were designed to protect the environment while fast tracking and simplifying the approval process by compressing state and federal approvals into one process.

He said neither side would get 100 per cent of what they wanted, but both should aim for “80-plus per cent”.

Ms Plibersek said the government was going “as fast as we can” but the legislation was “big and complex”.

“We’re doing a massive consultation on our new laws. The current act is around 1000 pages. The legislation that replaces it will be similar,” she said.

Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young said the delay was “a complete cave-in from Labor to the big mining companies, the fossil fuel lobby and the logging corporations”.

“The fact that almost every polluter lobby group has cheered this sellout, while almost every environment group has criticised it, tells you what you need to know,” she said.

Professor Samuel was commissioned by the former Coalition government to review the EPBC Act, but the Coalition has now sided against the proposed reform, as well as the establishment of an EPA.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, who is in Perth this week, said “this is one of the greatest anti-WA bills I’ve seen from a Labor government”.

“We saw Roger Cook make a huge misstep when he first became premier, and I think Anthony Albanese was about to make exactly the same bad move,” he said of the WA government’s hamfisted Cultural Heritage Laws, which it was forced to revoke.

“People from WA know if they vote for the Albanese government at the next election, they’re going to get this crazy overreach environmental law.”