Humane World for Animals Australia says risks to nature outweigh the gains in long anticipated reforms to Australia's nature laws, tabled in parliament today.
Having previewed the amendments to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act tabled today, Humane World for Animals Australia's Director, Campaigns, Nicola Beynon says the Government hasn't got the balance right.
"As the bills are currently written, the risks to nature outweigh the gains," says Ms Beynon. "We are calling on the Parliament to negotiate amendments to strengthen the bills so that we can be confident that nature will not end up worse off.
"The big risk in the bills is the handing over of approval powers for nationally important decisions to states and territories. This puts Australia's nationally threatened species and World Heritage sites, like the Great Barrier Reef, in danger.
"The bills do contain some vital new safeguards, in the form of 'Unacceptable Impacts' and 'National Standards', but amendments are needed to ensure weasel words and get-out clauses don't undermine them.
"It is disappointing that in the week a humpback whale calf has died in a shark net near Sydney, the bills are maintaining an old exemption which allows state government shark culling programs to continue unimpeded. This 'Continued Use' exemption is also facilitating deforestation and needs to go. Neither is it tenable for the EPBC Act to maintain a blind spot on climate change.
"A new fund for developers to pay into must not be a 'pay to destroy' mechanism to undermine otherwise better protections that are being proposed for biodiversity offsets.
"There are good elements to this bill that are let down by too much discretion for continued bad decision making.
"This long-anticipated opportunity to deliver the legislative tools needed to turn around Australia's nature crisis must not be squandered. We urge the Parliament to work on the amendments needed to give nature a fighting chance, and we are encouraged that the Government says their door is open to make that happen".
Nicola Beynon was one of the negotiators of the original EPBC Act in June 1999 and has spent twenty-six years working with the legislation to protect species and their habitats from destruction and exploitation. She will be at the Press Club today for federal Environment Minister Murray Watt's address and is available
