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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 05 Hansard (Tuesday, 4 May 2004) . . Page.. 1720 ..

The government’s amendments to its bill introduce some improvements to the options for courts, simply giving the courts the option to require the damage to cover the cost of rehabilitation rather than requiring the damager to do the rehabilitation work. This is sensible and recognises that the damager may not be the best informed or skilled party to restore the area.

The third and fourth government amendments, however, are not acceptable and I will speak more to these in the detail stage. I understand there is an agreement that, because amendments were introduced by the government today and yesterday, the debate on the detail stage will be adjourned until Thursday. I will make my comments then.

MS DUNDAS (11.53): Land clearing is one of the biggest environmental threats facing Australia today. Our bushland continues to be cleared at an astonishing rate and the vast majority of forest that was present on the Australian continent at the time of settlement has now been wiped out. Land clearing not only contributes to Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions, which are already the highest in the world per capita; it also destroys the habitat of our native wildlife, putting large numbers of threatened species at further risk of extinction. So any action to reduce the incidence of land clearing and land damage should be welcomed.

However, this Environment Legislation Amendment Bill is only a small step in that direction. It should be noted that the vast majority of land clearing events in the ACT are both authorised by the government and occur outside reserved areas. This bill only directs its efforts at tackling the problem of unauthorised land clearing events that occur within reserved areas. It does nothing to reduce land clearing approvals in the ACT nor does it take action to minimise the impact on or replace the lost woodland by land clearing that is authorised by the government.

The clearing of a large tract of native vegetation by Transgrid a few years ago was shocking. Many residents of the ACT generally believed that this type of large-scale clearing was not possible in our reserve systems, and in particular in the fragile ecosystems that are protected by Namadgi National Park. From that perspective, this legislation is necessary and timely to ensure that no such unauthorised incursions into our reserved areas take place.

We also need to look at the larger incidences of land clearing in the territory. The biggest threat to native woodland in the territory, particularly the endangered ecological community of yellow box and red gum grassy woodland, is the encroachment of urban development into remnant areas. We have already seen this government move to redevelop remnant stands in east O’Malley, north Watson and in some areas of Gungahlin.

The Democrats have concerns with the inclusion of strict liability offences into this bill. The penalties are taken from the Environment Protection Act, but that act also has a specific defence of due diligence clause that ensures that it is a defence to prosecution that the defendant took all reasonable steps to ensure that there was no damage to the environment. This bill contains no such clause, so in effect the offences in this act are more severe than those in the Environment Protection Act.

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