Page 3017 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 23 September 2014
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conservator cannot be overridden by ACTPLA on matters of national environmental significance.
The minister may override ACTPLA. In these cases of call-in, where the environment minister is the decision-maker, the minister may make a decision that is inconsistent with the conservator’s advice. However, the decision must still be consistent with the offsets policy and the approval must provide a substantial public benefit. This decision must also be referred to the commonwealth minister who can choose to make the decision instead of the ACT. For any proposal, the ACT may still pull out of any approval role and hand the full approval and decision to the commonwealth. Decisions may be made that have a condition applied to an approval, and this is enshrined in the legislation.
Let me turn now to the question of offsets. In conjunction with the bill, the ACT has also released a biodiversity offsets policy for the territory. This was a federal requirement for the development of the bilateral arrangement between the ACT and the commonwealth and it is crucial that the ACT offsets policy is practical and is also of a high standard. In principle, I would like to note that the Greens have problems and concerns with the general concept of offsets, as the system generally results in net biodiversity loss. An ACT offsets policy has been promised for many years, and until now the ACT has been relying on the federal policy. Unfortunately, this has largely meant poor ACT government process, poor public consultation and poor biodiversity outcomes.
I think the example of Justice Robert Hope park illustrates some of the shortcomings we have seen in recent years. Some of the key issues have been a lack of coordination across ACT government, uncertainty within government, issues of whether there has in fact been additionality and all of those problems undermining community confidence in the process and leading to the community being in a situation where they felt that the job has not been done properly or, as we saw with Justice Robert Hope park, where they felt that significant community effort had been undermined. They felt that there had not been clear recognition of the considerable work that had been done on that site through voluntary effort.
The development of this bilateral agreement has forced the ACT government to finalise an ACT biodiversity offsets policy, as it must be in place before the bilateral agreement can commence. I believe that the offsets policy and framework that this legislation delivers is a significant improvement on what we have had to date. I have worked with the government to ensure that our legislation also establishes clear requirements for regular review of the policy, and public and stakeholder input into the many steps to develop an offsets management plan.
The offsets policy and the offsets guidelines which went out for consultation earlier this year will be statutory instruments and will commence when notified after this bill commences. The policy and the guidelines then need to be reviewed every five years by the planning authority and the conservator, and the revised version is then put out for public consultation for six weeks. These processes are outlined in the bill before us today. The minister may also make minor amendments to the offsets policy in the course of the five-year period when considered appropriate, without consultation. The
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