The Morrison government has announced it will remove the need for developments in some areas to receive project-specific approval under national environment laws, in a step conservationists fear will further weaken nature protection.
Guardian Australia revealed last month that the government was considering using a little-used section of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act to allow some developments to be given the green light as part of a regional plan without consideration of the impact of the project itself.
In a joint statement released on Monday night, the federal environment minister, Sussan Ley, and the resources minister, Keith Pitt, said the March budget would include $62.3m to establish these plans in up to 10 priority areas, emphasising it could speed up approval for mining developments.
“The 10 new regional plans will streamline development approvals, including those for crucial resources projects, by removing the need for a project-by-project approval under national environment law,” Pitt said in the statement.
The ministers did not say which areas the regional plans would cover.
The announcement relies on parts of the EPBC Act that give the environment minister the power to create a regional plan, and to then declare development activities within a region covered by a plan exempt from needing federal approval. Regional plans are loosely defined in the act as being able to cover a broad range of biodiversity, social and economic factors. They have previously been used only in marine areas.
Documents obtained under freedom of information laws last month showed the government was planning to use regional plans more broadly so developers and resources companies did not have to seek both federal and state approval for developments that affect the environment.
The government has previously attempted to pass new laws to formally transfer more environmental decision-making powers from the commonwealth to state and territory governments, but its legislation was blocked by the Senate.
Ley and Pitt said an $128.5m package to “advance environmental law reform” would be included in the budget. In addition to support for regional plans, it would include $37.9m for “streamlining of assessment processes”, $12m to “modernise the environmental offsets policy” and $9.5m to improve compliance with the law.
Ley’s office could not provide details on what the modernising of environmental offsets policy would entail but is likely to be initially be used for a review. Guardian Australia has reported extensively on flaws in offset schemes, including offset commitments that were never delivered and problems with the federal government’s offset for the development western Sydney airport.
The minister said there would also be $4.9m to “strengthen our knowledge base of protected plants and animals’” and $2m to “scope a new advisory committee to provide expert industry and technology advice to government”.
She said it represented “another important step in delivering much needed environmental reform that reduces unnecessary delay and duplication, while strengthening safeguards”.
A review of the EPBC Act led by the former competition watchdog head Graeme Samuel last year found the environment was suffering from two decades of failure by governments to improve protection and called for an overhaul of Australia’s conservation laws to address a “trajectory of environmental decline”.
The Coalition is yet to formally respond to his review. Its attempt to introduce legislation that would allow states and territories to take more responsibility for environmental decisions failed to gain parliamentary support in part because the government did not adopt a recommendation by Samuel for a set of new national environmental standards against which developments should be tested.
The Senate rejected a weaker set of standards proposed by the government.
Alexia Wellbelove, a campaign manager at Humane Society International, said without the introduction of strong national standards the government’s new regional plans policy were unlikely to benefit the environment.
“In fact, they may do the reverse,” she said. “Speeding up decisions on environmental approvals and putting a focus on facilitating development is putting our heads in the sand on the extinction crisis.”
Wellbelove said substantial additional funding should be directed to helping a growing list of national threatened species.
“This package does nothing to address the crisis they face,” she said. “The funding is solely about speeding up decisions that will impact the environment when instead we should be directing this funding towards recovering threatened species and their habitats.”
