Two years have passed since the Morrison government was handed a troubling report on the failings of Australia's environment laws. On Thursday, the new government will explain how it plans to fix them.
Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek will be in Brisbane to make good on her promise to formally respond this year to 38 recommendations from the review of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.
The protective legislation is supposed to kick in when projects or developments pose risks to animals, plants, habitats and places deemed of national significance including World Heritage sites, wetlands of global importance, water resources of national consequence and places of high heritage value.
But as the review by Professor Graeme Samuel found in October 2020, it's doing a very poor job.
The former consumer watchdog chief was blunt, calling the Act ineffective and outdated.
"Good outcomes for the environment, including heritage, cannot be achieved under the current laws," he warned.
He said cumulative impacts were not holistically addressed and found a lack of integration with the states and territories was contributing to the environment's unsustainable trajectory of decline.
"The EPBC Act is ineffective. It does not enable the Commonwealth to effectively protect environmental matters that are important for the nation. It is not fit to address current or future environmental challenges," Prof Samuel said.
Despite that, successive governments had done little to improve it it came into effect in 2000.
In July, as Ms Plibersek released a shocking, five-yearly report on the nation's environmental health, she promised that by year's end, Labor would formally respond to the Samuel review.
Some of the big recommendations have already been promised, including fundamental law reform and the development of national environmental standards to underpin the reworked legislation.
Those standards, Prof Samuel said, should detail the environmental outcomes Australia's laws should achieve.
The review also recommended greater independent oversight and Labor has promised that in the form of a federal environment protection agency.
But some important recommendations are yet to be addressed, including ones relating to how the climate impacts of developments are disclosed and assessed.
Another politically tricky recommendation is that logging carried out under regional forest agreements in public native forests should no longer be exempt from most federal environment laws.
There's also a recommendation to expand the water trigger beyond coal seam gas and coal mining activities, to ensure other potentially damaging industries are assessed.
The Australian Conservation Foundation and WWF-Australia are hoping for much more detail about the powers and make up of the new environment protection agency.
Both groups want decisions on whether developments can proceed or not to sit with that agency, not the minister of the department, to take the politics out of environmental protection.
But both are pessimistic about the prospect of a climate trigger, like the ones the Greens have championed to ensure new mines or big developments are assessed for climate impacts before environmental approvals are decided.
Ms Plibersek is expected to hold a press conference in Brisbane on Thursday before speaking at a Queensland Conservation Council event.
