For years we have seen many examples of communities that are overwhelmingly opposed to destructive projects, but those projects go ahead anyway because corporations have an overpowering voice in our system of environmental decision-making.
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Take, for example, the Great Australian Bight. Here the federal government gave Equinor, a Norwegian oil giant, permission to drill despite 30,000 community submissions opposing the plan. In this case, the intensity of community opposition eventually forced Equinor to walk away, but it shouldn't have taken costly legal action and massive national protests to get the right outcome for nature. The community's view had been clear for years.
And the Narrabri Gas Project in the NSW Pilliga Forest, on Gomeroi Country. Why is it that 98% of 23,000 community submissions opposed the project, yet the NSW and federal governments approved it anyway?
People shouldn't wake up one morning to a plan that tells them the place they love is now up for destruction. They shouldn't be forced to fight a rearguard action to stop their culture being trashed, air and water polluted or have native species driven to extinction.
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The root of these issues is that environment and planning laws are failing to guarantee communities a meaningful say in environmental decision-making.
It's been 30 years since the 1992 UN Rio Declaration called for environmental community rights to be adopted by nations, with Australia as a signatory. But no government in Australia has yet enshrined these rights, the right to know, to participate and to challenge, into legislation and practice.
A new report by the Wilderness Society, informed by legal analysis from the Environmental Defenders Office, shows a system-wide failure, across Commonwealth, state and territory jurisdictions, to uphold these three community rights in environmental decision-making.
At a federal level, there are an array of community rights failures in the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. For example, timeframes for public consultation on matters of national environmental significance are prohibitively short; there are limited requirements for the Minister to even take the community's views into account, and communities have no access to merits review whereby a decision is reconsidered.
Strong environmental community rights are also critical at the state and territory level, where the report shows some governments, such as in the Northern Territory and Western Australia, are failing across almost all criteria.
Even relatively high-scoring governments, like the ACT and NSW, have major gaps where they are failing to provide basic access to information or disclose environmental risks.
Unfortunately, the only community right that all governments do well in is to let community members know in writing when their request to access information is being refused.
Across the country, there is an acknowledged lack of trust in how decisions are made, and who is making them. The community wants laws that will give them a voice in environmental decisions, to effectively drive governments to take the serious and urgent action required to deal with both the climate and biodiversity crises. Governments and corporations come and go but communities live with the impacts of their environmental decisions for generations.
Additionally and specifically, First Nations rights recognised in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, including the principle of free, prior and informed consent, should be embedded across decision-making processes in all jurisdictions.
At a federal level, the Albanese government's promised reform of the EPBC Act provides an opportunity to deliver community rights, and go some way to restoring trust and integrity in environmental decisions. They must not squander this opportunity to deliver environmental laws that work.
Only when strong environmental community rights are enshrined at both the Commonwealth and state/territory levels will communities across Australia have the power to secure better outcomes for people and nature.
- Victoria Jack is NSW campaign manager at the Wilderness Society.
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