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| Mr HAMPTON (Natural Resources, Environment and Heritage): Madam Speaker, I move that the bill now be read a second time. The purpose of this bill is to amend the Environmental Offences and Penalties Act to increase the penalties for environmental offences and to ensure the amended penalties can be regularly updated. The Environmental Offences and Penalties Act came into effect in 1997. The act establishes a framework for environmental offence levels and establishes a penalty regime for each level. Four environmental offence levels are created. Environmental Offence Level 1 establishes a current penalty of between $125 000 and $1.25m for a body corporate; while at the lower end, Environmental Offence Level 4 current establishes a penalty of up to $25 000 for a body corporate. The Environmental Offences and Penalties Act does not of itself create offences; rather, the various environmental offence levels are referenced and picked up in specific environmental legislation such as the Waste Management and Pollution Control Act, the Mine Management Act and the Water Act. These statutes regulate activities and create the actual offences. The Environmental Offences and Penalties Act creates a consistent set of penalties, among these, different environmental laws. Recent spill incidences have highlighted the need for continued vigilance to protect our precious environment. I am determined to instil a culture of disclosure and environmental compliance within industry. A critical first step in changing corporate culture is to ensure that our environmental laws provide sufficient penalty to deter inappropriate practices and behaviour; which is why I recently announced the government will be moving to double penalties for pollution offences. Today I am bringing forward amendments to the Environmental Offences and Penalties Act that deliver on this commitment. The amendments will see penalties contained within all environmental offence levels, doubled. As a result, the Territory will have some of the toughest penalties for pollution in Australia behind only Victoria and New South Wales. These amendments I am presenting will, for example, see the offence of intentionally causing pollution resulting in serious environmental harm, be subject to a maximum penalty of slightly more than $2.5m for a body corporate. In addition to doubling the penalties for pollution, the amendments will also introduce penalty units as provided in the Penalties Units Act. This will mean that the immediate doubling of pollution fines, established through this bill will, over time, be kept up-to-date with adjustments to the value of a penalty unit. The regular updating of penalties will now mean pollution fines will remain a significant deterrent over the longer term. Some other lower level offences can be treated by way of a smaller fine when an infringement notice is issued. The intent of this bill has been to double the fines for more serious offences; hence the fines for infringement notices have not been doubled. The bill does, however, provide for the existing fines to also be converted to penalty units, and consistent with the current legal policy, they have been subject to a modest increase of, as near as possible, 15%. I am determined those who flout our environmental laws face stiff penalties. I commend this bill to honourable members and table the Explanatory Statement to accompany the bill. Mr ELFERINK (Port Darwin): Madam Speaker, I am going to break with the normal traditions of this House and speak to a bill which I have not yet seen because it has not yet arrived on my table. I am prepared to take a certain risk on this occasion, because there are certain issues which need to be addressed in relation to what is underlying the bill. Over recent months we have seen a calamitous decay … Mr HAMPTON: A point of order, Madam Speaker! There is a motion before the House this afternoon. I do not know if … Mr ELFERINK: I am speaking to the bill. Madam SPEAKER: No, there is no point of order, minister. Mr ELFERINK: Madam Speaker, this is indicative of a minister who wants to silence debate on this issue. Twitchy, scared, nervous … Ms Lawrie: Not at all. Mr ELFERINK: Absolutely so. For that reason he has already tried to use, within the first few minutes of me getting to my feet, the rules of this House to silence me. Ms Lawrie: You did your best to gag me yesterday in Question Time. Madam SPEAKER: Order! Mr ELFERINK: This minister has had a monumental problem in relation to how Darwin Harbour is being treated. I draw members’ attention to page 2 of today’s newspapers which talks about a poo-nami in the harbour. I am deeply concerned this minister is using this legislative instrument - this is part of his: ‘I am coming down like a ton of bricks’ on perpetrators of these offences, when it is not reflected in truth and it is not reflected in what he is doing. His coming down like a ton of bricks included no less than the hiring of three new staff at short notice, and I suspect without any training whatsoever, to be entered onto a list of people who are inspectors under the legislation in a special notice in a Gazette simply so the next day he could say: ‘I have these inspectors’. That demonstrates how desperate this government has been in positioning itself to say it is doing something about it. The problem I have as well is we are seeing increasing discharges of all sorts of things into the harbour. The argument that: ‘I am coming down like a ton of bricks’ this minister is running is not coherent. If he wants to come down like a ton of bricks on the Darwin Port Corporation why does he not speak to the owner of the Darwin Port Corporation, the person sitting about four metres away from him to his immediate left. The Treasurer is the person who owns these government owned corporations, and they are not government owned corporations. The Darwin Port Corporation is a government business division. It is much closer to government. Think about how these really tough fines he has announced today will work in reality. He comes down like a ton of bricks on the Darwin Port Corporation, which government owns, so government will be suing government for the criminal liability of polluting the harbour. Government has to pay the fine to government after having been found guilty of this offence, and the Darwin Port Corporation, because they have been hammered by this really big fine, has a viability problem. Who do you think they will go to to underwrite their viability problem? Government! This is a little in-house circle which makes no real or effective difference to the people of the Northern Territory other than to dress it up as: this is the Darwin Port Corporation over here, and this is government over here. I urge members - think I have the document in front of me, yes, I do - to look at the back of Budget Paper No 2 in relation to the separation of government from government. I point out, in the Appendix classification of entities in the Northern Territory, public non-financial corporations include - you have it - Darwin Port Corporation. We have this fanciful little dress-up going on here, and this is the problem this government carries forward with itself into the future; it is all about how you make it look, rather than how you do it. Can I talk to them about that water discharge licence? Thank you. The best example I can give you is that this minister said: ‘I am really coming down on the Darwin Port Corporation’. Yesterday, I heard a question in Question Time about the Darwin Port Corporation - all this dreadful water coming. How many conditions did the minister put when he was coming down like a tonne of bricks on the Darwin Port Corporation on the Water Discharge Licence? How many conditions? The answer? Zero. Not a single condition ... Ms Lawrie: Under the CLP? Zero. Mr ELFERINK: This is the minister who said, ‘I am here to protect the harbour; I am going to come down like a tonne of bricks’ but, when you actually examine what he has done when it comes to the Water Discharge Licence, the licence that says ‘You may discharge water as a corporation into our harbour, and the following conditions apply ...’ – none, not a single condition applies because this is a government which is more interested and more inspired by what occurs on page 2 or page 1 of the newspaper, as the case may be, in its political self-protection, rather than attending to the actual issues of protecting the harbour ... Ms Lawrie: Not true. Mr ELFERINK: Well, I will pick up on that. ‘Not true’, says the Treasurer. It was not so long ago we were all complaining about the Larrakeyah outflow, more commonly and affectionately known as the poo shooter, which pumps an Olympic-size swimming pool of untreated … Ms Lawrie: About which the CLP did nothing. Mr ELFERINK: … macerated sewage into our harbour every day. The solution offered by this particular government in relation to this matter is that they will redirect all of that through the Ludmilla treatment facility. So, what happens? Do they then dig a trench? I see the trench is being dug, and it goes through Doctor’s Gully and under, I presume, Mitchell Street out to the golf course where it can then linked up to the treatment pipe to going out to Ludmilla. This is the solution. The problem is, the ugly finger of suspicion is pointing directly at the Ludmilla treatment works as the source of the E coli pollutions which are currently in our harbour and, if that is the case, the government’s solution is now part of the problem. They are spending $30m to fix a problem which we were assured would be the fix for the discharge of sewage into our harbour and the brown stain that appears at low tide on a neap tide in our harbour. The solution was going to be, ‘We are going to send it out to Ludmilla’. The solution turns out to be the one that is probably polluting our beaches in Mindil Beach and Vestey Beach, if I recall the article in the newspaper today correctly. That is a curious thing, because this government now has a track record of stuffing up their solutions to these problems ... Ms Lawrie: We had to fix up your mess. Mr ELFERINK: Where they say they have fixes, what they actually have is bandaids on amputations. Madam Speaker, the other thing I am curious about was ‘the CLP’ from the Treasurer. Well, I have listened to that argument. When do you become responsible for running the Territory? You have been sitting there 10 years. If I employed somebody in my business and, five years later, they were still standing there saying, ‘Oh, look, the people who were here before were actually the problem’, how long do you think my business would last? When do you become responsible for governing the Northern Territory? Ms Lawrie interjecting. Madam SPEAKER: Order! Mr ELFERINK: When do you actually take up the mantle of responsibility and say: ‘It was me’? Ms LAWRIE: A point of order, Madam Speaker! I remind the member for Port Darwin to direct his speech through the Chair. Madam SPEAKER: His comments through the Chair, yes. I ask you to do that. Mr ELFERINK: Yes Madam Speaker, I acknowledge my errant way. I did actually refer to the member directly but, as she continues to screech her denials, it is very difficult not to address the absurdity of her position. Madam Speaker, this government’s monumental stuff-up in the harbour, and ongoing stuff-up in the harbour, is going to be addressed, if this bill reflects the public comments we have heard so far, ‘I am going to come down like a tonne of bricks’, it is just dressage. This is a con being perpetrated on the people of the Northern Territory, and it is all about how they look, and nothing about the real and genuine protection of the Darwin Harbour and other harbours in the Northern Territory. I seek leave to move to complete my comments at a later date. Leave denied. Debated adjourned. |