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The WA government plans to retrospectively validate 25 contentious resource project approvals, a move the Australian Conservation Foundation says shows the proposal for “one-stop-shop” state environmental decisions is “deeply inadequate”.
The WA government is introducing legislation to provide reassurance to 25 huge resource projects which were approved by the state’s Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) between 2002 and 2012. EPA board members were subsequently found to have a conflict of interest, and in 2012 a supreme court ruling found that the environmental approval of a $40bn gas hub at James Price Point in the Kimberley was illegal.
Chief justice Wayne Martin found that three board members had a series of conflicts of interest and should never have been involved in the decision.
That case cast the validity of 25 projects into uncertainty, and operators have sought reassurance that they are not under any threat of legal challenge, prompting the state government to introduce the legislation.
“We are deeply concerned this bill is simply a way for the state government to make sure the EPA’s previous environmental approvals stand immune from challenge – even though there is a strong case to say some should be re-examined,” said Wade Freeman, Kimberley project officer for the Australian Conservation Foundation.
“This whole episode shows again why we need federal involvement in important environmental decision making – and why the proposal for state-based so-called one-stop-shops for environmental decision making is deeply inadequate.”
Freeman said state governments were often at risk of conflicts of interest in resources projects because of the potential royalty income.
“The so-called one-stop-shop plan removes an important layer of protection for special places, including James Price Point on the Kimberley coast, where the WA government still fantasises about building a massive industrial gas processing plant.”
The proposed legislation will not revalidate the James Price point project, which is being reassessed by an independent panel.
The chairman of the EPA, Paul Vogel, who gave final approval to the James Price Point project but was not found to have a conflict of interest, has rejected calls for his resignation. He said the flawed approval process did not discount the science behind the decisions.
“My judgment at the time was based on Section 13. That was found to be flawed – I accept that,” he told News Corp. “I genuinely believed at the time I was managing those conflicts appropriately.”
The WA opposition leader, Mark McGowan, said a full inquiry should be held but Labor would support the legislation to validate the approvals.
Some of the projects were approved while Labor was in office but McGowan did not accept that his party needed to take responsibility for the problem.
He said the environment minister had admitted to causing the “stuff up” after the Liberals changed the rules in 2008 to allow EPA board members with a conflict to make decisions.
Labor had legislated in 2003 to prevent that happening, McGowan said.
“The buck stops with the government,” he said. “It is a mess of their making.”
Greens MP Lynn MacLaren said if the projects stretched back 10 years, both Labor and Liberal governments were “complicit” in allowing the EPA to operate this way, and described the mistakes as a travesty.
“How this was allowed to continue for so long brings to question the practices we have in place to monitor processes that ensure state authorities are not corrupt,” she said.
MacLaren told Guardian Australia the Greens were concerned about “any kind of blanket retrospective approval of projects that were approved by conflicted EPA boards”.
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