This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

A Senate committee examining Australia’s animal extinction crisis has recommended new environment laws to try to halt the decline of threatened species.

The laws, proposed in an interim report by the committee, would include a new, independent national environmental protection authority that would have sufficient powers and funding to enforce compliance with environment law.

“The current laws are so weak with caveats, exemptions, ministerial discretion and loopholes that projects can be given the green light despite destroying or damaging critical habitat, or even wiping out a species entirely,” the Greens senator and inquiry chair, Janet Rice, said.



“Australia’s extinction crisis has only got worse in the 20 years since our environment laws were introduced. It’s absolutely clear they need a complete overhaul.”

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The inquiry was launched after the Guardian’s Our Wide Brown Land series exposed major flaws in Australia’s management of threatened species and the failure of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act to properly protect them.

The recommendations are backed by the Greens and Labor, who said in the interim report that the inquiry “has raised serious questions about whether the EPBC Act is still fit for purpose and is in fact achieving the objectives set out in the Act”.

“It is also clear that the EPBC Act is struggling to meet the scale of the challenge our environment faces, including the threats to our faunal species,” the report says.

On Thursday morning, crossbenchers including Andrew Wilkie, Adam Bandt and Kerryn Phelps also called for an overhaul of the act and for an independent environment protection authority that Wilkie said needed to have “real teeth”.

Labor has promised new environment laws if it is elected in May, as well as a national EPA, but environment groups and Labor Environment Action Network have been calling for the party to release the detail of its policy.

Environment groups said on Thursday the inquiry’s interim report made clear Australia’s regime for the protection of species and nature was failing.

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Basha Stasak, the nature campaigner at the Australian Conservation Foundation, said the committee “had clearly articulated major reform is necessary to save Australia’s precious threatened fauna and flora like the regent honeyeater, mountain pygmy-possum and corroboree frog”.

“Months of hearings and hundreds of submissions have sent a clear message to our elected representatives that our current national environment laws are failing to protect Australia’s unique natural values,” she said.

“This has been exacerbated by years of deep budget cuts to environmental programs by the federal government”.

ACF this week handed a petition with 177,000 signatures calling for new laws to the environment minister, Melissa Price.

The national director of the Wilderness Society, Lyndon Schneiders, said parties and candidates at the next election needed to “explicitly outline the policies they will pursue and the funding they will commit in response to this damning report”.

“The buck needs to stop somewhere. Australians will be horrified by the evidence presented to this inquiry and failures of successive governments to take real action.”

The extinctions inquiry will continue after the election.