Australia politics live: Watt condemns Coalition plan to split environment laws; Joyce says ‘I’m still in the National party’

New nature laws expected to be introduced this week but Labor’s hopes of passing them before Christmas appear slim. Follow the latest updates liveGet our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcastTo split or not to split?No I’m not talking about the Coalition… but the bill we’ve been covering all morning, the EPBC Act.I think some of the things around regional planning certainly have merit, but we’ll work through all of the detail when it lands because we really only have some of the bill, and the minister has said he will introduce it this week into the parliament.The minister has put in some of Graeme Samuel’s recommendations and others that he hasn’t. For example, the premise of Graeme Samuel review was that there be a commission for the environment, and instead, what’s happened is the minister has put out there an EPA, an environmental protection agency, which was a promise by the Prime Minister at the election before the last one. And so there are some things that are straight out of the Samuel review playbook, and there are elements in there of uncertainty… And also, very, very high penalties that were higher than Tanya Plibersek’s natural positive laws.What we want to do is work with the state so that at least the assessments can be done by a state government on behalf of both the state and federal government, potentially saving months or years in an approval process.If a property developer wanted to build a development in the middle of an internationally listed wetland, that’s almost certainly going to get a no at the end of a process, and we might as well put everyone out of their misery early and give them a quick no …If a mining company wanted to go and mine under Uluru, and perish the thought they would ever want to do that, but clearly that kind of thing is going to be unacceptable because of the environmental damage that it would cause. So they’re the kind of things that we’re seeking to try to stop and stop early in the process. Continue reading...