We must reform Australia’s broken national environment laws, as they have failed to protect the environment. Projects critical to our future prosperity are bogged down in slow, opaque, duplicative and contested environmental planning and approvals processes based on poor information, and mired in administrative complexity.

Matters of national environmental significance (MNES), such as world and national heritage areas and the Great Barrier Reef, must be protected and restored.

Protecting the environment while facilitating faster project decision-making demands several important changes to the existing commonwealth legal framework. First, we need regional plans, developed cooperatively with state and local governments. Second, we need stronger resourcing of the newly established Environment Information........

© The Guardian