Thursday, 3 August 2023

Bills

Mineral Resources (Sustainable Development) Amendment Bill 2023

Second reading

Debate resumed.

Nathan LAMBERT (Preston) (14:56): I rise to speak in support of the Mineral Resources (Sustainable Development) Amendment Bill 2023. Just before lunch those of us who were here heard that the member for Croydon was unwell, and I think we all wish him a speedy recovery. It was a bit of a pity that he was not here, because the member for Caulfield had to very valiantly try to fill his half-hour contribution.

A member: And he did brilliantly.

Nathan LAMBERT: He did all right. I am not sure he even got some basic facts about the size of the industry’s gross value added right, but we hope that when the member for Croydon returns in good health, he can fill him in. As we know, this bill amends the Mineral Resources (Sustainable Development) Act 1990 quite substantially. Amongst other things, it does rename the act. It does seem slightly odd to me that we are going to rename the act, but it will be called the Mineral Resources and Extractive Industries Act 1990. I kind of feel it should say 2023, but anyway, 1990 was a great year, and I am very happy to speak in favour of the creation of this new or revised act.

A member interjected.

Nathan LAMBERT: The minister remembers the 1990s, I am sure. As the team in the department know, this bill has had a long gestation period, and there are a lot of minor amendments in there which will update things that need updating, but there are three key changes in the bill. Firstly, it removes work plans, as we have heard, and replaces them with a general duty to minimise harm. There is a three-tiered risk system that the bill introduces to accompany that assessment of risk. Secondly, there is a new interim system for minor variations to work plans. And then finally, there are the transitional arrangements to bring rehabilitation plans and bonds across into the new regime.

I believe those second two components are largely uncontroversial. They both continue long-running regulatory trends in the area. We all think that genuinely inconsequential variations should not have to go through the whole assessment process. Similarly, I think there is broad agreement that rehabilitation has been an area in which we have needed to see strong regulation, and we have had to make sure that mines and quarries continually update and invest in their rehabilitation plans. But the key thrust of the bill is the removal of the work plans and the introduction of the new duty-based system in which proponents have a duty to minimise or avoid risk wherever practicable. This has, as we all know, been a common theme of recent regulatory efforts, based as it is on the general environment duty in the Environment Protection Act 2017.

I might just make an observation that this kind of thing of replacing fixed guidelines with a general duty always sounds good, but we do need to be conscious of what it actually means in the real world. Just to give one example, when a lot of us probably drove into work here, we would have driven down Macarthur Street. It does currently have a 40-kilometre-per-hour speed limit. Now, in theory you could replace the 40-kilometre-per-hour speed limit and have a general duty on drivers to minimise risk wherever practicable. But I think we all recognise that were you to do that, ultimately you would have to issue some guidelines for what sort of speed people would drive at, because the practicable bit is important. People have different tolerances for risk and they have different understandings of what is practicable, so there is always a need to give some guidance as to what that means.

I say all that because I think we will find, and it is indeed the minister’s intention, that as we come to dealing with quarries and mines, which have many areas of risk that need to be managed – they have buffer zones, noise levels, the gradients of their roads and all that sort of thing – I imagine we will see a similar sort of thing whereby over time the subordinate legislation will provide guidance as to exactly what that interpretation of ‘practicable’ is going to be so that we end up, if you like, with a general duty but no doubt also a lot of guidance to operators. In a lot of respects we will end up with a system that is not dramatically different from what we have at the moment.

However, two things will very much change as a result of this bill. Firstly, the new system will consolidate a whole range of matters that are currently scattered across thousands – certainly over a thousand – of work plans. We have hundreds of mines and quarries, and currently all those different work plans are effectively a whole lot of different subordinate instruments. The reality is that most of those mines and quarries face fairly similar challenges with respect to the environment and safety and so forth. A lot of those work plans already contain standardised controls – they already have risk management plans – and all of those things will transfer across to the subordinate legislation. As it stands, those work plans are not particularly transparent. They are inconsistent in their application. They are hard to update. They are hard to enforce. As a result of this bill we will have subordinate instruments that are the exact opposite. They will be transparent, they will be more consistent, they will be easier to update and they will be easier to enforce.

The second big change is that the bill will allow for that technical assessment of mines and quarries to happen in parallel with the planning process. Whether it is a conventional planning process or whether it is an environment effects statement (EES) process, either way it will now happen in parallel rather than the current statutory endorsement system, whereby basically you have this kind of period where the proponent goes back and forth with the department and the department gives preapproval to a work plan in a process that can take up to three years behind closed doors. It is not good for industry, it is not good for the community and it is not good for the environment. Then we finally get to the planning process and often I think operators have to go through the same thing again. Much more sensibly, now the regulator will just be a referral authority. The proponent will still of course have to send in their plans and go through an approval process, but essentially the preapproval and the approval will be rolled in together, turning three steps into two to the benefit of all of us.

It is very important to be clear what the changes in this bill do not do. There will be no change to that EES process. There will be no change to consultation requirements; I think that is very important to point out. In fact the consultation will get better under this bill, because communities and other interested stakeholders will have the chance right from the start of the planning process to have their say. I should draw your attention to this. I did get an email – some other members might have got an email – from Environmental Justice Australia on this bill. They did claim that the bill would reduce government oversight of the mining industry, scrap transparency requirements for mining operators and let operators self-assess the risks of their mining projects. Now, with the fullest of respect to the people at EJA, I do not think that is in any way a fair representation of what will happen with this bill. Projects that would have been rejected under the current regime will be rejected under this new system. There is no change to the regulatory standard that we are applying. Information that people need that is available under the current system will be available under the new system. There is no change to that either. I think certainly the expectation – certainly what will happen – is that with the very complex sites, which are often the ones where there is some debate in the community, there will be conditions attached to their operation which in all practical senses will be very similar to work plans anyway. I just want to say I appreciate the sentiment of the EJA. Certainly none of us wants to see a repeat of what happened with Rio Tinto’s Brockman 4 mine with the Juukan caves, obviously. There have been plenty of other examples, unfortunately, of mining projects that have not gone well around this country. To this day some of our communities are still dealing with mercury problems and arsenic problems caused by the original gold rush. But my strong feeling is that this bill will in no way worsen those problems. In fact it will strengthen our ability to deal with them.

It is important to reiterate that we do need a good mining industry and a good quarrying industry in order to support so many aspects of our life. We were at the Royal Children’s Hospital the other week – our family had cause to be. You do not normally think of mines and quarries when you are in a hospital, but as we know the concrete in a hospital, the glass in a hospital and the stainless steel, all of it, is ultimately a product of our extractive and mining industries. We need to support them. We need to make sure they can do the right thing to support our livelihoods whilst at the same time ensuring that those negative events I just referred to do not happen.

I should note on that particular issue that the bill does increase penalties significantly and introduces imprisonment for really serious breaches of the duty. To come back to the Environmental Justice Australia email, in that respect it furthers and supports the cause that they are seeking to advance rather than in any way hindering it. I should say I have tried to get in touch with that particular organisation and we have missed each other. Anyone in the government, I am sure, would be very happy to chat further with them about it, but as I said, this bill will really strengthen our ability to tackle bad actors, not weaken it. It is a good bill. It is a detailed bill. I do want to just briefly shout out to the team behind it. Firstly, Minister D’Ambrosio and her fantastic team. I want to recognise the efforts of Linda Bibby over a long period and shout out to Anna Cronin, who started some of this work back in 2017, Jane Burton, Dr Paul Smith, Anthony Hurst and John Krbaleski, all fine public servants that have contributed to the long gestation of this well-designed bill. Some of them have since moved on from those roles, but they have all made strong contributions. There is a lot of expertise embedded in this bill, and I commend it to the house.

Cindy McLEISH (Eildon) (15:06): I rise to make a contribution today on the Mineral Resources (Sustainable Development) Amendment Bill 2023. I have got a lot to say about this bill. I am not going to fit it all in in my 10 minutes, but I will do my best.

Among other things, this bill will amend the Mineral Resources (Sustainable Development) Act 1990 to change the title. Other things it does include removing the requirements relating to work plans, and I will comment on this a little bit further. What often happens when you change one thing in one bill is it requires you to make a bunch of consequential amendments. The bill, as I said, changes the name of the principal act to the Mineral Resources and Extractive Industries Act 1990. This is in order to reflect the broader regulatory framework encompassed by the act. If we think about extractive industries, it does expand on the typical mineral resources that we might think of generally, and extractive industries are particularly relevant in my electorate with the number of quarries. It seems that there are not enough quarries and not enough product in the state at the moment to cope with the demand.

Another key component of this is removing the requirement for holders and applicants of certain licences and extractive industry work authorities to lodge a work plan for the licence or the authority. Now, the work plans are exceptionally complex depending on what it is that you need to do. MinterEllison a few years ago prepared a work plan variation for mining in Victoria for the Minerals Council of Australia in the form of a flow chart. It is quite complex, and I know that for those within the industries having that change will make a difference to them. The bill also reforms how mining and quarrying works are to be approved and regulated. What it does here is it introduces a general duty to eliminate or minimise risk of harm to the environment, public land, property and infrastructure, and that is what is going to replace the current work plans, which, as I said, are really quite complex and burdensome. It is going to be similar to the general duty model in the environmental and OH&S legislation.

Another key component is the introduction of risk tiers of high, moderate and low to determine obligations under the duty. Too often we see a one-size-fits-all approach and the smaller player in the industry or in the field has to jump over loads of hurdles. They do not always have the actual resources on hand or can absorb those costs easily, so I am pleased to see something like this to really determine the different levels of risk and then obligations.

The coalition has come to this bill having conducted quite extensive consultation, and I am pleased with the extent to which we have gone and with the cooperation we have received from a number of the key players, being the Minerals Council of Australia –Victoria; Cement, Concrete and Aggregates Australia; and the Construction Material Processors Association, as well as drawing on that review published in June 2023 by MinterEllison. In fact the workflow thing was probably more recent than I alluded to.

Firstly, I am just going to touch on the minerals council. They supported the framework, subject to the regulations clarifying issues identified with the legislation. This is something that is really important, because too often we see: ‘This will be picked up in the regulations. Please trust us and we’ll get it right’. For me that is quite scary, because you do not know exactly what it is that will be in the regulations because it is not listed in the legislation. Hearing about the extent of the regulations does not give me a huge deal of comfort, and equally that could be said about the minerals council, because of some of their concerns. They really would like to see the regulations beforehand. Most mining projects are likely to go through the environment effects statement, and the process there is really quite onerous. I have seen a number of projects that have had to do that. If they do that, that means there is another reason why their planning permit works approval process can be bypassed and changed, because the EES process in itself is exceptionally complex, and it perhaps requires reform, according to the minerals council.

With Cement, Concrete and Aggregates Australia, they support the bill, as it enables a duty-based regime, which is a modern regulatory framework that aligns with safety and environmental legislation. They raise a really, really critical issue about the shortage that we are facing with quarry materials and supply and affordability, because the less that we have these materials available, the slower projects are, and the further they are from Melbourne, the longer it takes to bring them to where the growth is happening, and it adds additional cost. I know in my area that even where there are quarries there are shortages, and certainly with the program that the government has got going and the housing stimulus, this is creating an unprecedented demand for quarry material, so we need to be able to have systems and processes in place that can release these sorts of things quickly so it can be streamlined. There are significant issues with the current prescriptive work plans – this is Cement, Concrete and Aggregates Australia. As we have said, it is a significant current prescriptive work plan based approvals process in a time when we really need to get these things moving quite quickly. There are risks obviously, and the devil is always in the detail, and I have mentioned that without us seeing the regulations and having to trust what is going on. Even if there is a four-year transition period proposed, we still would like to see what is going on there.

The Construction Material Processors Association are concerned about the protection of resources that enable extraction of construction materials that is cost efficient to market – a similar vein to what I have already covered, because it is the taxpayer ultimately, the end consumer, who is paying for these. They also raised issues about the involvement of the local government authorities and even that the timing sequence for a decision by an LGA should be shortened from 12 months. Things do get held up. Sometimes the local government authorities are not always fully across all of the issues. If they are complex, it slows down their decision-making processes.

I want to also touch on the importance of mining in Victoria and in Australia. It is particularly important. The very recent Victorian Minerals Sector Economic Contribution Study commissioned by Minerals Council of Australia indicates that the sector contributed $510 million in direct spending in the Victorian economy in 2021. There are a number of ways that I want to highlight. We have had for a long time a very historic goldmining history, and this is still going, with significant operations at Fosterville, Ballarat, Stawell and Costerfield, which has also got an antimony mine. We have mineral sands mining. Mineral sands mining is really important because that is where you find the rare earth elements, and the rare earth elements are what are so critical to modern society. We have deposits in the north and the west of the state and a particularly large deposit of mineral sands – in fact one of the most valuable globally perhaps – down near Bairnsdale, 20 minutes north-west of Bairnsdale.

Mineral exploration has really been growing in Victoria, and I think that is a good thing, because these rare elements are what are required in electronic components. These are things that we use in daily life. It has allowed things to get lighter and smaller. The sorts of things I am talking about are with telecommunications and medical science – our phones, computers, MRIs, laser scalpels and anything relying on magnets and lasers. If you think about our phones, the SIM cards – tiny little SIM cards – are silicon with phosphorous and gold, and it is so important that we continue to make sure that we have mining operations in Victoria. The closer it is to home and to any manufacturing base, the better it is. Lithium is something I want to touch on, because lithium is required in so many things: batteries – rechargeables for mobile phones and even larger laptops – and we also use it in the health industry certainly as a component in the treatment of manic depression.

In other areas that are so important for food processing, there is mining. We have aluminium. Coca-Cola uses 300,000 tonnes of aluminium to produce their Coca-Cola cans in America. That is quite extraordinary. Closer to home, tinned products use tin and copper. Health care – uranium is used in cancer treatment and radiation. We have pacemakers relying on platinum and titanium in artificial joints, and as I said, for bipolar disorder we use lithium. There are more than 40 mined metals and rare earths needed to produce a single smartphone, and it is so important that we support this industry to make it a great industry in Victoria.

Nina TAYLOR (Albert Park) (15:16): I am very pleased to speak on the Mineral Resources (Sustainable Development) Amendment Bill 2023, and I thought I would start out by pointing out what the problems are that this bill is seeking to solve and will solve once passed, subject to the will of the chamber, obviously. The statutory endorsement process, essentially a preapproval of the work plan, has been criticised as unnecessary, costly and inefficient, and in some cases proposals that receive statutory endorsement are later rejected at the planning stage, resulting in significant up-front costs being incurred by operators in preparing a work plan without early advice from local councils about the likely problems in obtaining the planning approval. I think something really, really important to zone in on here is: it is important to note that these projects receive statutory endorsement with little or no community input. So these are some of the significant elements which this bill is seeking to overcome. That is why these legislative reforms are so very important. Statutory endorsements are based on the operation of the project itself, but do not consider a key question: is this the right location for this development?

We can see where the vulnerabilities are in the current process to date. The risk is the inconsistency in the work plan and lack of transparency, including – and again coming to this community aspect – the lack of public availability of work plans. You can see the problems that have to be fixed. An absence of community input to the approval process after statutory endorsement can – further problem – give rise in the community to an impression that work plan approvals are predetermined, undermining the credibility of and faith in decision-making in the industry. We can see some significant problems there.

There is a further issue which has been alluded to as well: once approved, the work plan is not changed or updated except in limited circumstances. The work plan system is static, and herein lies a very large problem. There is no adequate process requiring operators to review and adapt their work plan to changes in their operations in a dynamic way. Again, this is a problem which this bill is seeking to overturn. Let us come to some of the solutions. We are replacing the opaque and restrictive work plans with a constant statutory duty to eliminate or, if not possible, to minimise the risks of harm as far as reasonably practicable. This brings the regulation of mines and quarries into line with the approach and regulatory practices of the Environment Protection Authority and WorkSafe. This also removes the statutory endorsement requirement, treating mining and quarrying applications in the same way as other permit applications to create, and I am coming back to this critical element, greater community input into proposals – get this – right at the beginning of the process, ensuring there is open and transparent engagement. You might wonder why I am emphasising this point. Because there has been some criticism suggesting the reverse, now I just want to affirm factually what this bill will actually deliver. This removes a significant source of unnecessary cost and time delay for industry from the approvals process, without reducing regulatory oversight.

So you can see there are important caveats built into this legislative reform. It will deliver a simpler regulatory framework by streamlining processes for the submission, assessment and determination of regulatory approvals for mineral and quarrying operations. A duty-based model is a far greater way to manage risk than the current work plan system. I think that probably gives you a little overview of some of the very significant caveats and also some of the solutions that are being brought about by this legislative reform.

I do want to go to some other anticipated concerns which are being addressed by this bill. Another concern was that the first time communities hear about a mine could be when they start digging. I am very happy to say that this is completely false and shows a complete lack of understanding of the bill. With this reform, community input will now be the first step before a new project can be approved via the planning process. This brings quarrying and minerals projects into line with any other developments, so I hope that allays some of the concerns that may have been anticipated unnecessarily. But it is good we have the questions raised, then it is great in this circumstance, in debate, to be able to address them.

A couple of the other issues that I did want to speak to are, if we look at clause 38AAG(1) of the bill:

The holder or former holder of a licence must, before carrying out any work under the licence, apply to the Department Head for a determination of the risk level for that licence.

The bill requires new operators to carry out an initial self-assessment of risk when applying for a risk tier determination by Earth Resources Regulation. I note that there may be some concerns about this concept of self-assessment, but I want to address those concerns. That self-assessment will be based on the prescribed criteria and information, but – and this is what is important – ERR will make the final determination of the risk tier. Again we can see important caveats that are built into the fundamental and central tenets of this bill. If someone is wanting to create a new minerals mine or a quarry, their risk tier is assessed and ultimately determined by the regulator. Again we can see that there has been a lot of careful consideration and analysis ahead of compiling the fundamental changes that are being brought about through this bill.

I just want to reiterate a point that was made by another learned colleague – that is, when it comes to environmental assessment, these reforms do not change the Minister for Planning’s ability to require projects with potentially significant environmental impacts to be assessed through the environment effects statement process. This does not change. As we have seen previously and are continuing to see, all the new minerals and mining projects currently being progressed in Victoria have been referred to an EES, so we have a direct reference point as well, which I think is good and lends itself to the credibility of this caveat.

What about concerns about consultation with regard to the formulation of this bill? I am happy to say and to affirm that the government consulted widely with local government, industry and the broader community, including representatives of traditional owner groups, environmental justice advocates and landowners, during the development of this bill over a number of years. Any suggestion to the contrary is simply not true, so I hope that that also addresses any concerns that may be flagged in that regard. The bill purely creates the enabling framework for transitioning to a duty-based model, every aspect of which will be set in regulation, codes, standards and guidance material. These will be subject to a public consultation process before they come into effect in 2027 so industry and community can have confidence in the standards set. I think all would agree that that is well and truly a reasonable time frame to give community really intense consultation on these important reforms, and we are saying it here in the chamber. We are affirming it, so that should also go towards allaying some of the concerns that may be anticipated in this space and in this state.

Another point that I did want to raise was with regard to fundamentally the element of enforcement. For instance, a duty holder will commit an offence of breaching the statutory duty if they fail to minimise the risks of harm posed to the environment, members of the public, land, property or infrastructure as far as reasonably practicable in carrying out the work under a licence, work authority or in relation to the rehabilitation of land, and Earth Resources Regulation will be ensuring compliance with the general duty. This bill also expands – and this is very important – Earth Resources Regulation enforcement options, increasing the maximum penalties available under the act for instances of non-compliance with the statutory duty. This includes jail time for aggravated offences and a stronger enforcement regime, including increased penalties for non-compliance and including jail time for egregious breaches. So you can see it is really strengthening the space with which to enforce very important elements and controls concerning the matter of mineral resources. We know that in the renewables industry and when building train tracks and the like, fundamentally they do need minerals to be able to do this. This is just part of the process. We cannot pluck the minerals from the air; they do have to come from the ground. But equally it is very important to have proper controls in place, caveats that are there that can be enforced and very significant and profound community consultation over a reasonable time period.

Jade BENHAM (Mildura) (15:26): It is my pleasure to rise today to speak on the Mineral Resources (Sustainable Development) Amendment Bill 2023. This is a bill that is very important to my patch, my electorate of Mildura, that covers 37,500 square kilometres and which is very, very, very rich in mineral sands and in fact rare earths. I will get onto that little bit later, but I obviously want to highlight the provisions that will allow a more streamlined planning framework and make things a little bit more swift on the ground, because some of these projects with regard to mineral sands and rare earths have taken 10, 15 years to get off the ground. Some of them are still in the very infant stages, such as Avonbank. Hopefully now they are up to the last stage of submitting that work plan, so hopefully this will streamline that project as well.

I have been doing a lot of speaking with friends, colleagues and contacts that I have within the mining industry, because they are very thick on the ground in places like Mildura, like Donald, like Ouyen. There are plenty of people around that have either worked in the industry or currently work in the industry, and there are people who are actually degree-qualified geologists in Mildura. There are actually a lot of them, which may surprise some people. It surprised me. So I have been doing a lot of – I will call it consultation – speaking to them and getting all sides of the story, particularly when concerns are raised with my office regarding this bill in particular, this amendment.

As the member for Albert Park stated, there has been some concern conveyed to my office in particular about the belief, somewhat misplaced, that this will remove regulation from the mining industry in this state, and it will not. All it seeks to do is streamline that work planning process so that we can get projects off the ground more quickly, because, as we know, demand for mineral resources and rare earths is growing day by day by day. So we need those mineral resources – the mineral sands, the rare earths – to keep that investment in renewable energy moving forward. In all of the electronics that we use every day, our phones, our computers, everything these days – we live in the digital age – mineral resources are a key element. That is not to mention, like the member for Eildon stated earlier, some really important medications that come out of rare-earth deposits and mineral sands and different mineral elements.

On the concern around removing regulation around mining and quarries – I mean, the regulation is good. We need regulation in a sector like this, of course, and sometimes we tend to over-regulate certain industries, but this is just getting rid of the red tape, and you do not often see that come through this place. Usually we are adding more red tape and more red tape until we find it hard to move, but this one is actually going to streamline that process for the industry. It is one of those occasions where the outcome will be quite positive and really practical on the ground, and that is what we like to see, particularly the Nats – we are practical, pragmatic people and we like practical solutions, so it is a good thing. I know that when we start talking about mines and quarries some people immediately start twitching at the very thought of digging holes in the ground, but like I said, mineral resources are critical not only to things we use every day but to things that will become more important into the future, like electric cars – you cannot have an electric car without nickel – phones and the ability to develop renewable energy. The investment is going into the same part of the world – my part of the world – where we have 360 sunny days a year on average to harvest that solar energy.

I have got some facts that I could bamboozle you with, and why not – I have got 5 minutes. Solar photovoltaic plants, wind farms and electric vehicles require more critical minerals to build than their fossil fuel-based counterparts. It makes me giggle when you start weighing up electric cars versus fossil fuels and all that kind of stuff. A typical electric car requires six times the mineral inputs of a conventional car, and an offshore wind plant requires 13 times more mineral resources than a similarly sized gas-fired plant. Since 2010 the average amount of mineral resources needed for a new unit of power generation has increased by 50 per cent as the share of renewables in new investment has risen. We can see why we need to streamline the process of pulling those minerals out where we need them, in a carefully planned and regulated way of course, and to look at the environmental impacts that will have after the life of the mine has ended. Some of these mines that have been planned at the moment have 25-year work plans written for them and some of them are expected to have life spans of up to and above 40 years, so it is really important.

Like I mentioned earlier, there are quite a few projects in my patch. In the past – almost the immediate future, although ‘immediate future’ is probably talking 10 years ago, but that is immediate when we talk about mine life – there was the Iluka sands mine at Ouyen, and soon we will have the Donald rare earth and mineral sands project, to mention a couple. There are also neighbouring projects like Avonbank, which goes into Lowan, and the Goschen mine, which is in Murray Plains. That has great benefits not only for the industry itself but also for the entire region. The Donald rare earth and mineral sands project has been subject to a detailed evaluation over many, many, many years, and all main regulatory approvals have been achieved or are well advanced – they are just about ready to kick off. The project evaluation and the technical work have included the completion of the mine planning, which is what we are talking about – the recovery after it has ended. The processing plant and the infrastructure designs have been done. The engineering design has been done. Product transportation, sales, marketing and the major regulatory approvals have been done, with the exception of the project work plan. Hopefully now we can streamline this and bring that project to life more quickly.

The Donald mineral sands project will be and can be certainly a unique contributor to the local community. They have committed themselves to a long-term generational project – and it will be – with a life up to 40 years. The company has committed itself to extensive community consultation, and it believes it has an obligation and an opportunity to make a sustained and longer term contribution to the region, and it does. They will adopt a policy of seeking to employ local people with all of the jobs that will come from this, and that is a priority. They will only relocate specialist skills when they need to, and like I said before, there are many, many university-qualified geologists and experts on the ground in our region. A local procurement policy is also in place, and that spans from catering services in the mess halls to the trades specialists. Housing is a real issue in our area, as it is everywhere, and these mines will need to house their workers somewhere. The legacy that will be left after these mines is not only great for the industry itself, but we will be left with workers’ accommodation and things that can be used afterward or that are multiuse, which is fantastic. We saw that with Ouyen. There are 18 new house builds this year in Ouyen, so that town is booming afterwards. They have a very, very active, committed community that is helping Ouyen thrive after the mine closed down.

Also there are other mines in the planning stages, like I said, in neighbouring electorates – the Goschen project and the Avonbank project – which really do have major benefits for the entire region. There is a lot of distance between towns and between mine sites. Fly-in fly-out is not always an option, unless you are close to Mildura, which has an exceptional regional airport, and we are very, very lucky to have that regional airport in Mildura. But a lot of it is driving. Imagine trying to drive in and out of these mine sites, and it might be tough at the moment because you do have to dodge a lot of potholes. But imagine not being able to dig a quarry and try and fix these quarries without the mining industry. Hopefully this amendment will allow the quarries to open up – the ones that are in the planning stages at the moment. Maybe we can get some of those potholes fixed just a little bit more quickly so we can get the mine workers in and out safely – not to mention their families – and get them home to their families as well. Mineral resource mining, rare earths and mineral sands, is growing exponentially in the Mildura electorate, and it is really exciting for things to come.

Iwan WALTERS (Greenvale) (15:36): It is great to rise to contribute to this really important bill and to follow colleagues on my side of the chamber, the member for Albert Park and the member for Preston, who bring a wealth of experience in this kind of effective regulation of our extractive industries. The member for Mildura talked about some of the growth areas for our extractive industries in Victoria, across the Mallee and the Wimmera. It is great to see that things like mineral sands are making such an important contribution to our state’s economy.

I want to talk briefly about the purpose of this bill. I will not dwell too long on those technical dimensions because I think the member for Preston gave a fantastic exposition of those and why they are so important. But it is important to note that the purpose of this bill is to amend the Mineral Resources (Sustainable Development) Act 1990 (MRSD act) to modernise the regulatory approval processes for exploration, mining and quarrying industries in Victoria and in doing so improve the management of risks associated with minerals and quarry operations by a primary duty – and it is important to focus on that dimension, that primary duty – to eliminate wherever possible the risks of harm.

It is important to address the inherent risks of mining. The nature of mining and quarrying activities poses risks and can be a potential cause of serious harm to public safety, the environment, infrastructure, land and property. They are not static risks, they are inherently dynamic. They are emerging and evolving. They recede and they emerge over time, especially given the longitudinal nature of a mine or a quarry, which can extend over decades. In a previous life, as it were, I spent quite a lot of time on the west coast of Tasmania, and others may also have visited that part of the world, places like Queenstown, where the environmental damage and the legacy of unregulated mining in the 19th and 20th centuries has left an incredibly scarred landscape. It is indicative of why effective regulation is so important. We need a strong mining sector; it is an integral part of our economy. It has been for 180 years in this state. But doing that in balance with effective regulation that minimises those risks, eliminates them to the extent that it is possible, is so important. You only have to look around the physical environment of some of those previous mine sites where that effective regulation has not been in place to see why this bill and why the work that has been conducted by Better Regulation Victoria, by the Minister for Energy and Resources’ team, by the minister herself, is so important, and I thank them for that. The need for reform has been highlighted in a number of studies and reviews, including Getting the Groundwork Right and State of Discovery, which are fantastic publications championing our state’s resources sector.

I just want to note that in streamlining while also maintaining the integrity of the regulatory process, the amended MRSD act will decrease red tape and costs involved in obtaining permission to commence work. That is expected to reduce the administrative costs for operators associated with extractive operations by approximately $3.25 million to $3.5 million every year and in doing so, put downward pressure on the costs of extractors.

As those who come to this house know – there are many who do not, particularly of the Greens persuasion – housing is the most incredibly important policy area confronting our state today, so putting downward pressure on extractors, making the cost of house building cheaper, I think is a good thing to do. If only there were Greens colleagues – fellow parliamentarians, I should say, not colleagues – to endorse that, that would be lovely.

Gary Maas: They have got to turn up.

Iwan WALTERS: They have got to turn up. They do have to turn up, member for Narre Warren South. I am going to have a bit of a frolic through the history of mining in Victoria. This chamber, this city and the economic fabric of our entire state were built on the prosperity originally delivered by mining. I know we have got a number of regional MPs on our side of the house particularly concentrated in the golden triangle of Bendigo, Ballarat and Stawell – and I will return to Stawell later. The golden triangle had the richest alluvial fields in the world, member for Melton. From 1851 to 1896 the Victorian mines department reported that a total of 1,898,391 kilograms of gold were mined in this state. Gold was the key driver of Victoria’s economic diversification away from wool.

As a Labor MP I think it is salient that the role of gold in our state’s economy was also what set Victoria apart in the 19th century by increasing the purchasing power of the working man and woman. The gold rush between 1850 and 1860 increased the real value of wages by 70 per cent. It made sure that working-class people in this state were relatively wealthier and better off with a higher purchasing power than any other equivalent in the rest of the world. That set us on a path to prosperity and to modernisation, which the labour movement captured and supported, and has built the state and the economy we enjoy today.

There is a purpose to this, Acting Speaker, you will be happy to know. The reason gold was so important to the Victorian economy, and the contribution of the Victorian economy to the global economy, was in part due to the operation of the gold standard. Others may also be aficionados of economic history and like their gold standard history, but for the period 1717 to 1931 Britain and consequently Victoria and Australia operated a formal or a de facto gold standard for a lot of that period. It meant that the holder of a bank note could claim the convertibility and demand immediate payment of bullion at a fixed conversion rate, if they held that bank note. That regime required sufficient gold to be in existence to maintain convertibility. In effect global economic expansion and growth under the gold standard were contingent on a constantly increasing supply of gold. So Victoria’s contribution to the world economy in that first wave of pre-First World War globalisation cannot be underestimated.

As I said, there is an important point to this historical interlude. If we get the regulatory settings right, we can help to unlock a new wave of investment and prosperity that is built on our extractive industries, but this time around things like mineral sands and rare earths, which are integral components in the new wave of the green economy, in batteries, in things which are going to power us through the 21st century and into the 22nd, without diminishing the prosperity of working people in Victoria but by providing new opportunities and new jobs. So it is important, and the gold standard does have a role to play, even in this speech today.

Mineral sands exploration has grown by 321 per cent in the last four years alone. That is just a small indication of the real interest that exists in developing our state’s critical mineral opportunities. Exploration is growing as well – $222 million was spent in the last recorded financial year alone. That is a huge investment in regional Victoria. It creates local jobs, it upskills the regional workforce and it enables investment in the local communities that really need it most.

I do want to, in summary, reflect on the importance of making sure that externalities are captured through the regulatory process – that we avoid environmental catastrophe and that we do not have a model that socialises the costs on to communities and privatises the gains. I talked a little bit about Queenstown before. I think that a social licence for the resources sector is critical. We do know that earth resource exploration and development come with inherent risks. That statutory primary duty will form the basis of a new outcome-focused and risk-based regulatory framework, which is particularly important in Victoria because we are small, because we are relatively densely populated and because we have a diverse economy.

My own lived experience is indicative of that. I taught at Stawell Secondary College, which is only a few hundred metres from what I think has probably been either the biggest or the second biggest producer of gold in Victoria over the last 20 years. It means that community buy-in is incredibly important. The important work that the mine is doing in providing jobs and generating gold that adds to our capacity to pay for public services through royalties here also adds to our balance of payments and other great benefits like that at a macro-economic level. It is reliant on there being good information flows through to community through things like the Stawell Gold Mines community hub, where information about mining activity is shared and where applications for environmental planning and permission are there and visible for the public to be able to access and have clarity and confidence that what is happening is in accordance with law. But it is going beyond that; it is buying into the idea of social licence being particularly important for our mining sector.

In the short time remaining to me, I just want to say that Scrutiny of Acts and Regulations Committee has considered this bill and particularly the new notification offence whereby authority holders have an obligation to tell the secretary if circumstances change, even if those changed circumstances reveal breaches of law. The critical point here – and SARC has considered this; we have written to the minister to get some further information – is that if operators act in good faith and if they are accurate in their reporting, that acts as an effective safe harbour, so there is no excuse not to do the right thing.

Roma BRITNELL (South-West Coast) (15:46): I rise to speak on the Mineral Resources (Sustainable Development) Amendment Bill 2023. This bill does a number of things that have already been outlined by the initial speaker, my colleague the member for Caulfield, on behalf of the Shadow Minister for Energy and Resources, who is away sick. Basically I am going to stick to some parts of the bill that do some good things. The bill reforms how mining and quarry works are approved and regulated, and it does it by introducing a general duty to eliminate or minimise the risk of harm to the environment, public, land, property and infrastructure. So basically it replaces the current work plan, and that is a good thing because we do need some flexibility in the industry. That is what the industry has been telling us.

The member for Caulfield talked about his time in the portfolio, when in 2017 the industry was saying that they needed to have more flexibility so that things could happen at a rate that was reasonable rather than having the red tape compromising and killing the ability for mining to take place. Obviously what we do not want to see is any compromise to the environment. But this change will look very similar to the general duty model in the environment and OH & S legislation. Now, I have been contacted by people concerned about this change and that it will result in more risk to the environment, and I know that no-one in this chamber wants to see that. We all understand that the environment has a high priority in everyone’s mind and that we should always leave things better than we found them, and that is, I think, the intent of everybody in this chamber.

The bill also introduces risk tiers of high, moderate and low to determine obligations under the duty. Now, the Mineral Councils of Australia, Victoria division, have given us feedback on this bill. The Cement, Concrete and Aggregates Australia organisation have also given us feedback, as have the Construction Material Processors Association. Now, these are very important associations because they represent a very important part of our world where we need to be able to mine. The environment has provided for us – minerals and gold that are produced by the environment, not produced by mankind, as I think the member for Greenvale was trying to say. ‘We produce gold’ – no, we do not. We mine gold – the environment produced it – and we make sure we do it in a responsible way. I can understand the importance of getting this right. We are not opposing this bill, but we do reserve the right, in the upper house, to examine it closely, because what is lacking is some detail. Basically, the Minerals Council and the CMPA and the CCAA have some concerns that there is a lack of detail that this government is leaving until after the legislation is introduced to actually refine, and I can understand the nervousness that that creates.

It does not seem like a responsible approach to me either. I think too often we see this particular government, the Andrews Labor government, rush into legislation with scant detail of how it will actually be implemented. In the last sitting week before the winter recess, we saw the pharmacy bill passed through this house, which is an example of this, where the committee that was going to work out the final details of how the medications would be safely delivered had only been set up a week before the legislation was introduced. They are still not able to give us the details of how the pharmacists will be dispensing these medications in as little time as, I think, November, when that bill is going to come into play. That is one example. The public drunkenness bill is another example of the way this current government rushes through bills with no detail, and I am getting contacted still by the police asking how the health professionals and the police are supposed to handle someone who is in a state of drunkenness and may be a danger either to themselves or others. There is no clarity. That is meant to be coming into play in the first week of November, Melbourne Cup week. Still, the lack of clarity is concerning.

I have been on many boards where you set strategy for five to 10 years and you then look back when you have been off the board for a while and you realise the goodwill or the intent has actually changed and what you intended in the strategy has really shifted significantly. That is why legislation is so important. It is not about let us suck it and see how it plays out. It is about putting the parameters in place so the regulations sit firmly within some strict guidelines. I can understand the organisations are nervous about this, but they all actually agree with the intent, so we are, as I say, happy to go along with that, because the last thing we want is to hold up progress when it comes to making sure we have access to mined goods.

Mining is incredibly important. The member for Caulfield outlined the contribution to our state economically that mining brings in annually, and it was in excess of $1 billion. That is all very important, but so is having a roof over our head and so is having roads to drive on. We have got companies in South-West Coast – Bamstone quarry is a really great example of a mining company. There are only two bluestone quarries left in Victoria. You will be shocked, I am sure, to hear this. We have got bluestone quarries which have high-quality bluestone, and what I will tell you now is, I thought, quite interesting. There are different qualities. Bluestone can have a lot of iron in it, which rusts. When it rusts it becomes quite slippery. Bamstone have to compete against China because the Andrews Labor government actually bring in bluestone and put it in our pavers, in our streetscapes, and that is actually really dangerous. So it is a really big problem when we have got a government that does not prioritise procurement from local businesses like our very valued Port Fairy Bamstone quarries, who do so much good for our local community and so much philanthropy. I think this government could have a bit of a think about what we would lose if we lost businesses like that. Putting procurement policies in place that prioritise businesses like that is a sensible thing to do. As a farmer you know that the biggest cost to bringing anything on transport is the weight of something, so surely when bluestone is being brought from China there is something very, very wrong, especially when it is of inferior quality and dangerous to our community, because slipping over on our streetscapes is not what we want to see.

That brings me to our roads, because I remember when Bamstone was sending bluestone down to do the streetscape in St Kilda – our roads are so bad and have got a lot worse since this – that the pieces of bluestone were breaking when they were being transported in the trucks down to St Kilda from Port Fairy. I think that really epitomises the state of our roads. We have got to have mines getting quarry material out so that we can fix our roads, build our houses and meet contracts in an affordable way – although we saw the humiliation Victoria suffered under the Commonwealth Games when this government broke the contract, so maybe they do not value efficiency and good business the way I do When you run a farm you need to understand those sorts of things – but maybe not.

This bill, we hope, will improve the regulatory environment and not add more red tape, and that is why we want to support the councils saying that they want the bill to go through. But I ask myself: why is this bill coming into the Parliament at the moment? I would suspect it is to avoid the criticism of Victoria being ranked last in the most recent report of investment attractiveness in mining. I suppose that comes again to our reputation as a state. Businesses are leaving left, right and centre because of the taxes imposed on businesses. Look at the cost of WorkCover to businesses; it is killing and crippling businesses.

Unfortunately, the government has got a lot to learn. We value the environment, and that is why it is important to get this right. I do have a concern also about the risk mitigation aspect. Who is going to determine what low and what moderate is, and will this just end up in VCAT? If it has not got that clarity in the legislation and it looks more confusing because the regulatory parameters are not set yet, we will end up with more VCAT hearings when they are just backlogged to over two years now. That will not help the industry, and helping the industry is what I am absolutely intent on, because I want to see our quarries working efficiently, getting those products of limestone, bluestone – all the sorts of quarry material that we need to build our roads and build our houses – as efficiently as possible to our shires, to our builders and to our industries that require them.

I just hope this government understands the importance of the work that they have got in front of them to make sure this state progresses. I am afraid that from what I saw with the Commonwealth Games I am not convinced that our government does have an appreciation of good, efficient business. But let us hope this legislation does something towards that.

Dylan WIGHT (Tarneit) (15:56): It gives me great pleasure this afternoon to contribute to the Mineral Resources (Sustainable Development) Amendment Bill 2023. Deputy Speaker, you would know that Victoria’s minerals and extractives industries are vital to our state’s economy, in particular in regional areas outside of the metro area. They generate around $6.3 million each year and comprise 3.2 per cent of Victoria’s industrial output. Just in the 2021–22 financial year this sector contributed 30 per cent of the total growth in our state’s economy, so a significant driver in economic growth in the state of Victoria.

Our state, Victoria, has a long and proud history in the mining sector. The Latrobe Valley is an area that contributed to Victoria’s energy production for generations; we are obviously moving away from coal-fired power at the moment, but nonetheless mining in that area has been something that has been incredibly important for generations. Obviously the gold rush in both Bendigo and Ballarat and the surrounding areas some time ago was important as well. But it is not just mining in that traditional sense that we have thought about, but also the many quarries around Victoria where we extract the very important minerals that we use to manufacture the materials that contribute to so many important infrastructure projects in our great state.

Our ambitious infrastructure projects and also the rising demand for affordable housing have placed an enormous demand on the resources and minerals that we have here in this state. The resources we excavate, like high-quality minerals for our tunnels, train tracks and roads and cement for housing construction, are essential for Victoria’s future.

Whilst we are moving away from that traditional mining that has played such a pivotal role in the Victorian economy for so long, our mineral resources sector is going to continue to be so incredibly important to build the rail infrastructure, whether it be the new Tarneit West station that we are building in my community of Tarneit – it is absolutely fantastic; whether it be the level crossing removals that we are undertaking all around Victoria, including three that have been removed in my municipality of Wyndham; whether it be significant infrastructure projects like the West Gate Tunnel, a project that is being built purposely to benefit those in the outer west and cut their travel times to the city by up to 20 minutes; or indeed whether it be the Metro Tunnel, the most significant rail project that we have undertaken in this state – all of those projects, and obviously the building of affordable houses and new homes, the building of new schools, all of those projects and indeed our economy rely on this sector, which is why it is so incredibly important.

Even though this sector and the projects that it supports are so incredibly important, the legislation governing the sector is unfortunately outdated, complex and inflexible. This has resulted in a series of challenges for the industry and most importantly for the communities that it impacts, in particular those regional communities. The current works approval process is highly convoluted. It is fraught with inefficiency. It is fraught with red tape. I actually agreed with something that the member for Caulfield said, perhaps for the first time in my being in this place, when he made a contribution on this bill earlier: the process is bound with red tape, making it incredibly difficult to get through, which is why this piece of legislation is so incredibly important.

To initiate any project the current legislation mandates three stages: a statutory endorsement of proposed works; application for a planning permit; and then finally, once you get through all of that, approval of a work plan. This process is often criticised for being time consuming, costly and inconsistent. For instance, statutory endorsement is a sort of pre-approval that in many cases is later denied at the planning stage. This means operators incur substantial costs in preparing work plans without prior consultation with local councils regarding potential issues. This lack of early communication exacerbates delays and increases costs for operators, breeding frustration and mistrust. Furthermore, there is a troubling lack of transparency in this process. Work plans, which include crucial detail like rehabilitation plans, are often kept out of public view. As I said, there is a lack of transparency around that process and the community has little to no say in the approvals process after the statutory endorsement. This situation can cause a sense of suspicion among community members, potentially undermining their faith in the industry and the decision-making process and indeed their faith around the project.

To add to the issue, the current system does not facilitate the dynamic updating of work plans. Once a work plan is approved, it is largely set in stone, with changes permitted only in rare circumstances, meaning that the process is not agile and there is no flexibility within it to change if circumstances do indeed change. This static approach does not align with the realities of mining and quarrying, where conditions and requirements can change rapidly, as I suggested.

The heart of this bill is an innovative approach replacing the current restrictive work plans with a more proactive, constant statutory duty to eliminate or, if not feasible, to minimise the risks of harm as far as is reasonably practicable. This proposed change aligns the regulation of mines and quarries more closely with the regulatory process practices of the EPA and WorkSafe Victoria. So firstly, it removes the requirement for statutory endorsement, treating mining inquiry applications just like any other permit applications. This provides an opportunity for greater community input into that process, into the project and what is happening and into proposals right at the outset of the process. This shift will ensure more transparent and open engagement, fostering trust and collaboration between industry and communities. And it is incredibly important during these processes that we bring the community along with the project and we give them a sufficient opportunity for consultation and to be heard. This new approach can significantly reduce unnecessary costs and time delays in the approval process without compromising on regulatory oversight. The bill streamlines processes, making the submission assessment and determination of regulatory approvals for mineral and quarrying operations much simpler. The shift from rigid work plans to a duty-based model will also allow more effective management of risks. This is a dry piece of legislation, but it is one that is so incredibly important. I congratulate the minister and her staff, and I commend the bill to the house.

Ellen SANDELL (Melbourne) (16:06): Today I am also speaking on the Mineral Resources (Sustainable Development) Amendment Bill 2023, and as others have said, this bill is a shake-up in the way that mines are approved and regulated in Victoria. I have been listening to the contributions from other members, and it is true that the way that mines are approved and regulated in Victoria now is not working. That is clear. The process is confusing; it is opaque. Many communities who live near quarries and mines, especially, suffer from this. The environment also suffers from this. Personally I have worked with many local communities across the state over the last 10 years who have really had to fight tooth and nail to stop bad mining proposals from going ahead – something that has not been talked about a whole lot in the chamber in this debate. These are proposals that would have poisoned local communities and rivers, decimated biodiversity and severely affected the people who live near them. Sometimes it is a years-long or decade-long fight from local communities, who are often vindicated in the end when an environment effects statement or similar determines that the mine is not a good use of that area. But communities in the meantime have to go through so much. Many communities who are living next to mines have mines that do not take their responsibilities seriously enough, and that has a real impact on people’s daily lives.

We could have taken an opportunity to fix some of this, but the government has put forward a bill that we fear could make things even worse. We fear it has been designed in a way to make it simply easier to get mines approved in Victoria. Mining companies so far seem quite happy with the bill, but locally affected communities, councils and environment groups are all raising serious concerns with it. I think it is important when all of those groups are raising serious concerns about a bill that we do look at some of those concerns, so I would like to detail some of those today.

Firstly, the bill would remove a crucial requirement for mining companies to lodge work plans with the Earth Resources Regulator. To be honest, when I first looked at this change I thought it looked like something that was written and designed by the Minerals Council to make mining easier, and I have heard some of the contributions from Labor MPs today saying that getting a mine approved is time consuming and costly, that there is too much red tape and that we are increasing costs for operators, which to me sound a little bit like some talking points from the mining industry. But let us look at what work plans are – the thing that the government will be removing. Work plans cover details like community engagement plans; elimination or mitigation of risks, particularly for work that might impact the environment, groundwater, the community, land, property or infrastructure; and also plans for rehabilitation. This bill replaces work plans with a duty for mining companies to self-assess and then minimise risk to the environment and people, akin to perhaps the general duty under the Environment Protection Act 2017.

I heard the previous Labor speaker say that work plans contain crucial details for certain things in the mining plan, but now we are removing them. Work plans do offer this singular first step in ensuring transparency and public reporting for local communities. They create some level of environmental oversight and general compliance. They are not perfect, and we know that things are perhaps not working as well as they could, but I do not think that just removing work plans is necessarily the right answer. Mining licences are not publicly available documents, so this means that work plans are the only things detailing mining and quarrying projects that communities can access. Yes, they have to pay a $30 fee, and yes, they are often not as transparent as they could be, but without them we do not really have anything. Otherwise communities would have to go through long, expensive and often fruitless freedom of information requests. There is nothing really in these amendments that gives us confidence that companies will have to provide equivalent publicly available details in another format, save for perhaps a watered-down requirement for a rehabilitation plan, which I think has some issues as well. In the minister’s second-reading speech we read that some industries have complaints about the current approvals process – basically, that seeking statutory endorsement of a work plan before getting planning approval led to unnecessary cost and delay in the approvals process for mining companies. Maybe we could have reordered the process and could have done things differently rather than scrapping the work plan entirely.

Potentially what might be worse for communities is what it means for work plan variations, which are currently required for any operator who suddenly decides to expand their mine, for example. Under this bill it seems that all they would have to do is notify the department head, and, say, a mining company wants to double, triple or quadruple the size of their project. It is not clear how the community would find out about that. So not only does this remove some level of transparency and a review avenue for communities who might not want to see mine expansion, but potentially it removes their shot at the only mechanism we have for an actual environmental investigation – a referral for an environment effects statement – because unless the minister calls for one, the decision to request an EES will remain the decision of local councils, who are already, as we know, quite under-resourced but will now be saddled with this additional job of deciding whether or not to approve mines in their local communities.

This brings us to a second concern that many groups are raising with us with the bill, which is that without the requirement for a work plan, the first and only step in the approvals process becomes planning permission. This places the first decision regarding mining and exploration activities on local government and the planning department rather than the groups with the geological and environmental expertise, the resources department and the Earth Resources Regulator. Objections will still come to councils and the Minister for Planning will remain a referral authority, but neither the community nor council will have the benefit of an ERR-endorsed work plan to assess a project’s level of risk, the adequacy and honesty of a company’s mitigation efforts or the long-term costs and benefits of a proposal. Even MinterEllison has come out and admitted that this has the potential to shift a greater burden onto the planning regime to effectively assess, approve and regulate mining and extractive industries in Victoria.

So what information will councils now make their decision on, beyond a mining company’s self-assessed risk plan? That is unknown. Whatever they get, they will effectively have to assess themselves without department or regulator staff and expertise, and I think this goes to the crux of some of the problems with this bill. We are saying that having to do all that work in a work plan first before going for approval is too much red tape, too much effort and too much cost for mining companies, but instead what we are getting is a mining company self-assessing whether they are a low-risk or a high-risk operation, they send that to councils and councils have to decide. But what information do they have to make that decision? Very little information. They do not necessarily have the expertise. They do not have the benefit of a work plan that has been endorsed by the ERR to even look at and say, ‘How do we even make this decision?’

I think there are some problems there. It is probably designed that way so that councils are more likely to approve mines than not. I do not know if many councils can bring together dedicated teams of ecologists, hydrologists, geologists, First Nations historians and other environmental scientists that would be required to really properly assess mining applications, and certainly I do not think they can do that in a rate-capped environment. Labor is essentially asking councils now to assume the role of a state regulatory body. Will they be given any resources to do this? In our briefings there has been no indication that that is the case, so probably the answer is no.

Councils also do not have the same powers as a regulator or state department. I have had former councillors contact my office directly to remind us of the specific deficiencies with the Victorian planning provisions – namely, that they are not prescriptive and do not cover certain mining impacts. These include radiation from mineral sands mining, compliance with the Commonwealth Critical Minerals Strategy and its national security issues, consideration of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, matters of national environmental significance, water security and more.

Recently Ballarat City Council in fact refused to request an environment effects statement for the Ballarat Gold Mine’s new tailings dam. They simply rubberstamped the permit, although a VCAT appeal has now been lodged. So under this bill Ballarat could be more or less alone in now monitoring that dam’s ongoing self-assessed risks to the community and the environment. How will councils do any of this? How will they obtain the technical expertise on mining operations, on environmental hazards and on the monitoring required to enforce regulatory compliance with the nebulous new duty, the ability to assess ongoing public health impacts of mining? We have not really been told how councils will be able to do all of this. Will they get new financial resources? Will they get new human resources? Who knows.

As I mentioned, planning decisions are reviewable at VCAT, but this again seems counterintuitive, because without a work plan how can councils and communities know how to challenge a project based on environmental or community impacts? What we have been told in the briefings that we have had, which we have engaged in in good faith with the department and the minister’s office, is that a lot of these details will be in the regulations, in the codes of compliance. But they are not to come until several years after this legislation is passed. So we are essentially being told to trust the government: ‘Everything will be in the regulations. Don’t worry about it.’ But I have to say that is probably not enough detail, particularly for communities who will be impacted by these mines. It does not give the community a lot of confidence that it will improve things, and in fact many communities are really worried that it might make things worse – it might make things a lot easier for mining companies to run over the top of communities. Not that all mining companies do that, but I have seen enough examples of that in my work here over the last nine or so years to know that that is a very real risk and one that the government should take seriously.

The third concern that has been brought to us is that under these amendments a work plan endorsed by and created with interagency consultation is replaced by a new self-assessment of risk prepared by the mining company, the operator. Essentially for mining companies, now what they will get to do is self-assess how much risk their mine poses to the environment and to the community and then decide for themselves how they will manage those risks. For anyone here who trusts mining companies to self-regulate, I would just remind you to perhaps look at what Rio Tinto did in Juukan Gorge over in WA, Labor’s petrostate. There are countless more examples where self-assessment or self-management – self-regulation – have not been particularly successful.

If a particularly honest company admits that their project is high or medium risk, they will be forced to do one small element of the existing arrangement, a rehabilitation plan, and undertake some level of reporting. If a proponent goes for the cheapest option and opts for low risk – and hey, when have mining companies ever publicly underestimated the impacts to boost their bottom line? – the proponent can commence work according to this code of compliance. But as I said, what is in the code of compliance, we do not know. We are told this will come later, after the bill has passed.

On the self-assessed risk plans, what the government is telling us is that they will theoretically be kept in check with a new duty: that mining companies will have to minimise their risks to the environment. Ordinarily we would welcome a new environmental duty. We did so in the Environment Protection Act that we passed a number of years ago. But without a reformed and funded regulator or substantial fees and penalties for non-compliance we are worried that there is nothing to suggest this new duty would actually increase environmental protections. Instead there is a fair bit to indicate that it could actually act as a fig leaf while companies continue to get away with damage to the environment.

There is nothing really here that allays our concerns and addresses the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office’s 2020 finding that Earth Resources Regulation has nothing meaningful in place to set enforceable requirements to encourage mining operators to comply with their rehabilitation obligation. The proposed fines for breaching it are very low, and mining is exempt from the need to obtain certain environmental approvals during the planning process, such as restrictions on clearing native vegetation and certain approvals under the Environment Protection Act. The logic to these exemptions, we have been informed, was that ERR will ensure these requirements are effectively met in the work plan preparation and approval process where the EPA and the Minister for Planning are consulted. That was the rationale, I guess, for having them exempt from some of these environment laws. But under this bill, if this bill passes, there is no requirement to do a work plan, so the rationale for exempting them from these environment laws does not seem to make a lot of sense. We also note that groups like Environmental Justice Australia and local communities have advocated for the mining sector in Victoria to integrate an environmental impact assessment as part of the assessment of mining projects for years, but this bill does not take the opportunity to do that.

It seems that the reason this bill is being brought forward is twofold. Firstly, mining companies are finding it too confusing and difficult to get mines approved. They want it to be easier. Secondly, there is about to be a boom in mining for critical minerals, things especially needed to build renewable energy. Victoria is not a huge mining state. But we do have some of these critical minerals, and I get that Victoria wants to cash in on that boom. I get that some of these minerals will absolutely be necessary. But if we are about to have a boom and if we are about to have an increase in applications for mining these minerals, surely we need to have a regulatory system that is really robust to deal with that, because it will not just be one mine every few years. If we are about to see a boom, let us regulate it. Deregulating it or allowing mining companies to self-assess, removing important parts of the process, is really the last thing we should be doing.

All of this means that my office has been contacted by a variety of organisations over the last month, quite a wide variety, who are really worried that there will be less transparency and that it will make things much easier for mining companies to go ahead, potentially at the expense of local communities. There is a local group, Mine-Free Glenaladale, out in Gippsland who I have been to visit a few times, who have been fighting a mineral sands mine for a long time. It is a mine that really should not have gone ahead and did not in the end. They won their fight. But it took them a really long time and a lot of work to do that, and they have said to us that this bill is akin to giving the fox the keys to the henhouse and leaving the door wide open.

Environmental Justice Australia says that Victorians deserve a chance to review the bill and decide whether they support the government stripping back oversight and transparency requirements for mining companies, but the public have only had two weeks. I hear a lot of the government’s arguments. I hear that it is not working for anyone, the current system. I think, though, that given that the community has not had a lot of time to look at this and given the significant concerns that have been raised, it is prudent to delay it – to go away and do further consultation and try and improve this bill. Therefore, given all that, I would like to move a reasoned amendment, and I move:

That all the words after ‘that’ be omitted and replaced with the words ‘this house refuses to read this bill a second time until further consultation occurs with local governments, environmental organisations and regional communities likely to be impacted by mining and exploration’.

We would like to see much more consultation done with these groups and the broader public about what these changes really will mean. We would also like to see some more detail about what will be in the codes of compliance and other regulations so we are not just asked to trust that everything will be okay, because the devil will be in the detail. It is for that reason we are moving the reasoned amendment, and we hope all those in the chamber will support that. I think more consultation, more than two weeks, is a good thing for our democracy. We hope that this reasoned amendment is supported. If not, we will not be able to support the bill in this house in its current form.

Steve McGHIE (Melton) (16:25): I rise today to contribute to the Mineral Resources (Sustainable Development) Amendment Bill 2023, and of course this is another important technical bill which will streamline and modernise workplace processes to keep up with increasing demand whilst keeping our communities informed and safe. This is a bill that makes positive changes that will benefit our communities, our environment and our future.

I just want to go to the amendment of the Greens and some of the points that the member for Melbourne made. Firstly, I do not see any reason to agree with any amendment. There is obviously no reason for that. The member for Melbourne made a reference to the operators being able to self-assess their risk. This is just not accurate and correct. The bill states quite clearly that the operators will need the regulator’s approval on their risk level, and I think again we see the Greens fearmongering on every issue that comes up just to try and find a position for themselves – that is clearly what they are doing here – and putting doubt into the community’s mind by suggesting that the operators will assess themselves. It is just ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous.

I will go to their lack-of-consultation argument. Our government has consulted widely with the local government. We have consulted widely with industry and the broader community, including representatives of the traditional owner groups, and we will always do that. The environmental justice advocates and landowners – we have spoken to them during the development of this bill. This has happened not over a short period but over many, many years – over a number of years. The bill purely creates the enabling framework for transitioning to a duty-based model, every aspect of which will be set in regulation – the codes, the standards and the guidance material. All of these materials will be subject to a public consultation process before they come into effect in 2027, so there is time for ongoing consultation and for further development. We will deal with those agencies I referred to earlier, like the local governments and environmental organisations, and anyone from regional communities across the state will be able to have input into all the new regulations that will set the standards and requirements for this industry. Of course this will ensure that communities can have confidence in the standards set and have their say on how the industry is regulated.

The introduction of the standard statutory duty and further subordinate instruments, like the codes of compliance and standards, not only improves the regulatory consistency between sites but provides clear visibility to the community of the compliance obligations that the industry must meet. Again I will come back to what the Greens comments were, and again they need to stop fearmongering, as they have done during the course of this week. They have just done it again with this particular bill by putting forward their amendment and making their comments. This bill drives transparency, it drives better standards and it provides a stronger role for communities in this process.

We can strike a balance between responsible resource development and the stewardship of our natural environment. We can have a thriving mining and quarrying industry while protecting our natural treasures for generations to come. Certainly in my electorate of Melton we are seeing a massive growth of housing and construction everywhere. It has been spoken about quite a bit this week. There is plenty to do in Melton, and we are getting on and doing it, I can tell you. The projections of the population in my electorate – we are around 200,000 at the moment – are that we will get to 250,000 by 2030 and 450,000 by 2050. I will speak a bit more a little bit later about some of the things that are happening in Melton to try and cope with that growth. Of course next year we commence the build of the new Melton hospital. We also commence the build of the new Melton TAFE. We are also removing four level crossings, and on top of that we are putting in a brand new train station at Melton. So we are preparing ourselves for things into the future. Do not believe stories in the paper about the Melton railway line. But not only that, to cap that off we are also building another primary school at Weir Views next year for the opening of the 2025 school year. In Melton we need plenty of mineral resources to be able to build the infrastructure that we are building, and we will need it for many years to come because, as I say, when we get to a population of 450,000 by 2050, there will be a lot of resources that are going to go into the infrastructure build there.

This bill is all about preserving public safety, protecting the environment and ensuring the integrity of our infrastructure, our land and our property by modernising and strengthening the way we handle the risks and making sure we are up to date with the latest technologies and best practices. That is what we are doing through this bill. It is about safety and being innovative, and it takes a fresh approach to safety in mining and quarrying operations. We are in the 21st century, and there is great technology that is involved in these operations. Instead of just following a specific work plan, operators will have a primary duty to eliminate or minimise any risks that they may have as much as possible. This means putting safety first, finding innovative ways to keep everyone safe while we dig for valuable resources. Of course time is important in every industry but in particular in this industry. As I said, this is about the growth across the state – keeping up with that growth and having the materials to be able to build the things that we need to and to provide all the commodities that we require for our modern-day communities nowadays. It gives great strength to the establishment of a risk-based framework that gives us a clear understanding of what is happening and of course the confidence that decisions are consistent, transparent and fair.

Melton is a very unique electorate in many ways, and I would like to take this opportunity to tell you about Melton’s natural landscapes. We are located on the Victorian volcanic plain, one of only 15 biodiversity hotspots in Australia – and hot; it is one of the hottest suburbs in Victoria, if not Australia unfortunately, and we are going to try and change that by planting a lot more trees in Melton. Certainly the grasslands are a significant area for Aboriginal peoples and have been dramatically transformed over the past 150 years, and the impacts of agriculture, grazing and urban development are evident as you drive across the Melton landscape. It sits across the Western Plains north and the Western Plains south. There are green wedges in the Western Plains south and areas with rich cultural history, areas which are critical to our state’s food production industry. People will notice that as they drive along the Western Highway out towards Bacchus Marsh and as they go through Melton: the very high production of food for all Victorians and Australians in regard to that industry. We need to ensure our food supply can continue to feed not only Victorians but people across Australia, and we will do that and keep that close to home.

Our quarries and minerals industry is rich, especially in regional Victoria, both in the amount of resources that we have in our great state and in what these resources financially bring to our state. Victoria’s minerals and extractive industries account for approximately $6.3 million annually in economic value. They represent about 3.2 per cent of Victoria’s industrial output. In the 2021–22 financial year the sector contributed 30 per cent of total growth in the state’s economy. Of course it creates many thousands of jobs for Victorians. I just want to quote some other figures. The extractive resources sector underpins our $23 billion building and construction industry, and we have all seen that in all of our electorates, about what is going on with the infrastructure build right across the state. We will continue to do that. We currently have 535 quarries produce around 50 million tonnes of stone, limestone, sand and gravel each year, and they generate $786 million at the quarry gate. That is an amazing effort. In 2021 the mining sector contributed $13.745 billion of Victoria’s total economic output. Again, an amazing effort by such an industry, and a growing industry due to what is happening around the state and the productivity in this great state. During 2020–21 the minerals and extractive industries were due to pay a combined $142.3 million in royalties, and again that is something that we gain so we can provide for the rest of the state in regard to that infrastructure build.

This is a really important bill. I see no need for the amendment by the Greens to be agreed to. Again I will come back to the point that I believe they are just continuing to fearmonger. It is not going to work. They can keep trying it as much as they like. It will not work. It is an important bill, and I commend the bill to the house.

Kim O’KEEFFE (Shepparton) (16:35): I also rise to speak on the Mineral Resources (Sustainable Development) Amendment Bill 2023. As we have discussed and there has been a lot of conversation about in the chamber today, the purpose of this bill is to amend the Mineral Resources (Sustainable Development) Act 1990 to modernise the regulatory approval processes for exploration mining and quarrying industries in Victoria. The bill changes the name of the principal act to the Mineral Resources and Extractive Industries Act 1990 to reflect the broader regulatory framework encompassed by the act.

The bill will improve the management of risks to minimise the risks of harm associated with minerals and quarry operations. There is industry consensus that the current work plan system is outdated compared to other modern duty-based regulations in safety and environment. This bill creates a duty to eliminate or minimise the risk of harm to the environment, public, land, property and infrastructure, and to ensure risks are understood and effectively mitigated, replacing current work plans. Also, updating reporting requirements for new and changing work will ensure the emerging and dynamic risks are identified and properly managed over the life of the mining or quarry operations. This bill will remove the requirement to lodge work plans, while retaining the requirement relating to rehabilitation plans, and require the regular review of rehabilitation plans. It will provide for a system of risk levels for authorities that determines the obligations with which an authority holder must comply in relation to the duty to eliminate or minimise risk. Introducing risk tiers such as high, moderate or low will determine obligations under the duty.

Earth resource exploration and development come with inherent risks, and they must be properly managed. This bill ensures risks are understood and effectively mitigated in a proper manner. With this bill community confidence in minerals and quarry operations will be strengthened with the establishment of a risk-based framework to provide consistency and transparency in the way decisions are made and regulatory activities are undertaken, contrary to what we have just heard. There will be greater ability and flexibility to prescribe criteria and standards on public safety, environmental matters and other matters, such as cultural heritage, that keep up with community expectations.

This bill will also promote greater consistency and transparency in decision-making and earlier opportunities for the public to provide input on mining and quarry proposals. Penalty units will be strengthened to reflect the fact that failures to comply with obligations carry serious risks of harm to the environment, members of the public, land, property and infrastructure. It will also encourage competition and remove unnecessary regulatory burdens while safeguarding the community and the environment, with more flexibility for industry to determine how to most effectively manage its risks.

Removing the requirement for operators to prepare and update work plans that must be individually approved by the regulator will remove a significant source of unnecessary red tape for the industry. There can be great delays and frustration with lengthy bureaucracy and red tape that these changes will help streamline. Rehabilitation plans will require approval and will need to be regularly updated to ensure they are responsive to changing circumstances and the land is returned to a safe and stable state. No longer requiring operators to seek statutory endorsement of those work plans before seeking planning approval will remove a significant source of unnecessary cost and delay from the approvals process and provide more flexibility to determine how they most effectively manage risk.

A new outcomes-based focus in the regulatory framework to drive innovation will do away with unnecessary prescription and provide the industry with significantly more flexibility to determine how to most effectively manage its risks. Extensive feedback was received from the Minerals Council of Australia – Victoria; Cement, Concrete and Aggregates Australia; and many others, which is critical input. The duty model frees industry up to manage its own operations in the ways it knows best under the duty to protect people, infrastructure and the environment.

Victoria is facing a critical quarry material supply and affordability risk. We are seeing this across many affected industries, and we must do all we can to protect them. It should be recognised that our current way of life would not be possible to maintain without the quarries. Quarry products provide the basics for our transport network, roads, railways, water and sewerage systems, housing construction, factories, schools, hospitals and so much more – more than we think. There are 1700 businesses offering significant employment and economic benefits. This is a billion-dollar industry.

Victoria’s regulatory environment needs to be internationally competitive to continue to attract capital to invest into Victoria to ensure a sustainable and competitive heavy construction materials industry. This in return facilitates Victoria’s improved productivity, housing affordability and lower infrastructure costs. These reforms will significantly change the way that earth resources are regulated in Victoria. There will be comprehensive implementation processes with industry and other stakeholders. The bill will set up a framework and give the opportunity for compliance and much better guidelines.

Our stance today is to reserve our position in the upper house. When the Greens probably call an inevitable vote, we will likely support the bill’s passing to the upper house, but only so some of the matters of detail can be discussed in committee. One example of this is we have some emails saying this bill reduces oversight and input from communities, but the minister has told us the complete opposite, saying communities will be notified earlier and there is no reduction in transparency. It is a matter I have just discussed with the member for Gippsland East. What the minister has to do is give us, as other speakers on this side have said, the answers to this question. Sadly, we do not get the chance to go into consideration in detail in this chamber any more, so we will support the progress of the bill to the Council, where they do go into committee and discuss detail and ministers must provide answers under questioning. Our stance today is to reserve our position in the upper house, and when the Greens probably call an inevitable vote, as I said, we will likely support it. Overall this will be a more streamlined and efficient process, and I do commend the bill.

Sarah CONNOLLY (Laverton) (16:42): Well, it must be the end of the day, because I rise with a big smile. I am very happy to speak on the Mineral Resources (Sustainable Development) Amendment Bill 2023, and I am not just trying to have a joke there. Mineral resources and mining is a big topic in my household, particularly this week because I was just speaking to my brother, who is a FIFO in and out of WA. He works in a goldmine over there and has worked in the mining industry for what must be close to a decade now. He tells me all kinds of interesting stories about working in that mine and driving a truck very deep underground. As exciting as he thinks it is, it is quite a horror for my mother and myself, but back to this bill.

This is a really important bill that will help modernise and improve Victoria’s regulatory approach to approving processes for minerals exploration, mining and quarrying in Australia. I appreciate the contribution that the member for Melbourne made and the importance of ensuring that there are proper processes around work plans and approvals. She talked about some of her concerns in relation to that, and I do think that it is really important to have a balance, because even though we want to make sure that there are stringent processes in place to ensure that there is compliance with regulatory processes and other things per se, it is also really important to make sure that businesses are able to operate here in Australia and here in Victoria because, as the member for Melton talked about, they really do employ a lot of people in this state and they have a role to play. They do exist and have existed for some time. Yes, we do need to have responsible legislation and regulatory reform around that, but where there are unnecessary duplications in processes – and we like to throw around words like ‘red tape’ – it is part of being a responsible government that you go ahead and remove that to ensure that businesses can operate efficiently whilst also responsibly. That is what this bill is doing. It is an important bill that is going to modernise and improve Victoria’s regulatory approach.

We know that whilst our state is not as reliant as others on mineral extraction – I talk about WA, but my brother has also worked in Queensland and in the Northern Territory – the resources sector in Victoria still plays a really important role in our economy and generates approximately $6.3 billion each year. Having said this, the demand on our resources sector has never been higher, because on top of this our resources extraction sector plays an indispensable role in our government’s massive infrastructure program. I know the member for Melton likes to take all the credit for what is happening in the western suburbs, and he is not here to dispute that at the moment.

I would say to the member for Melton and to other people in this place, and most certainly to constituents in the western suburbs that would happen to be listening to this, that Wyndham is also a mighty LGA and has many suburbs. Some of the fastest-growing suburbs in this state and in this country make up the city of Wyndham. Indeed Wyndham has benefited from the Andrews Labor government’s investment in infrastructure immeasurably, and I see that and I hear that and I live that each and every single day. Unlike the member for Melton, I am not going to stand here for the next 6 minutes and list all of those projects off, because it would take more than 6 minutes for me to talk about those many, many, many infrastructure programs that are going on and happening in Wyndham as we speak.

Surprisingly, when we talk about our roads, train tracks, tunnels and bridges all relying on minerals extraction, funnily enough, so too does our renewable energy infrastructure, which has also got a really important role to play here in this state and here in this country, right now and for generations to come. Victoria is fortunate enough to have critical minerals deposits, significant on a global scale, let alone a national one. And as we head towards meeting our targets of 95 per cent renewable energy by 2035 and net zero by 2045 our resources industry is going to play an important role in getting us there. This is why it is especially important for regional communities that rely upon this industry generating hundreds of millions of dollars and creating thousands of jobs that we ensure that legislation and bills coming before this house are not only removing some of the unnecessary red tape, as I talked about earlier, but it is also our ensuring that these companies and mineral extractors and mines are still able to operate responsibly within the communities that surround them but also for the workers in those communities that go ahead and indeed have a job in those companies and on those sites.

That is why it is really important that these communities have the confidence that the processes we use to approve these operations are really strongly and appropriately regulated, as they need to be. That is exactly what is happening here. That is exactly what this bill is going to improve. It is going to improve transparency, it is going to improve accountability and it is going to improve oversight of the mining industry here in Victoria, ensuring that all states operate under clear and, most importantly, consistent standards. We know that for businesses to operate efficiently and to want to stay here in Victoria operating their businesses, they need to have certainty and transparency around the standards which we expect and their communities expect them to operate within.

Now, we are a small and we are a very dense state, and I think I can legitimately stand here and say that, being born in New South Wales and spending a lot of time in Queensland and a very small amount of time in the ACT. Victoria is a small and dense state with a mix of industries that make up our economy. Unlike WA, we are not heavily reliant on mining, and it is nearly impossible to avoid having minerals extraction land located in close proximity to other areas such as residential, agricultural or tourism areas, to name a few.

I know when my brother jetsets off from Coolangatta airport all the way to WA and flies in, he is then flown out to Kalgoorlie, and then I think it is a bus ride into God knows where in the middle of nowhere. And the times when my family have said we will go and visit Ben and have a look where he works and what he does, he has assured us there is no need to do that, because it is in the middle of nowhere and there is nothing and hardly anybody around him. But here in Victoria it is a little bit different. Over the past week I have had a few emails come through to my office from constituents who have raised concerns with this bill. It is rightly so, and it is very heartening to see that constituents in the western suburbs are looking at this and are thinking about this. I know that a lot of people were concerned that in fact this bill does the opposite of its intention and will deregulate the mining industry here in Victoria, but what I would say to those people is that nothing is actually further from the truth. What we are doing is providing greater certainty and simplicity to the regulatory framework that governs minerals projects. This framework has over the years become really complex and inflexible, which leads to lengthy delays, overlapping regulatory requirements and inconsistent decision-making. In fact what has happened as a result is that the social licence that we were just talking about a bit earlier has been eroded, and rather than stripping communities of their right to have a say, as some have suggested this bill will do today – that they have been deprived of having their say – this bill goes towards fixing this. What we have had is at least three reports that have told us that this area is in real, desperate need of reform. We are getting on now, and we are acting accordingly and providing much-needed legislative improvements.

In the almost 60 seconds I have left to talk about this bill, I just want to talk about that one change in part of the bill that relates to work plans that manage mining and quarrying operations. Under the current arrangements each site has their own individual work plan, which has resulted in over 1200 work plans being lodged with Earth Resources Regulation. The process is three-tiered: there is a statutory endorsement followed by the application of the planning permit and then it concludes with the approval of the work plan. The mining and quarrying industries are the only two industries that require the statutory endorsement process, which effectively functions as a preapproval process for the work plan. This stage has been criticised for being unnecessarily costly and inefficient when half the time the projects do not pass the planning stage and are effectively redundant. What this bill is doing is trying to improve those processes, making sure that things can be done on time. I commend the bill to the house.

Richard RIORDAN (Polwarth) (16:52): I too rise this afternoon after listening to an extensive debate on the Mineral Resources (Sustainable Development) Amendment Bill 2023, where both sides of the house, it appears, except for our friends in the Greens, have agreed that this is an area of government policy and activity in the state of Victoria that is desperate for reform. As a short-term shadow minister for resources, I am well aware of the need for reform here, in fact so much so that I am somewhat concerned with elements of this bill that has been presented to the Parliament. The government has been dragged kicking and screaming to the position of having to do desperate reform because this state is in fact running out of urgent and critical building resources, particularly in the areas of sand and blue metal, which of course are the essential components for any type of building construction, road work, suburban development and other elements. They are the building blocks of a modern First World city and a modern First World state. Industry representative after industry representative, company after company and community after community that are relying on these products will tell you any day of the week how difficult and how expensive these essential building products are becoming in the state of Victoria because of the lack of simplicity and planning around making these resources – these crucial resources – accessible to everybody who needs them.

We have seen in recent times long-held stocks and stores of these resources coming to their end, and I know from firsthand experience in my own electorate the process to get approvals for quarries and sandpits in particular takes forever. In fact recently just a short distance from Colac, with very few environmental and/or neighbourhood or area concerns, the process still took over 10 years for approval so that the quarry could begin to operate as a resource. In that time there were some very significant state projects literally on the boundary of this potential resource.

We had the Mount Gellibrand wind farm, which consumed a huge quantity of materials. Instead of being accessible for that fantastic renewable resource, they were in fact having to be trucked and shipped many, many hundreds of kilometres. Not only was that bad for the environment, ironically, it was incredibly expensive and added many, many millions of dollars to that renewable project, because instead of literally driving out one gate and straight back into the other, the trucks were doing somewhat of a 250-kilometre round trip – just to take the materials in.

At the same time as that wind farm of course the state government and the federal government had embarked on their Princes Highway west proposal, which consumed a similar amount of material. Exactly the same problem arose, where the essential building blocks – the blue metal material that forms the basis of concrete and cement – was coming from many, many miles away, at great cost to the road surfacers and everything else. There are lots of examples like that right across the state of where we need these materials.

We know for a fact that with the government’s endless tunnel building and rail crossing removals – which the government touts as a good thing – the consequence is that that has absolutely hoovered up existing sand and rock supplies to Melbourne, to the extent that quarries that have existed now for 20, 30 or 40 years on the outskirts of Melbourne are now basically dried up. They are empty. In fact I visited one out towards Donnybrook where the quarry is now searching through mullock heaps of old topsoil and material that had been cast aside decades ago. They are now fossicking through that to try and bring material out because they have literally run out of space and are still waiting for approval for a new resource.

The challenge we have is that, with this bill that has come through, the government is promising the industry that that 10-year turnaround for approvals – which seems to be about the average time – they are going to cut that back. But as we so often see with this government, the devil is in the detail. It is a bit like ‘We can host the Commonwealth Games, but the detail is just a little bit complex. In fact it’s beyond this government’s ability to put together’ and ‘We can offer a fast train to Geelong. The detail is there, but we can’t quite do it’. We are hearing that a lot from this government.

While the industry welcomes the government’s desire to streamline, they have not actually told anybody how they are going to streamline it. Therein lies the problem for the industry: they need detail. This Parliament really needs the detail. What people fear is that this is once again like a pre-election promise from the government: easily said, easily spoken about, but not very easily delivered. As we have in fact seen with Commonwealth Games, as we have seen with Geelong fast rail, as we have seen with airport rail and as we have seen with the duplication of metropolitan train lines in the west of Melbourne, all were quickly cancelled when it got too tough for this government to embark on them. This desire by the government to speed up the quarrying, mining and mineral industries in this great state is an admirable objective but one poorly formed.

I also point out that the Greens moved a reasoned amendment to this. I am not too keen on that because I think we do need to progress this. But the Parliament and those involved in the extractive industries will need to keep an eye on this government – we will certainly be doing that on this side of the house – and continue to try and hold them to account on their promise of a speedier, more efficient and more effective approval system for this vital industry. While we want to progress and go forward in this state, it is of huge concern to this side of the house and certainly to others that we are having to import – as we are now – sand from New South Wales when we have had reserves of sand set aside here in the state of Victoria for literally decades and decades. In some cases some sand supplies were set aside more than a century go, and yet we are unable to access those valuable reserves because this government cannot get its approval systems right. What that means, when we are having to rely on the efficiency and effectiveness of other state jurisdictions, is that it is actually costing taxpayers, unnecessarily so.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! The time set down for consideration of items on the government business program has arrived, and I am required to interrupt business.

The minister has moved the Mineral Resources (Sustainable Development) Amendment Bill 2023 be now read a second time. The member for Melbourne has moved a reasoned amendment to this motion. She has proposed to omit all the words after ‘That’, replacing them with the words which have been circulated. The question is:

That the words proposed to be omitted stand part of the question.

Those supporting the reasoned amendment by the member for Melbourne should vote no.

Assembly divided on question:

Ayes (70): Juliana Addison, Jacinta Allan, Brad Battin, Jade Benham, Roma Britnell, Colin Brooks, Josh Bull, Martin Cameron, Anthony Carbines, Ben Carroll, Darren Cheeseman, Anthony Cianflone, Sarah Connolly, Chris Couzens, Chris Crewther, Jordan Crugnale, Lily D’Ambrosio, Daniela De Martino, Steve Dimopoulos, Paul Edbrooke, Wayne Farnham, Will Fowles, Ella George, Luba Grigorovitch, Sam Groth, Bronwyn Halfpenny, Katie Hall, Paul Hamer, Martha Haylett, Mathew Hilakari, Melissa Horne, Natalie Hutchins, Lauren Kathage, Emma Kealy, Sonya Kilkenny, Nathan Lambert, Gary Maas, Alison Marchant, Kathleen Matthews-Ward, Tim McCurdy, Steve McGhie, Cindy McLeish, John Mullahy, James Newbury, Danny O’Brien, Michael O’Brien, Kim O’Keeffe, Tim Pallas, Danny Pearson, John Pesutto, Pauline Richards, Richard Riordan, Brad Rowswell, Michaela Settle, David Southwick, Ros Spence, Nick Staikos, Natalie Suleyman, Meng Heang Tak, Nina Taylor, Kat Theophanous, Mary-Anne Thomas, Bill Tilley, Emma Vulin, Iwan Walters, Vicki Ward, Kim Wells, Dylan Wight, Belinda Wilson, Jess Wilson

Noes (3): Gabrielle de Vietri, Tim Read, Ellen Sandell

Question agreed to.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: The question is:

That this bill be now read a second and a third time.

Assembly divided on question:

Ayes (70): Juliana Addison, Jacinta Allan, Brad Battin, Jade Benham, Roma Britnell, Colin Brooks, Josh Bull, Martin Cameron, Anthony Carbines, Ben Carroll, Darren Cheeseman, Anthony Cianflone, Sarah Connolly, Chris Couzens, Chris Crewther, Jordan Crugnale, Lily D’Ambrosio, Daniela De Martino, Steve Dimopoulos, Paul Edbrooke, Wayne Farnham, Will Fowles, Ella George, Luba Grigorovitch, Sam Groth, Bronwyn Halfpenny, Katie Hall, Paul Hamer, Martha Haylett, Mathew Hilakari, Melissa Horne, Natalie Hutchins, Lauren Kathage, Emma Kealy, Sonya Kilkenny, Nathan Lambert, Gary Maas, Alison Marchant, Kathleen Matthews-Ward, Tim McCurdy, Steve McGhie, Cindy McLeish, John Mullahy, James Newbury, Danny O’Brien, Michael O’Brien, Kim O’Keeffe, Tim Pallas, Danny Pearson, John Pesutto, Pauline Richards, Richard Riordan, Brad Rowswell, Michaela Settle, David Southwick, Ros Spence, Nick Staikos, Natalie Suleyman, Meng Heang Tak, Nina Taylor, Kat Theophanous, Mary-Anne Thomas, Bill Tilley, Emma Vulin, Iwan Walters, Vicki Ward, Kim Wells, Dylan Wight, Belinda Wilson, Jess Wilson

Noes (3): Gabrielle de Vietri, Tim Read, Ellen Sandell

Question agreed to.

Read second time.

Third reading

Motion agreed to.

Read third time.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: The bill will now be sent to the Legislative Council and their agreement requested.