ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION
(COST RECOVERY) REGULATIONS 2021
841. Hon TJORN SIBMA to the minister representing the
Minister for Environment:
I refer to the draft Environmental
Protection (Cost Recovery) Regulations 2021.
(1) What protections are in place to prevent the
Department of Water and Environmental Regulation from over–cost recovering
or, colloquially speaking, price gouging when setting user fees for
environmental assessments?
(2) How will fees be set and structured to avoid the
potential for cross-subsidisation of other DWER or other government functions, which are explicitly referred
to as ''comprising departmental costs'' in the consultation draft, when these matters were not
contemplated in the Environmental Protection Amendment Bill passed in the
fortieth Parliament?
Hon
STEPHEN DAWSON replied:
I thank the honourable member for
some notice of the question. The following answer has been provided to me by
the Minister for Environment.
(1)–(2) The head power enabling cost recovery in section
48AA of the Environmental Protection Amendment Act limits the use of
cost recovery to meet the costs incurred by the Department of Water and
Environmental Regulation in respect of the referral, assessment and
implementation of proposals under the EP act. In addition, for the purposes of
transparency, cost-recovered revenue and expenditure will be reported on by
DWER annually.
The DWER-proposed pricing model for
part IV of the Environmental Protection Act 1986 is based on a detailed
analysis of the actual costs incurred by DWER in managing the referral,
assessment and implementation of proposals
under part IV the EP act. This model was developed by an external consultant,
and further independently tested by Ernst and Young, which concluded that the
underlying assumptions used to develop the model were logical and reasonable.