EPA Amendments Pass

An amended version of the Government’s Environmental Protection (Chain of Responsibility) Amendment Bill 2016 has been passed by the State Parliament, which could see landowners becoming responsible for remedying certain environmental defaults of their tenants. 

The amendments establish a legal chain of responsibility for the environmental protection of sites to ensure the taxpayer doesn’t bear the cost of managing and rehabilitating sites.

The Government’s original proposal would have seen all landowners potentially held responsible for relevant activities undertaken on their land. After Parliament’s Agriculture and Environment Committee rejected this position, the Government amended the Bill so that landowners are only potentially responsible for non-resources related activities on their land, unless the landowner is an associated entity of the company undertaking the activity, or unless the landowner has some other ‘relevant connection’ to the defaulting company.

Although the Government’s changes effectively exclude primary producers and native title holders from the new ‘chain of responsibility’, many landowners who lease their property for other non-resource related environmentally relevant activities could be held responsible for the defaults of their tenants.

The Property Council argued that many landowners do not have any involvement in, or control over, the activities in question and therefore should not be held legally responsible for them.  The Government’s response to this issue was that these landowners have the capacity to influence activities being carried out on their land through the terms of their lease and should have priced the risk of the tenant failing to make good into the rent.

Binding statutory guidelines will be developed by the Government to assist in decision making under the Act – the Property Council will review and comment on these when they are available, to try to ensure maximum clarity for members about who will be caught by the new legislation.