2025-02-27
Thursday 27 February 2025
The Greens (WA) have responded to the release of the Vogel-McFerran review after the Cook Labor government lost a 13-month battle to suppress the details following a Freedom of Information request from the Conservation Council of Western Australia.
Comments attributable to WA Greens MLC Dr Brad Pettitt:
“If the Vogel-McFerran Review were a university assignment, it would get a fail for being poorly referenced and for plagiarising the interests of big business.
“Last year the Cook Labor government used this review - without any consultation with the sector or the community - as the basis for the worst attack on the EPA we’ve ever seen from any government and it was only the Greens who stood up against it in the Parliament.
“Now that we’ve finally seen the review, it is outrageous that the Cook Labor government gutted our EPA without any real data or information.
“Non-government organisations like the Conservation Council of WA should not have to spend 13 months fighting to get access to information that should have been on the public record to start with!
“The Vogel-McFerran Review was predicated on the assumption that new nature-positive legislation would be implemented to replace the federal EPBC Act; legislation that Premier Roger Cook also intervened in November to kill off under pressure from corporate mining interests.
“The Cook Labor government’s interference on nature-positive legislation at both a state and federal level, and at the behest of corporate interests, is an affront to democracy.”
Comments attributable to WA Greens environment spokesperson and Legislative Council candidate, Jess Beckerling:
“It's unsurprising that the Cook Labor Government sought to suppress this review. It's a shameful basis for their unprecedented attacks on the independence of WA’s EPA.
“The review lacks any source material; it is unreferenced and flimsy and is essentially a series of thought bubbles about giving industry what they want from EPA processes.
“The review says the EPA should be more client-centred, treat industry as customers and that its job is to facilitate development. That is not the EPA's job. The EPA’s job is to protect the environment, but the Cook Government seems to have forgotten this.
“The EPA is the thin green line in WA, tasked with protecting our incredibly precious natural environment. This shoddy review has been used as the basis to erode that thin green line in the interests of big business.
“The WA Labor Government simply cannot be trusted on nature protection but the Greens will work in the next term of government to hold Labor to account, protect nature and take real action on climate.”