ASBG has responded to the Protection of the Environment Legislation Amendment Bill 2011, which imposes considerable new punitive conditions on business and industry in NSW.  Under this Bill companies are required to immediately report environmental incidents of material harm (>$10,000).  Changing 'as soon as practical’ to 'immediate' introduces considerable new liabilities, make it very difficult to comply with, will substantially increase compliance costs and may even detract from better environmental protection.

ASBG submission to the Minister appealed for the introduction of a new alternative incident reporting action called 'Serious Environmental Incident'.  This new approach will drop the $10,000 harm trigger, but be limited to a list of chemicals and substances which are of community concern.  In addition, Serious Environmental Incidents will require immediate reporting or within in one hour.  Use of one hour is in line with the O'Reilly Report, which unfortunately was not adopted within the Bill.

The Bill also introduces many new conditions such as:

  • Requiring all Licensed monitoring data be posted on company websites.
  • Empowering the EPA to undertake health and environmental risk analysis at the reporting company's expense
  • Legislating that all Licensed sites develop, train and implement incident action plans.

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