Bill
Environment Protection Reform Bill 2025
passed, as at 2025-12-01. Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water portfolio.
- Sponsor
- Not recorded
- Portfolio
- Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water
Recorded stages
- introduced — 2025-10-30
- second reading — 2025-10-30
- second reading — 2025-11-04
- second reading — 2025-11-05
- second reading — 2025-11-06
- second reading — 2025-11-06
- committee — 2025-11-06
- third reading — 2025-11-06
- introduced — 2025-11-24
- second reading — 2025-11-24
- second reading — 2025-11-27
- second reading — 2025-11-27
- committee — 2025-11-27
- third reading — 2025-11-27
- other — 2025-11-28
- passed — 2025-11-28
- royal assent — 2025-12-01
Divisions
No divisions recorded. Most questions are decided on the voices; this does not establish that a bill was unopposed.
Plain-language summary
Written by a model from the explanatory memorandum; not the record, as at 2025-10-30.
The bill would overhaul Australia's main environmental law to deliver stronger protection while speeding up project approvals for housing, renewable energy and critical minerals.
It would set legally enforceable national environmental standards, ban projects with unacceptable impacts, require compensation for remaining harm, and give the new environmental regulator stronger penalties and new powers to issue environment protection orders.
The bill is based on the 2020 Samuel Review and amends the EPBC Act, but the explanatory memorandum does not say when the changes would start.
- Create a framework for the minister to set, update and revoke legally binding national environmental standards.
- Define unacceptable impacts and ban approval for projects that cause them, with no offsets allowed for those impacts.
- Require proponents to compensate for all residual significant impacts on nationally protected matters to achieve a net gain, either by delivering offsets or paying a restoration contribution charge.
- Increase criminal penalties and introduce a new civil penalty formula for serious breaches.
- Give the CEO of NEPA new powers to issue environment protection orders in urgent circumstances.
- Expand audit powers to cover persons subject to environment protection orders, conservation orders, remediation determinations or remediation orders, and introduce compliance audits.
Proponents of projects that affect nationally protected matters, the minister who makes national environmental standards, the CEO of NEPA and the new Restoration Contributions Holder.
Sources
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