I rise to support the Environmental Protection and Other Legislation Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2008. This bill predominantly provides for amendments to the Environmental Protection Act 1994 and the Nature Conservation Act 1992 as well as a few other acts. This bill will improve the effectiveness of the Environmental Protection Act as it clarifies the roles and responsibilities of councils and the Environmental Protection Agency. It is important to note that regional councils will be responsible for managing environmental nuisance and minor water pollution while the EPA will continue to be responsible for managing more serious cases of environmental harm. Therefore, each level of government will have the ability to set appropriate conditions for the developments they approve and to impose penalties if those conditions are breached.

In my electorate there is a flurry of building occurring-residential, industrial and major infrastructure. This raises the chance that environmental harm can occur and is something that local residents are very concerned about. The same applies to the urban/rural interface which sometimes causes issues, particularly around noise and pollution. This bill gives councils the power to tailor local environmental standards by allowing them to implement local laws for nuisance matters, and I support that. It is also important to note that the penalties for environmental nuisance, air pollution and water pollution are being increased to provide a better deterrent to degrading our environment.

I now want to turn my attention to the provisions in the Nature Conservation Act requiring horse riding impacts on the south-east Queensland horse trail network to be assessed. The horse trail network, as we know, was announced by the government in December 2007 and passes through proposed new national parks in south-east Queensland. As the House is also aware, the south-east Queensland Forestry Act is the historic agreement between conservationists, the timber industry and the state Labor government which has delivered 260,000 hectares of new national parks so far, with a total of 504,000, and it is vital that we protect these environmentally sensitive areas.

The provisions in the bill give effect to the government’s commitment to ensure that any harmful impacts of horse riding on the trail network and adjacent areas will be identified and addressed. There will be a comprehensive monitoring program which will evaluate impacts at representative locations along the trail network. The monitoring program will not just single out horse riding impacts; it will take account of the cumulative effect of all activities occurring on the trails, including official use by rangers. The monitoring process will investigate a range of potential impacts such as soil erosion, degradation of water quality and the spread of weeds. Monitoring will also investigate social impacts such as attitudes and expectations of the community and impacts on recreational use.

This is a very important aspect of the bill, as currently we have a mix of uses within our national parks-from motorbikes to four-wheel drivers to walkers and horse riders-and we need to make sure that we provide balance and we need to ensure that all recreational impacts are considered. This is very important in my area, because it is surrounded by a lot of state forest which has become or will soon become national park. We obviously have a range of trail runners who use those areas. Horse riding activity currently occurs through a national park just because of the historic use. We need to make sure that all of those impacts are considered and that each recreational user is also considerate of what other people are doing in the park. There is actually nothing worse than walking along some of the trails to be confronted by piles and piles of horse manure which just ruins the experience of the natural environment. We need to make sure that we find ways of mitigating that.

We also need to make sure that we are not doing any more harm to these lovely areas than we have. The member for Toowoomba South said that if a few weeds get in that is okay. A few weeds getting in is not okay. If we find that horse riding is bringing that impact forward, then we need to make sure that is mitigated. It is not about saying, ‘A little bit of this weed is okay, but that’s not okay when the pigs are there.’ As a government we need to ensure that we are providing safe areas that are sensitive and that we make sure we protect them. That is our obligation to ourselves and to future generations as well.

Information gathered under the monitoring program will be assessed by a scientific advisory committee consisting of experts in a range of relevant fields including conservation biology, freshwater ecology, social science, soil science, sustainable recreation and weed management. In order to ensure impartial advice, the bill requires the scientific advisory committee members to be independent of government agencies and stakeholders that may have particular interests in decisions affecting horse riding on the trail network. I have heard criticism of this from the opposite side during the debate and a wish to have riding associations represented. I need to emphasise that this needs to be a rigorous scientific process, not one that just has all of the vested interests on it. They will be consulted, obviously, as part of the ongoing process-as they have been to date, and I am sure that will continue. However, we need to ensure that if we are undertaking a scientific process here we have all of the correct representatives on the committee, and I support the minister in his desire to do that.

The assessments provided by the scientific advisory committee will be used to review the areas that make up the horse trail network. In addition to identifying the nature and extent of impacts, the review process includes a requirement to consider how any identified significant adverse impacts can be addressed. Ultimately, if the impacts cannot be managed, as the minister has said, a trail could be removed from the horse riding network. Once again, that is something that we will take into careful consideration but, as I have also said, we need to be protecting these sensitive areas. The review process will start immediately on proclamation, with priority to be given to identifying and monitoring the most vulnerable sites, and the review of all areas in the network must be completed by 2025.

The provisions in the bill serve to formalise the scientific monitoring process that the government quickly moved to establish after announcing the trail network last December. A scientific advisory committee has been appointed comprising eight distinguished scientists chaired by Dr Marc Hockings of the University of Queensland. The committee has been actively working with the Environmental Protection Agency and stakeholder groups to develop the necessary monitoring program, and I note that long-term funding has been allocated to the EPA to secure the operation of the monitoring process. I take this opportunity to commend the minister on all of the work that he has done, his ministerial staff who have provided him with support and obviously the departmental officers who, as we know, always work hard to ensure that our environment is protected. I commend the bill to the House.