Assess once under an accredited state process, decide twice
Where a project needs both state and Commonwealth environmental approval, two documents are prepared, two consultations are run and two assessments are performed on the same impacts. Assessment bilateral agreements already allow one assessment to serve both decisions — they are simply not in place for most of the country.
Steps this would change
- Commonwealth environmental approval for a residential subdivision — Prepare assessment documentation
- Commonwealth environmental approval for a residential subdivision — Public comment on the documentation
- Commonwealth environmental approval for a residential subdivision — Departmental assessment and recommendation report
- Build a major transmission line — sequential easement pathway — Commonwealth environmental approval
- Build a major transmission line — concurrent easement pathway (Victoria) — Commonwealth environmental approval
Rationale
This proposal is unusual on this site because it does not require inventing anything. The mechanism exists, it is in the Act, it has been used, and the current Commonwealth government is funding its extension. The proposal is that it be finished, and that the finishing be treated as delivery of the housing target rather than as environmental housekeeping.
The distinction that makes it defensible is between assessment and approval:
- Assessment is the gathering of evidence about impacts: surveys, modelling, documentation, public comment, and the analysis of what the project would do. Doing this twice produces two descriptions of the same impacts, at different times, in different formats.
- Approval is the decision, applying the decision-maker's own law and conditions. Under an assessment bilateral the Commonwealth still decides, still applies the EPBC Act, still sets its own conditions, and can still refuse.
Nothing about federal environmental protection is surrendered by accrediting the evidence-gathering. That is the entire content of an assessment bilateral, and it is why they are lawful now.
On the residential subdivision process this collapses three steps -- prepare documentation, public comment, recommendation report -- into their state equivalents, which are being done anyway. On high speed rail the effect is larger still and the case is more embarrassing: a Commonwealth agency is running a duplicate Commonwealth assessment of its own Commonwealth project.
The remaining EPBC reform provisions commence on or before 1 December 2026, with subordinate regulations from 1 July 2026, and existing bilaterals are to be updated for consistency with the new National Environmental Standards. That is the window in which this either happens or is deferred again.
What is being traded away
This is where the argument gets genuinely hard, and the environmental objection is not a formality.
Accreditation is only as good as the standard it is measured against, and the standards are not yet final. Accrediting a state process before the National Environmental Standards are settled means accrediting it against nothing in particular. The sequence matters enormously: standards first, then accreditation. A reform delivered in the other order is not this reform.
State assessment capability is not uniform. The premise is that a state process gathering the same evidence produces the same quality of evidence. For some agencies on some matters that is true. It is not automatically true everywhere, and the Commonwealth's ability to say so about a particular state is politically constrained in a way its formal power is not.
Accreditation is hard to reverse. Once a state process is accredited, withdrawing accreditation is a public accusation against a government, so it tends not to happen. That asymmetry means the decision to accredit is more consequential than it looks, and it argues for accreditation that is periodic and expiring rather than standing.
And the honest concession: the ANAO record suggests a large share of Commonwealth delay was never duplication at all -- statutory timeframes were met in 19 per cent of cases in one quarter of 2019 and 87 per cent after funding increased, with no change to the law. If the binding constraint is assessor numbers, then bilaterals will save less than this estimate and hiring will save more. Both should be done, and only one of them is a structural argument.
Precedent
Assessment bilateral agreements are existing law under Part 5 of the EPBC Act. South Australia signed a new agreement with the Commonwealth on 18 February 2026, and Western Australia signed a memorandum of understanding on 21 April 2026 to have one in place by December 2026. The Commonwealth committed more than $45 million over four years to progressing them.
Sources
- Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (Cth), Part 5 (bilateral agreements)
- Minister for the Environment and Water, joint media release, 'Faster environmental approvals with states and territories'
- ANAO, Auditor-General Report No. 47 of 2019-20
- King & Wood Mallesons and Ashurst, published analyses of EPBC Act reform commencement through 2026