The Victorian Government has overwhelmingly accepted the recommendations of the Victorian Competition and Efficiency Commission (VCEC) to streamline the state’s environmental regulations, measures the commission says could cut red tape costs between $30-48 million per year.

Victoria's Great Ocean Road.

VCEC in July tabled a 522 page report urging reform of the regime, including improving project approval processes, boosting decision-making capacity in the face of uncertainty, and amendments to the Environmental Resource Efficiency Plan (EREP) measures.

The VCEC report, released by the government on Friday, comes after six months of consultations that saw calls for: a more effective compliance regime including performance reporting and evaluation; improved accountability and transparency in some areas; greater use of incentive-based arrangements; and better aligning regulation with ecologically sustainable development principles.

It adds the regulatory framework should not constrain the innovations that will ultimately drive the development of low-cost, low-emission energy sources. It should ensure neutrality in the approvals process between renewable energy sources (and those with low carbon emissions).

VCEC looked in detail at five major Victorian environmental acts covering environmental assessment, environmental protection, native vegetation, earth resources and environmental reporting. It estimated they impose administration and compliance costs on business of $185–$431 million per year.

These costs are likely to be the bulk of those from Victoria's environmental regulation, and include costs necessary to achieve the government's environmental objectives as well as some unnecessary costs.

The Victorian Government is keen to reduce regulatory burdens and said it would work with state agencies, such as the Victorian EPA, and collaborate with local government.

It broadly supported all the recommendations, bar one to establish the Native Vegetation Regulator (NVR) to replace the current regulatory functions in the Department of Sustainability and Environment

For example, it backed the recommendation not to require works approval for changes that would result in the same or less environmental harm and to exempt from the works approval process a list of pre-approved technologies.

The majority of EREP recommendations were either supported in principal, in part or fully supported.

Among them is proposal that a range of sites that could be exempted from the EREP program, which requires an audit to identify resource efficiency opportunities and mandates implementation of those with a payback of three years or less.

The government says it accepts a VCEC recommendation to exempt EREP-covered sites from having to prepare a separate plan under WaterMAP, a water efficiency scheme administered by the state's water corporations.

It also supports the call to greatly streamline WaterMAP reporting – with its response committing to simplifying the current 90 "information obligations" to "about 15 one-off information obligations and 20 annual reporting obligations".

Other proposals relevant to the VCEC report were also set out in the land and biodiversity white paper issued by the State Government last December with other relevant measures to be included in its upcoming climate change white paper.

In its response to the VCEC report the government says it will better a VCEC recommendation to achieve 75% of the potential roll-out of corporate licences by mid-2011. The special licence, which amalgamates into a single document multiple licences for a company's different sites, will be fully rolled out to all suitable recipients by March 2011.

The government has also agreed to better VCEC's proposed timetable for a review of the 650 or so standard licences issued by EPA, with its response committing to reviewing 50% of these by mid-year and 75% by mid-2011.

The VCEC report found that cost reduction could also be achieved by:

• Providing greater clarity about key strategic and regulatory objectives;


• Extending risk-based approaches to regulation in some areas;


• Replacing some prescriptive regulations with outcome-based approaches;


• Improving assessment and approval processes to reduce timeframes; and


• Removing duplication and overlap in areas such as environmental reporting.

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