Cost Benefit Analysis - Reforms to Environmental Impact.docVIP

Cost Benefit Analysis – Reforms to Environmental Impact Assessments under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities 20 April 2011 Contents Glossary i Executive Summary i 1 Background to the problem 1 1.1 Structure of this report 1 1.2 Contextual background 1 1.3 Rationale for reform of EIAs 2 2 Objective of the reform 7 3 Options 11 3.1 Summary 11 3.2 Option 1: the base case (status quo) 11 3.3 Option 2: implement reforms 11 4 Qualitative impact analysis 12 4.1 Nature of impacts 12 4.2 Impacts on the Australian Government 13 4.3 Impacts on state and territory governments 14 4.4 Impacts on business and industry 14 4.5 Impacts on the economy and society 15 4.6 Summary of costs and benefits 15 5 Cost benefit analysis 16 5.1 Methodology 16 5.2 Projections of workload costs going forward 16 5.3 Option 2 – potential impacts on FTEs 20 5.4 Impact of delays – case studies 27 5.5 Benefits from reduced delays – Option 2 32 6 Conclusions 34 6.1 Summary of the CBA findings 34 6.2 Sensitivity analysis 36 References 37 Limitation of our work 38  Charts Chart 1.1 : Increasing matters of NES 6 Chart 1.2 : Referrals received by DSEWPAC by full financial year, 2000-01 to 2010-11 6 Chart 2.1 : Distribution of project delays, January 2010 to February 2011 7 Chart 2.2 : Value of projects subject to approval decisions, 2009-10 to 2010-11 8 Chart 2.3 : Percent of total decisions not meeting timeframes, 2001-02 to 2009-10 9 Chart 5.1 : Actual forecast determinations by CA status (base case) 17 Chart 5.2 : Actual forecast decisions under the EPBC Act (base case) 18 Chart 5.3 : Decisions per FTE, without additional resourcing 19 Chart 5.4 : FTE savings compared to the base case, with the implementation of guidelines 22 Tables Table 2.2 : Annual percentage change in proportion of decisions not meeting timeframes 10 Table 4.1 : Impact of reforms on numbers of referrals and CA