The Western Australian Government has announced a new pilot project, the Reduced Reporting Burden, to help improve efficiency and make meaningful differences to mining reporting processes.
The Association of Mining and Exploration Companies (AMEC), Chief Executive, Warren Pearce, said the pilot program was well received.
“The rapid growth of Western Australia’s mining and mineral exploration sector is putting significant pressure on the government and industry, and these new measures will make a meaningful improvement to the efficiency of the reporting process in Western Australia,” Mr Pearce said.
Part of the Streamline Western Australia initiative, the pilot program will stop, or halve environmental reporting requirements for lower-risk industry licences.
Under the pilot program, a risk-based assessment was conducted to identify licences eligible for reduced reporting requirements.
These include:
• Licences with no monitoring requirements will no longer require annual environmental reports
• Licences with limited monitoring requirements will move to environmental reports every two years
Other licences, such as those that require comprehensive monitoring and have several environmental issues, multiple monitoring points, complex monitoring suites, and/or high frequency monitoring, will continue to require annual environmental reporting.
Previously, annual environmental monitoring and reporting were required for these licences, regardless of the operation’s risk to the environment or public health, or whether the information is likely to change from year to year.
The changes affect more than 60 per cent of eligible licences granted under Part V Division 3 of
the Environmental Protection Act 1986.
Mr Pearce said sensible changes will reduce the government’s administrative burden while ensuring strong environmental protections remain in place.
“AMEC has been a strong advocate for significant regulatory reform and for better efficiency around environmental reporting. With less red tape for lower risk licence holders, this program is a positive outcome for the mining and exploration industry,” Mr Pearce said.
Western Australian Environment Minister, Reece Whitby, said it was important to note that the environmental monitoring requirements stay the same.
“This project applies a risk-based approach when setting reporting conditions which encourages good environmental performance, while also providing regulators with more time to focus on higher-risk matters,” Mr Whitby said.
“While the changes relate to existing licences, these principles have been applied to the assessment of applications for new licences over the past 18 months, with more than 80 licences already benefiting from a reduction in unnecessary reporting requirements.
“We are now looking at where this practice can be applied to other instruments to reduce unnecessary workload for licence holders and regulators for low-risk matters.”
