Message from inaugural EPA Board Chairman Stephen Walsh QC

I recall well the steep learning curve the members of the first Board experienced. Fortunately, whilst the Authority did not then have direct control over the Department’s staff other than the few who reported direct to the Board, including Rob Thomas and Corinne Kelly, access was seamless. I was struck by the professionalism of the many highly qualified experts available to guide decisions on complex issues, as well as the Board members from diverse backgrounds who ensured that the decisions of the Board were greater than the sum of its individual parts.

I was also impressed by the guiding provision in the Environment Protection Act 1993 that in making its decisions, a precautionary approach was to be applied. This was significant. Thus, in making decisions, the burden of proof to be applied, whether in a civil or criminal context, regarding enforcement and in providing advice, was not only the balance of probabilities (civil) or beyond reasonable doubt (criminal), but tempered by the overriding statutory direction.

In the general community when addressing the effects of climate change, we so often hear the response from interested parties that ‘you can’t prove that it causes climate change’. By way of example, the debate about cigarettes was often that ‘you can’t prove they cause cancer’. Even today, some writers foster the view that ‘you can’t prove pollution is causing climate change’. Like the human body, the earth is a living, breathing body. Just as putting cigarette smoke into fragile human lungs was always, as a matter of common sense, a dangerous thing to do, so it is with the earth’s climate. Eventually, scientists proved that cigarettes caused cancer. As did fluorocarbons cause holes in the ozone layer. The smoke from the recent bushfires is still circling the planet. 

A precautionary directive is and was the most positive and important directive in the Act. It should become the guiding principle of Parliament in its legislative role. 

Stephen Walsh served as Chair of the EPA Board from 1995 to 2003