The dozers left the site in the second week of March, and nobody could tell the crew when they would be back. The project was a mid-size wind farm with a battery attached, somewhere on the western slopes of New South Wales — a little over 200 megawatts, big enough to matter to the grid, not big enough to make the news. The development manager had spent three years assembling it: option agreements over eleven farms, a place in the grid connection queue, two seasons of bird and bat surveys, a community benefit fund negotiated with the shire. Then the federal referral came back with a request for further information about a threatened woodland bird recorded on two of the survey transects. The request was reasonable. Answering it properly meant another survey, and the bird is only reliably detectable in spring. Spring was seven months away.
Nothing had gone wrong. No decision had gone against the project. No rule had been broken, and no official had done anything but their job. The department had asked a fair question and the proponent had to go and find the answer. But the statutory clock — the legal deadline inside which the Commonwealth must decide — had stopped, and it would not restart until the information arrived. In the meantime the option payments to eleven farmers kept falling due, the connection queue position had to be held, the turbine supply slot had to be paid for or surrendered, and equity raised against a 2027 first-power date sat in an account earning less than it cost. That is what an approvals queue actually is. It is not a filing cabinet. It is capital, standing still, in a country that keeps telling itself it is in a hurry.
That proponent is a composite, written to be typical rather than to be real, and it is worth saying so plainly. But the mechanism in the story is exact, it is written into Commonwealth law, and it is the most misunderstood feature of Australia's environmental approvals system — including in the reform numbers the government now points to.
What happened: a review in 2020, a collapse in 2024, a law in 2025
The law in question is the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, usually called the EPBC Act, passed under the Howard government and in force since July 2000. Its architecture is simple to describe. If you propose to take an action that is likely to have a significant impact on a defined list of matters of national environmental significance — world heritage properties, national heritage places, internationally important wetlands, nationally listed threatened species and ecological communities, listed migratory species, Commonwealth marine areas, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, nuclear actions, and water resources in relation to coal seam gas and large coal mining — you must refer that action to the Commonwealth. The Environment Minister then decides whether it is a "controlled action" requiring assessment and approval. Everything else in the system flows from that first decision.
The Act requires an independent review every ten years. The second, conducted by Professor Graeme Samuel AC and commissioned by the Morrison government, was delivered in October 2020. It is one of the bluntest documents ever handed to an Australian government about one of its own laws. It found the Act was ineffective, that it was not fit for current or future environmental challenges, and — the finding that matters most here — that it was not working for the environment, for business, or for the community (Independent Review of the EPBC Act, Final Report, Oct-2020). It made 38 recommendations, built around legally binding National Environmental Standards, an independent regulator to enforce them, and better environmental data.
That is a rare kind of finding. Most policy fights are distributive: one side gains, another loses, and the argument is about who should. The Samuel Review said this law was failing all of its constituencies at once. Conservationists were not getting protection, proponents were not getting certainty, communities were getting neither. There was, in principle, a reform available that made everybody better off. Almost nothing in public policy looks like that.
What followed has to be set out carefully, because responsibility is genuinely shared, and this site's rule is to separate what a government caused from what it inherited.
The record, in order
In August 2020 — before Samuel's final report — the Morrison government introduced the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Amendment (Streamlining Environmental Approvals) Bill 2020, which would have devolved federal approval powers to the states through bilateral agreements. It offered interim standards rather than the legally binding national standards Samuel had recommended, and that was the core of the objection to it. The Bill passed the House of Representatives, did not pass the Senate, and lapsed at the prorogation of Parliament before the 2022 election (Parliament of Australia, Bills records). Between October 2020 and the change of government in May 2022, no national standards were made and no independent regulator was created.
The Albanese government was elected in May 2022 and released its Nature Positive Plan in December 2022, accepting the broad architecture of the Samuel Review. Its substantive stage became a package of bills that passed the House of Representatives on 4 July 2024 and was introduced into the Senate on 12 August 2024, creating an independent compliance body, a data body, and higher penalties. In November 2024 the negotiations to secure Senate passage collapsed. In February 2025 the government confirmed it was not proceeding.
That collapse is the government's own. It was not inherited. A government that controls the executive and the House chose, after negotiations, not to accept the conditions on offer in the Senate. Reasonable people can argue the price demanded was too high and that passing a bad law would have been worse than passing none — that argument is put fairly in the steel-man below. But the decision belongs to the decision-maker, and the cost of it is roughly a further year.
In 2025 the government returned with a larger package: the Environment Protection Reform Bill 2025 and six related bills. This time it passed. Parliament agreed to it on 28 November 2025 and it received Royal Assent on 1 December 2025 (Parliament of Australia; DCCEEW). It is the most significant change to Commonwealth environmental law since the EPBC Act itself.
What the reform actually does
Four things matter for the question this article asks.
National Environmental Standards. The Minister gains the power to make binding standards by legislative instrument, with "no regression" principles designed to stop future standards being weaker than current protections. The framework provisions commenced on 2 December 2025. Draft standards for matters of national environmental significance and for environmental offsets were released, revised and re-released for consultation in April and May 2026; standards on community engagement, First Nations engagement and data were still to come (DCCEEW consultation materials, 2026).
A national regulator. The National Environment Protection Agency takes on compliance, enforcement and audit as an independent body, alongside Environment Information Australia, which must produce State of the Environment reports every two years, the first due by 15 December 2028. Both commence on 1 July 2026 (DCCEEW).
A streamlined assessment pathway. From 1 December 2026, two heavily used assessment methods — assessment on referral information and the public environment report — are replaced by a single pathway under which the Minister has 30 business days to decide whether to approve the action. It is not available for "fossil fuel actions", meaning coal and gas extraction and production, which continue under the existing pathways (DCCEEW; Environment Protection Reform Act 2025).
Disclosure and penalties. All assessment pathways will require disclosure of scope 1 and scope 2 greenhouse gas emissions, and penalties increase, from 1 December 2026.
So the honest summary as at September 2026 is this. The law has changed. The regulator exists. The standards are being written. And the provision governing how long a project waits has not commenced.
The strongest case for the policy
A rushed reform would have been worse than a slow one, and the slowness was mostly the Senate
Start with the finding the government was responding to, because it cuts against the reflexive criticism. The Samuel Review did not say the EPBC Act was too slow. It said the Act was failing on its own environmental terms — that it was not delivering protection for the matters it exists to protect, that cumulative impacts were not being considered systematically, and that climate adaptation was an implied rather than a central consideration. Any reform that only made approvals faster, without fixing the environmental failure, would have addressed the smaller half of the problem and would have deserved to fail.
The second point is the one most critics of approval timelines never engage with. Speed bought by weakening scrutiny is not durable speed. An approval granted on a thin evidence base is vulnerable to judicial review, and litigation is slower than assessment. A project held up eighteen months in the Federal Court is worse off than one held up eighteen months in an information request, because the court outcome is binary and the assessment outcome is negotiable. A hard 30-day deadline with no power to demand missing information would not have produced faster projects. It would have produced faster refusals, or approvals that did not survive contact with a court, and proponents would have paid for both.
Third, environmental assessment is a democratic function, not administrative overhead. When a wind farm, a mine, a highway or a transmission line is built, the people who live beside it did not choose it and cannot leave. Their interest in what it does to their water, their bushland, their heritage and their amenity is real, and nobody represents it in the room unless a public process puts it there. Consultation that slows a project is not a defect; very often it is the system doing exactly what it was legislated to do. The proper measure of an approvals regime is not how fast it says yes, but whether it reaches defensible decisions in a time proportionate to what is at stake.
Fourth, on the timing, the government has a real defence. It tried in 2024. The bills passed the House in July 2024 and went to a Senate it did not control, where the price of passage was set by others. A government that accepts any condition to get a bill through is not governing; it is transcribing. Walking away in November 2024 and returning in 2025 with a broader package that could actually pass is a defensible judgement. And the comparison with the previous government is unflattering to the critics: the Coalition received the Samuel Review, and its own response — devolution without binding standards — also failed in the Senate and lapsed. Two governments of opposite colours have now found this reform genuinely hard to legislate. That is evidence about the problem, not only about the government.
Finally, the reform is not cosmetic. Binding standards made by instrument, an independent enforcement agency, a statutory data body with a legislated reporting cycle, mandatory emissions disclosure, and two assessment pathways replaced by one carrying a fixed decision clock — that is structural change, and more than any government has achieved on this Act in twenty-five years.
The evidence: what a statutory clock actually measures
This is the heart of the topic, and it is almost never explained properly. The gap between the headline number and what a proponent experiences is not a scandal or a failure of integrity. It is a measurement definition — but one that quietly determines what everybody argues about.
How a referral works
A proponent lodges a referral describing the action and its likely impacts, and pays a fee — the set referral fee is in the order of $6,600 (approx.; DCCEEW fee schedule, indexed). The Minister, in practice a delegate inside the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, then has 20 business days to decide whether the action is a controlled action and, if so, how it will be assessed (EPBC Act, s.75; DCCEEW referral guidance). Twenty business days is about four calendar weeks. On paper, that is a fast regulator.
If the decision-maker forms the view that there is not enough information to decide properly, the Act allows further information to be requested. The effect is set out in the department's own guidance in plain terms: the request "stops the clock", and the clock does not resume until sufficient information has been provided. Stopping the clock also attracts a fee. The same mechanism operates at later statutory stages, where base and complexity fees apply at each — the base fee for assessment on referral information is in the order of $9,000 (approx.; DCCEEW cost recovery materials, indexed annually).
Read that again slowly, because everything else follows from it. The 20-business-day figure is not a deadline by which a proponent will have an answer. It is a budget of departmental working time. It measures how long the regulator is formally on the clock. It was never designed to measure how long the applicant waits.
A statutory clock that can be stopped is not a promise about elapsed time. It is a description of how the regulator spends its own.
Why the mechanism exists, and why it is defensible
Before criticising the gap, it is worth stating why any competent regulator needs something like this, because the alternative is genuinely worse. An assessment officer facing an incomplete referral has three options. They can refuse it, which punishes the proponent for a question that could have been answered. They can approve it on inadequate evidence, which is how bad decisions and successful court challenges are made. Or they can ask for what is missing. Only the third is defensible, and if the clock kept running while the proponent went away and did a spring bird survey, the department would breach its statutory timeframe through no fault of its own — or, more likely, would learn to decide on the evidence in front of it rather than the evidence a good decision requires. The stop-the-clock power is what lets a regulator insist on quality without being punished for the proponent's preparation. Any reform that abolished it without replacing it would make decisions worse.
It also puts the incentive in the right place. Because the clock stops on the proponent's side of the line, the cost of a thin referral falls on the proponent, and a developer who front-loads its surveys gets a faster answer than one who lodges early and hopes.
The measurement gap, quantified
The department reports its own performance against these timeframes. In its 2024-25 annual report, the key performance measure covering the percentage of EPBC Act referral and approval decisions meeting statutory timeframes was reported as "mostly achieved", with decisions that missed timeframes and the reasons for delay tabulated separately (DCCEEW Annual Report 2024-25). Performance against the three key decision points is also published quarterly.
That reporting is honest, and it is not the problem. The problem is what it can measure. A metric defined as compliance with a statutory timeframe cannot, by construction, capture time during which the timeframe is not running. A department could stop the clock on every referral it receives, take three years over each decision, and still report near-perfect compliance — not through bad faith, but because the two are different quantities. The Commonwealth publishes the one that flatters and does not publish, as a headline series, the one a proponent experiences.
What we do have is analysis of the public record. The EPBC Act public portal lists referrals, decisions and dates, and it can be interrogated. An analysis of that portal published in November 2025, covering referrals classified as renewable energy generation and supply between 2018 and 2025, reported that average elapsed time to a controlled action decision fell from around 136 days in 2023 to around 65 days in 2025 (approx.; law firm analysis of the EPBC public portal, Nov-2025 — a secondary source, clearly labelled).
Set those numbers against the statutory clock. Twenty business days is roughly 28 calendar days. Sixty-five calendar days is roughly two and a third times that. So even after a genuine and substantial improvement — and the improvement is real, and the government is entitled to claim it — the elapsed time to the first decision in the process still runs at roughly double the number that appears in the legislation and in the guidance material. The difference is, in the main, the clock being stopped.
The much larger gap is downstream
The controlled action decision is the front door, not the approval. A project found to be a controlled action then goes into assessment, and it is there that elapsed time becomes something a chief financial officer cannot plan around.
The same November 2025 analysis reported that, of renewable energy projects in New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria referred since 2023 that required full assessment and approval, 89 were in the system and one had received a final decision from the Minister. It also reported that the longest elapsed time for a renewable energy project to reach a final decision was 1,999 days — a little under five and a half years (approx.; same source).
Those figures need their caveats, and this site states them. They come from a secondary analysis, not departmental reporting. A pipeline count is not a completion rate: a project referred in 2025 has not been waiting long, and many of the 89 are early. Some elapsed time is the proponent's own — a developer that pauses to redesign a layout or wait for a state decision is stopping its own clock. And the 1,999-day figure is an outlier by definition, not a typical experience.
The caveats do not dissolve the point. The ratio of projects in the queue to projects out of it is not close. And none of that elapsed time shows up as a failure in the department's statutory-timeframe metric, because for most of it the clock is not running.
The new pathway inherits the same architecture
From 1 December 2026 the streamlined pathway gives the Minister 30 business days to decide whether to approve an action. That is a firmer commitment than the arrangements it replaces. But three features of its design determine whether it changes anything a proponent can feel.
The first is that requests for further information can still stop the clock during that period. The mechanism is not abolished; it is carried forward. Whatever share of elapsed time it accounts for today, it can account for tomorrow.
The second is more consequential and has had almost no public attention. The 30-business-day clock starts once the Minister has decided to apply the streamlined pathway to a particular action — and there is no statutory timeline governing when that decision has to be made. A proponent can be in extended discussion about information requirements and the assessment approach before the clock the reform advertises has begun to run at all. A firm deadline that begins at a moment nobody is required to reach by any particular date is a weaker guarantee than it sounds.
The third is that the pathway is designed for well-prepared referrals. Its logic is front-loading: studies and community engagement done thoroughly before lodgement, so the regulator has what it needs on day one. That is sound design. But front-loading does not remove work from the system; it moves the work earlier and shifts its cost onto the proponent. Total elapsed time from the decision to develop to the day a shovel goes in may not fall as much as the decision clock implies. For a large developer with a standing environmental team, that is a manageable reallocation. For a mid-size proponent — the one at the top of this article — it is a larger up-front cheque written before any regulatory certainty exists at all.
None of this makes the reform a failure. It makes it a reform whose effect is unknown, by design, until it has run.
The critique: the cost of five years, and the number nobody publishes
Two criticisms survive the steel-man, and both are narrow, which is why they are hard to dismiss.
One: the delay had a price, and somebody paid it
From the delivery of the Samuel Review in October 2020 to Royal Assent on 1 December 2025 is a little over five years. To the commencement of the streamlined pathway on 1 December 2026 is another year. Six years will have passed between an independent finding that a law was failing the environment, business and the community, and the operation of the provision most directly aimed at the second and third of those.
Responsibility for those six years is genuinely split, and the split matters. The first eighteen months belong to the Morrison government, which received the review, responded with a devolution bill that omitted the binding standards the review had recommended, failed to pass it, and made no standards. The Albanese government inherited a broken Act and an unimplemented review; it caused neither. What it owns is the period from May 2022: seven months to a plan, another eighteen to bills, a collapse in November 2024 that was its own decision, a year to a second attempt, and a further year of commencement lag written into the legislation it drafted.
The cost of that delay is not hypothetical and it is not evenly spread. Every year a project sits in a queue is a year of holding costs — land options, connection queue positions, supply contracts, professional fees, and the opportunity cost of committed equity. Those costs scale with time and not with company size. A large developer amortises them across a portfolio. A mid-size proponent with one project either absorbs them or gives up, and the ones that give up are invisible in every dataset, because a project that is never referred never appears in the EPBC portal at all. The regime's real selection effect is on who can afford to wait, and it favours incumbents.
The environmental ledger paid too, and the delay was not a win for conservation. For those five years the Act the review called ineffective went on operating exactly as it had: no binding standards, no independent regulator, no systematic treatment of cumulative impacts. Nobody was protected by the wait.
Two: the Commonwealth does not publish the number that matters
The second criticism is about transparency, and it is the most fixable thing in this article. The Commonwealth publishes compliance with statutory timeframes. It does not publish, as a routine headline series, the distribution of total elapsed time from referral to final decision — median, upper quartile, and the share attributable to stopped clocks. The raw material exists: the EPBC public portal carries the dates, which is precisely how outside analysts produced the figures cited above. What is missing is the department publishing them itself, consistently, in a form that can be tracked over time.
The consequence is that the public debate runs on the wrong number. Industry says approvals are slow. The department reports it is mostly meeting its timeframes. Both are true, and they are not about the same quantity, so the argument cannot be resolved by evidence. That is a bad state for a question this consequential to be in.
The department reports it is mostly meeting its timeframes. Industry reports that projects wait years. Both are true, because they are measuring different things — and only one of them is published.
The irony that should worry the government most
The friction binds hardest on exactly the projects the government's own energy policy depends on.
The Australian Energy Market Operator's Integrated System Plan — the biennial roadmap for the National Electricity Market — sets out an optimal development path requiring close to 10,000 kilometres of new transmission by 2050 and at least 6 gigawatts of new renewable generation capacity every year to 2050 (AEMO, 2024 Integrated System Plan). Transmission lines are linear infrastructure crossing hundreds of kilometres of habitat, which makes them among the most likely of all project types to trigger federal assessment. Wind farms are built on ridgelines that are also raptor habitat. Solar farms occupy cleared agricultural land that is often the last remnant of a listed ecological community. The transition is unusually exposed to environmental approvals in a way that, say, an apartment tower is not.
Coal and gas extraction, meanwhile, is expressly excluded from the streamlined pathway. Whatever one thinks of that as climate policy — and the case for it is straightforward, that the fastest approvals should not be available to the highest-emitting activities — its mechanical effect is to make the faster pathway a renewables-and-everything-else pathway. That raises the stakes on whether it is fast in practice, because the projects most reliant on it carry a legislated deadline: a 43 per cent emissions reduction by 2030 and net zero by 2050, both written into the Climate Change Act 2022.
A generation target is a construction schedule wearing a policy label. Construction schedules are made of approvals.
What they got right, and the caveats this article owes
Four things belong on the credit side, stated plainly.
They passed it. Two attempts failed before this one succeeded. The reform commanded no easy majority and was opposed from both directions at once — as too weak by conservation groups, as too burdensome by parts of industry. The government spent real political capital in a genuinely contested area and got a package through both chambers. On the record of the previous twenty-five years, that is not a small thing.
It is substantive. Binding national standards with no-regression principles, an independent enforcement agency, a statutory data body with a legislated reporting cycle, mandatory scope 1 and 2 emissions disclosure, higher penalties, and two assessment methods consolidated into one with a fixed decision clock. That is architecture, not tinkering. Critics who call it a rebadging exercise are not describing the legislation.
The clock did get firmer, and the caveats set out above are caveats about how much a 30-business-day requirement will deliver, not arguments that it delivers nothing.
Referral processing genuinely improved. Elapsed time to a controlled action decision on the renewables referrals analysed fell from around 136 days in 2023 to around 65 days in 2025 (approx.) — a better than fifty per cent reduction on the front-door decision, before the reform even commenced. The government is entitled to point at it.
And two caveats the argument in this article owes the reader.
The first is that the Commonwealth is not the main source of delay for the clean energy projects most often cited in this debate, and it would be dishonest to write about approvals friction without saying so. A survey of 67 representatives from close to 40 clean energy organisations, conducted in September 2025, found two-thirds identified assessment under the New South Wales State Significant Development framework, not the federal EPBC Act, as the greater source of delay. The same survey put average additional approval timeframes in New South Wales over the preceding five years at around 1,167 days for wind and around 993 days for solar-plus-battery, with pre-lodgement scoping alone averaging up to twelve months, and reported wind farm approval costs averaging up to $25 million and reaching up to $100 million on some projects (clearly labelled secondary source: industry survey, 3-26 Sep 2025). Those are state figures, from Labor state governments, and they dwarf the federal ones. Anybody telling you Canberra is the whole story is selling something.
The second is that this article cannot tell you the reform failed, because the reform has not run. The streamlined pathway commences on 1 December 2026, and the first cohort assessed under it will not produce a meaningful dataset until 2028. The honest position as at September 2026 is that a serious reform has been legislated, its most important provision has not started, and the evidence that would settle the argument does not yet exist. Anyone claiming otherwise in either direction is ahead of the record.
The risk to the future
The gap between a target and a queue is where a transition stalls
The risk is not that Australia's environmental law is too slow in the abstract. It is that two of the country's central commitments now depend on a variable nobody is measuring in public. AEMO's plan requires at least 6 gigawatts of new renewable capacity a year to 2050 and close to 10,000 kilometres of new transmission. The Climate Change Act 2022 sets a 43 per cent reduction by 2030 and net zero by 2050. Both are arithmetic problems whose denominator is time, and a significant share of that time is spent in approvals queues at two levels of government.
If elapsed time does not fall after December 2026, the consequences are cumulative rather than dramatic. Projects that were marginal at a five-year development horizon do not proceed at a seven-year one. The developers who survive are the ones large enough to carry holding costs across a portfolio, which reduces competition and raises the cost of the capital that does deploy. Firm generation retires on a schedule set by its own economics while replacement capacity waits on a schedule set by a queue, and the gap between them is filled by higher wholesale prices, emergency extensions of ageing plant, or both. Each of those lands on household bills and on the emissions trajectory at once.
The second-order risk is political, and more serious. A transition visibly behind schedule generates pressure to fix it by cutting scrutiny — and a future government that abolished the information power rather than fixing the process would produce exactly what the Samuel Review warned about: a system that is quick and protects nothing. The stop-the-clock mechanism is not the problem. Not knowing how much of the delay it accounts for is the problem, because you cannot fix a process you have declined to measure.
The generation that inherits this decides nothing about it. They inherit either an electricity system rebuilt roughly on time with real standards behind it, or a half-built system, a higher bill, and environment laws weakened in a panic because nobody published a number.
What would settle it
The useful conclusion here is not a verdict, because the evidence for a verdict does not exist yet. It is a test, and three things would resolve it, all within the Commonwealth's power. Publish median and upper-quartile elapsed time from referral to final decision, by project type, as a standing quarterly series alongside the existing compliance measure. Publish the share of that elapsed time attributable to stopped clocks, which the department already records because it charges fees against it. And publish, once the streamlined pathway commences, the interval between a referral being lodged and the Minister deciding to apply the pathway — the gap currently governed by no statutory timeline at all.
None of that requires legislation. It requires a decision to report the number that describes the applicant's experience alongside the number that describes the department's. A government confident its reform will work has every reason to set that baseline now, before the pathway starts, because a baseline is what lets you prove an improvement later. If elapsed time falls materially by 2028, the reform worked. If it is unchanged while timeframe compliance is reported at 95 per cent, the reform improved the reporting and not the experience. That is falsifiable, and this site will be checking it.
The reform passed. It is real. The clock is firmer. The question is whether a firmer clock, in a system where the clock can stop and where it does not start until somebody decides to start it, produces a different experience for the person holding the capital. As at September 2026, that question is open, the record contains no answer, and the honest thing to do is say so and set the date on which we will look again.