Western Australia is the nation’s economic powerhouse, with a long history of delivering projects across industry, including critical minerals, mining, agriculture, and technology innovation.

These projects have provided significant employment and growth opportunities across the state, delivering key infrastructure to our communities.

However, despite our wealth of natural resources, WA is no longer a state where development is encouraged, supported, or nurtured.

Our reputation as a state to invest in is being compromised by Labor’s web of green tape and their inability to fix it.

The costs and time associated with doing business have skyrocketed after seven years of Labor inaction, and the approvals processes are threatening the very industries our state’s prosperity was built on.

Almost $320 billion worth of investment projects are currently being held up by WA’s cumbersome environmental approvals processes.

Many companies are now questioning their investment decisions and the viability of entire projects.

This Labor Government sat on its hands for seven years before finally ordering a review of WA’s approval processes and procedures.

Despite the need for timely change, the Cook Government has implemented only a handful of the 39 recommendations in the review to fix the growing backlog.

These delays are killing jobs and killing investment, leaving companies waiting to invest billions of dollars into WA’s economy.

The WA Liberals will not allow these future growth opportunities to be squandered.

Creating the right business environment to unlock new markets and forge prosperity for future generations is paramount.

Amending environmental protections and streamlining the environmental approvals process will boost investment and foster job creation in WA.

Only a WA Liberal Government will do it.

The WA Liberals believe in supporting industry to innovate for the future of WA, while maintaining world-class environmental standards.

It’s the foundations on which our state, and the many communities within it, were built.

However, many of WA’s key future projects are being jeopardised by overly burdensome environmental approval processes, which can take years to navigate.  

The Cook Labor Government has neglected this process, which will be further impacted by the Federal Labor Government’s ‘Nature Positive Plan’.

The State and Federal Labor Governments have allowed future projects to stall – under a web of ‘green tape’, with potentially dire consequences for state development.

We cannot continue to allow our state’s future growth to be hamstrung by bureaucracy.

A WA Liberal Government will streamline the approvals process by amending the Environmental Protection Act, remove Federal-State duplications, and reinvigorate the Economic Regulation Authority (ERA).

This will seek to address the backlog, introduce strict conditions on stop-the-clock provisions, and enable parallel approvals.

Abolishing the Social Surroundings policy and replacing it with a Statement of Compliance, along with expanded deemed approvals, will enhance the efficiency of our environmental approvals system.

Further, it is detrimental to our state that taxpayers’ money is propping up activists trying to stop the development of our resources sector using the Environmental Defenders Office (EDO).

Balance is key, and the current environmental approvals process does not provide it.

This regulatory inbalance will not continue, nor will the EDO’s funding.

Providing certainty to business on environmental assessment timeframes and practices fosters productive relationships between government and industry.

Only the WA Liberal Party is committed to providing businesses with approvals certainty to innovate for Western Australia’s future.