Environmental Assessment Australia's New Outlook under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (Cth)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Environmental law in Australia owes much of its origins to British ancestry, but as a political federation of states and territories, Australia has also looked to other federal jurisdictions in the USA and Canada to help determine appropriate legal responsibilities for protection of the environment and management of natural resources. Environmental assessment of activities at Commonwealth level indeed was initially influenced by the American and Canadian models; but in recent years Australian governments have sought a more refined approach that reflects the realities of a new era of ‘co-operative federalism’ ushered in by the Inter-governmental Agreement on the Environment 1992. The promulgation of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (Cth) (EPBCA) represents the conclusion of this search for the most appropriate statement of Commonwealth/state responsibilities for the environment; and represents the most fundamental reform of Commonwealth responsibility for the environment in the past 30 years. The Act, which came into force on 16 July 2000, replaces five existing statutes; the Endangered Species Protection Act 1992 (Cth); the Environment Protection (Impact of Proposals) Act 1974 (Cth) (EPIP Act); the National Parks and Wildlife Conservation Act 1975 (Cth); the Whale Protection Act 1980 (Cth), and the World Heritage Properties Conservation Act 1983 (Cth). 1 The passage of the Act has been controversial because it appears to limit the legal responsibilities of the federal government to a narrow list of defined circumstances, omitting in the process some environmental issues in Australia that might appear to demand a national approach. The purpose of this paper is to describe the background and philosophy behind the new legislation, and outline the provisions for Commonwealth environmental assessment and approval of actions that might significantly affect the environment.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".