After I have cov­ered the new bio­di­ver­sity off­set fund in New South Wales and the bio­di­ver­sity off­set pol­icy in the Aus­tralian Cap­i­tal Ter­ri­tory in pre­vi­ous posts I would like to point to the New Envi­ron­men­tal Off­sets Regime for Queensland.

On 1 July 2014, a new envi­ron­men­tal off­sets frame­work was intro­duced in Queens­land. Read more on the web­site of the Queens­land gov­ern­ment:
The new frame­work stream­lines envi­ron­men­tal off­sets by pro­vid­ing an outcome-based approach to off­sets, remov­ing the com­plex­i­ties and dupli­ca­tion asso­ci­ated with the for­mer off­sets frame­work and align­ing off­sets across all three lev­els of government.

The new frame­work includes:

• Envi­ron­men­tal Off­sets Act 2014 (PDF, 490KB) which coor­di­nates the deliv­ery of envi­ron­men­tal off­sets across juris­dic­tions and pro­vides a sin­gle point-of-truth for off­sets in Queensland.
• Envi­ron­men­tal Off­sets Reg­u­la­tion 2014 (PDF, 230KB) which pro­vides details of the pre­scribed activ­i­ties reg­u­lated under exist­ing leg­is­la­tion and pre­scribed envi­ron­men­tal mat­ters to which the Act applies.
• New Queens­land Envi­ron­men­tal Off­sets Pol­icy(PDF, 795KB) Ver­sion 1.0 which pro­vides a sin­gle, con­sis­tent, whole-of-government pol­icy for the assess­ment of off­set pro­pos­als pro­vided by author­ity hold­ers to sat­isfy off­set conditions.

Rebecca Hoare from Nor­ton Rose Ful­bright has also pre­pared a break­down of the Envi­ron­men­tal Off­sets Bill: a new foun­da­tion for Queens­land envi­ron­men­tal off­set reg­u­la­tion and an update (July 2014) here.

Sarah Macoun and Gemma Chad­wick from Hop­good Ganim have pro­vided an analy­sis of what Queensland’s New Envi­ron­men­tal Off­sets regime means for local gov­ern­ment off­set con­di­tions (see also Envi­ron­men­tal Off­sets and inter­gen­er­a­tional equity).

What are your expe­ri­ences with envi­ron­men­tal off­sets in Queens­land and with the new regime? Where do you see weak points or advantages?