Labor needs to bow to Liberals or Greens or its environment law revamp is dead | Australian politics

The Albanian government will have to make significant concessions to the Coalition or the Greens to have any hope of revising federal nature laws after both parties ruled out supporting the current plan.

Environment Minister Murray Watt said he was open to working with either party but would not speculate on possible changes, leaving the fate of the promised rewrite of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act unknown before it is introduced into Parliament over the next fortnight.

After weeks of signaling she was open to a deal with Labor, opposition leader Sussan Ley all but ruled out the option on Thursday as she opposed the proposal which she called a “red light” for jobs and a “handbrake” for investment.

The Greens separately accused Watt of writing business-friendly laws that were worse for the environment than existing John Howard-era law, confirming they would not support the government without changes to directly tackle the climate crisis and native logging.

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This means Watt has no obvious partner to push the legislation through the Senate, diminishing his hopes of passing the laws before Christmas and raising the prospect that a second attempt to overhaul the EPBC law could fail within 12 months.

Labor hoped the Coalition would be more likely to approve the latest iteration given it was Ley, as environment minister in the Morrison government, who commissioned the Samuel review that inspired the changes.

The abrupt change in stance by the opposition leader and his shadow environment minister, Angie Bell, came after private briefings on parts of the legislation revealed details of Labor’s plan.

Among the opposition’s concerns, shared by parts of the mining industry, was a new definition of an “unacceptable impact” on the environment, which would result in the immediate refusal of a project.

Ley said the laws could jeopardize approval of critical mining projects backed under the deal Anthony Albanese signed with Donald Trump this week in Washington, including the Alcoa-Sojitz gallium project in Western Australia.

Guardian Australia contacted Alcoa, which believed the project would be subject to state – not federal – environmental laws.

Watt said the suggestion that the nature laws could jeopardize the government’s essential minerals campaign was “completely false” and those peddling it were “mischievous”.

The Coalition also included the new requirement for developers to achieve a “net gain” for the environment and tougher penalties for violations, among a list of grievances regarding what Bell described as “positive nature 2.0”.

Positive nature was the slogan of the EPBC reforms that Albanese shelved before the May elections amid industrial and political opposition, including from the Coalition.

Guardian Australia understands the shadow cabinet discussed its general position on EPBC reform earlier this month, but was not convened before Ley changed the coalition position on Thursday.

Senior Liberal officials say the opposition will push for concrete measures to ensure faster approval of projects in negotiations with the government.

If Labor fails to convince the coalition, the fate of the EPBC reform – promised in the last two elections – depends on reaching an agreement with the Greens.

The Greens’ environment spokesperson, Sarah Hanson-Young, was determined on Thursday afternoon that the party would not support laws that do not “protect our forests and do not protect our climate”.

The legislation will, for the first time, require highly polluting projects to disclose their emissions and how they plan to mitigate them, as part of the assessment process.

But it would not force decision-makers to consider climate impacts, meaning projects such as the North West Woodside Shelf extension could still be approved under the new regime.

“Our concern is that even if they now have to say how much pollution they are going to create, the minister can’t do anything with that,” Hanson-Young said on ABC Afternoon.

“He doesn’t need to think about it before giving it his approval. And it’s simply not suited to today’s world, where the environment is under enormous pressure.”