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Reform to Australia’s primary federal environmental legislation – the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (Cth) (“EPBC Act”) – has returned to the spotlight. After failing to pass its reform agenda through the last parliament, the Australian government introduced amending legislation in November 2025 and, after a short period of intense negotiation, an amended EPBC Act passed the parliament in December 2025. While shortfalls in the scope and effectiveness of the EPBC Act have drawn much scholarly critique over the past two decades, this critique does not typically articulate an analytical framework against which to evaluate reforms or standards for guiding new statutory or policy amendments. We define and characterise, for the first time, a nascent tool, “legal design principles”, as a guide to future, more-ambitious law reform for an uncertain and challenging future. This tool also offers a standard for critically assessing legal reforms such as the EPBC Act reforms. In this article, we (1) define what legal design principles are, (2) articulate core characteristics of legal design principles and their value in guiding future law reform and (3) briefly examine how this tool might help us to critically and transparently assess the EPBC Act reforms against ambitious global priorities.
Camatta et al. (Thu,) studied this question.