Record $60,000 fine and $1 million clean-up order issued under the Victorian Environment Protection Act 2017
Overview
The Heidelberg Magistrates’ Court has sentenced Diamond Creek property owner Joseph Chetcuti to a $60,000 fine, believed to be the highest individual financial penalty ever imposed under the Environment Protection Act 2017 (Vic), following guilty pleas to two serious environmental offences. The court also issued a legally binding clean-up order requiring Chetcuti to remediate his 19,000 square metre property at Black Gully Road, Diamond Creek, with total remediation costs expected to exceed $1 million. The sentence was handed down on 21 July 2024 following prosecution by EPA Victoria. An additional $12,000 in legal costs was ordered against Chetcuti.
The significance of this ruling extends well beyond the financial penalties. The court confirmed that the clean-up obligation remains personally binding on Chetcuti regardless of whether he sells or otherwise transfers the property. This is a material development for environmental law practice, property conveyancing, and contaminated land assessment in Victoria. It clarifies that under the current Victorian framework, attempting to exit a contamination liability through a property transaction will not extinguish a court-ordered remediation obligation attached to the responsible individual.
For environmental practitioners, developers, civil contractors, and property lawyers operating across Victoria and other Australian jurisdictions, the case raises urgent questions about how fill soil is sourced, classified, transported, and received. The operation at Diamond Creek was not a one-off incident but an organised, industrial-scale illegal waste disposal scheme involving commercially operated trucks. That the EPA identified, tracked, and successfully prosecuted the operator using aerial photography and community intelligence rather than on-site inspections represents a meaningful shift in enforcement capability and strategy.
Key details of the prosecution and offences
Chetcuti pleaded guilty to two charges. The first was depositing and receiving waste, including reportable priority waste, at a site not licensed to receive such material under the Environment Protection Act 2017 (Vic) and the Environment Protection Regulations 2021 (Vic). The second was non-compliance with an Environmental Action Notice (EAN) issued under Section 290(1) of the Environment Protection Act 2017 (Vic). Non-compliance with an EAN is a serious offence under the Victorian framework because it represents a failure to act on a formal regulatory direction after the EPA has already identified unlawful conduct and served notice.
The site first came to the attention of EPA Victoria and emergency services in May 2025 when an unauthorised burn-off of industrial waste occurred on the property. Waste material present at the site included asbestos-contaminated soil and mixed construction and demolition (C&D) debris. Under Victorian law, soil containing demolition material or asbestos is classified as industrial waste, and in some circumstances as reportable priority waste, meaning it can only lawfully be accepted at a facility holding the appropriate EPA licence. The 19,000 square metre property at Diamond Creek held no such licence. Accepting this material constituted an offence at the point of receipt, regardless of the source or the purported intent of the depositor.
EPA Victoria’s investigation methodology is particularly instructive. Rather than relying solely on physical inspections, the regulator deployed aerial photography to document the operation and used community reporting to track and identify commercially operated trucks delivering construction-derived fill soil to the site. This approach allowed the EPA to build an evidentiary record of an organised scheme over time without needing investigators physically present at each delivery. The investigation has now extended to the commercial trucking companies that transported the waste, with EPA Victoria actively pursuing upstream liability against those transporters. This confirms that the regulator views the waste transport chain as subject to enforcement, not only the end point of disposal.
The $60,000 fine, while the highest recorded individual penalty under the current Act, sits alongside the remediation order as the more consequential element of the sentence. Remediation of a 19,000 square metre site contaminated with asbestos and mixed C&D waste in a peri-urban Victorian location is a technically demanding and costly exercise. Costs exceeding $1 million are consistent with the scope of works likely required: asbestos characterisation, waste classification, licensed contractor engagement, clean fill importation, validation sampling, and regulatory sign-off. The court’s decision to attach this obligation personally to Chetcuti, rather than allowing it to follow only the land title, is the ruling’s most practically significant element for property and legal practitioners.
Australian context: how this ruling intersects with national contaminated land and waste frameworks
Victoria’s Environment Protection Act 2017 (Vic), which replaced the Environment Protection Act 1970 (Vic), introduced a general environmental duty and strengthened the EPA’s enforcement and notice powers substantially. Section 290(1), under which one of the charges was brought, gives the EPA authority to issue Environmental Action Notices requiring persons to take specified actions to prevent, reduce, or remedy environmental harm. Non-compliance with such a notice is a standalone offence, which is why Chetcuti faced two separate charges rather than one. This architecture is broadly consistent with the general duty and notice-based enforcement frameworks that also appear in the protection legislation of other Australian jurisdictions.
References and related sources
- Primary source: www.epa.vic.gov.au
- epa.vic.gov.au
- sers.net.au
- EPA Victoria
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This is an iEnvi Machete news summary. Prepared by iEnvi to summarise the source article for contaminated land, groundwater, remediation, approvals and site risk professionals.
Published: 26 Jul 2026
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