The state of Australia’s natural environment is rapidly going from bad to worse, as those in government with a duty of care choose to dress windows and kick potential solutions down the road.
Tanya Plibersek is widely thought to have been given the environment and water portfolio to restrain her ambitions. Although reportedly fond of bushwalking, she has no previous experience in an environmental role, either in government or opposition, having spent her political life specialising in health, education, foreign affairs, human services and women.
It can be something of a curse to be the human face of the government’s environment policy, with little real power to change things, but Minister Plibersek’s fall has been further than most, having been elected as part of a government promising to do much better in this area than its predecessor – not a big ask in this case.
When the Albanese government released its Nature Positive Plan in 2022 there was an expectation that sweeping reforms of Commonwealth environmental law would follow, particularly a reworking of the deeply flawed and unfit for purpose Environment Protection Biodiversity and Conservation Act.
So far, little has changed, apart from the announcement of two additional bureaucratic bodies; a new federal EPA (this is the watchdog with no teeth, only able to implement existing laws) and another one created to manage environmental data, to be called Environment Information Australia (EIA).
Too hard basket
The rest of the Nature Positive Plan – the part concerned with legislating real change on the ground, to protect species and ecosystems – has been broken up and relegated vaguely into the future. This has been warmly welcomed by mining companies, particularly in WA, while the environment organisations and other stakeholders who have been working behind closed doors with government to develop the plan are calling it a betrayal.
George Woods from Lock the Gate recently appeared at a parliamentary committee and said, ‘This delay is going to drive wildlife closer to extinction. It’s going to maintain the blindfold in Australia’s keystone environment law on climate change damage caused by coal and gas mining and exports.’
She said the government had failed in its promise to halt new extinctions, with ‘the lack of any kind of response from the minister to these really substantial problems.’
The absence of legislative reform means that coalmine and gasfield expansions, along with the destruction of forests, can continue just as they did under Scott Morrison, with no additional consideration of climate or species protection, but with a new body providing the green light.
Even without the new EIA, the data on Australia’s environmental decline is overwhelming.
World leaders
Australia leads the world in mammal extinctions, is second in the world for biodiversity loss, and has been named as the only rich country on a global deforestation hotspot list, with an area of bushland and forest equivalent to the MCG being bulldozed every two minutes, mostly for beef production. More often than not, being mapped as threatened species habitat is no protection against destruction in the lucky country, with agriculture and forestry exempt from existing federal environment laws.
The CSIRO has recently estimated 50 million native animals are killed each year in Queensland and NSW due to deforestation, on top of the 3 billion estimated to have died from bushfires across Black Summer.
The Great Barrier Reef is currently undergoing its worst ever coral bleaching (with no obvious response from the government), logging in Tasmania is accelerating, new coal mines are opening, ecosystems in WA are collapsing under the pressure from climate change and other human activity, offshore gas in NSW is back on the table, wind farms are being built in environmentally sensitive areas, new pipelines are being laid, and the fracking industry is spreading across the Northern Territory with no federal intervention, potentially permanently polluting underground water.
In a rare ray of sunshine, Tanya Plibersek did reject the Toondah Harbour development proposal near Brisbane, but only after a decade of grassroots community activism. She has declared herself ineligible to step into the Wallum dispute.
Recently the federal environment minister’s role has been further diminished, with her ability to oversee the offshore petroleum industry now handed over to Resources Minister Madeleine King, a woman who has shown as much enthusiasm for fossil fuels as Keith Pitt, Matt Canavan and Barnaby Joyce, who each held the portfolio before her.
How any of this squares with the government’s stated commitment to net zero is anyone’s guess. What happened to the climate trigger, Albo?
Originally from Canberra, David Lowe is an award-winning film-maker, writer and photographer with particular interests in the environment and politics. He’s known for his campaigning work with Cloudcatcher Media.
Long ago, he did work experience in Parliament House with Mungo MacCallum.
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