There is something significant missing from most of the political and media discussion about the Australian government’s promised, and now abandoned, nature protection laws: the environment. Logically, it should be a focus of the debate. In practice, it barely gets a look in.
This would be an extraordinary state of affairs were it not so familiar. Australia has a long history of taking its unique wildlife and landscapes for granted, stretching back to European colonisation. But what has happened in this term of parliament is a pretty remarkable extension of that.
For those who missed the details: the prime minister confirmed on Saturday that he had dropped plans to pass “nature positive” legislation to create a national Environment Protection Agency before the election. The failure to establish an EPA breaks a commitment made before the 2022 federal election.
It is not the first time Anthony Albanese has walked back from a government promise to prioritise improving protection of Australia’s unique wildlife. He had already abandoned plans to rewrite and replace the national nature laws – the 1999 Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act – despite everyone, including conservation and industry organisations, agreeing they are failing on nearly every measure.
The ramifications of that failure have been detailed before at length, but bear repeating. A major state-of-the-environment report – a five-yearly scientific assessment that was compiled under the Coalition but hidden in a bottom drawer until released with fanfare by Labor’s Tanya Plibersek – in 2021 found that Australia was clearing forests and other habitat relied on by threatened species at an astonishing rate. Nearly 8m hectares – an area larger than Tasmania – has been destroyed this century. More than 90% of this happened in chunks deemed too insignificant to need approval from the federal government under national law. But the collective impact has been immense.
Meanwhile, the number of species across the country nationally listed as being at risk of extinction has ballooned to more than 2,000, including – to pick just a handful – the koala, the numbat, the Gouldian finch, the eastern quoll and the greater glider. The state-of-the-environment report found the state and trend of nature was poor and deteriorating due to cumulative pressures – habitat loss, invasive species, pollution, resource extraction and, sitting above them all, the climate crisis.
It cited a World Economic Forum statement that environmental degradation has a bigger impact than many of us realise. It could “bring about societal collapses with long-lasting and severe consequences”.
This was not a one-off. It was consistent with the findings of a once-in-a-decade review of the environment act by the former consumer watchdog chair Graeme Samuel that found the existing laws needed a dramatic overhaul, including the creation of national environmental standards against which development proposals could be assessed. Bizarrely, these don’t already exist.
Plibersek accepted Samuel’s 38 recommendations on the government’s behalf, pledged to re-write the laws and started a consultation process with environment and industry organisations. Not surprisingly, agreement proved difficult, and there was a public backlash, particularly from business interests and the Western Australian Labor premier, Roger Cook.
The government responded by breaking its commitment down into stages. The overhaul of the laws was delayed indefinitely. Plibersek pushed on with plans for an EPA and a second body, Environment Information Australia, describing the introduction of legislation to create them as a “historic day for the environment”. But that, too, has now been abandoned this side of the election, with no guarantees beyond it.
Albanese has offered a couple of defences, including that he does not have the numbers in the Senate to pass the bill and the Greens have hardened their position, demanding any deal include a path that could end logging of native forests. But these are specious arguments. To the extent they are true, they are a result of decisions made by the government, not the crossbench.
The reality is that Labor has not spoken with the crossbench about the bills since Albanese intervened in November to scuttle a potential deal between the environment minister, Tanya Plibersek and the Greens and independent David Pocock. As Dan Jervis-Bardy reported last week, Plibersek wrote to the Greens in late November thanking them for the “constructive approach” they had taken to negotiations, acknowledged the bills would be amended and asked that they confirm their support.
The Guardian revealed at the time the proposed deal included the environment minister being given the power to introduce national standards that would apply to regional forestry agreements with the states – a step that, if the minister acted on it, could have ended the longstanding exemption from national nature laws for state-sanctioned logging.
The most remarkable thing about this was that it was not much of a concession by the government. It brought forward what Samuel had recommended and Plibersek had already committed the government to do as part of its promised re-write of the environment act. Rather than scupper a Greens-led deal, Albanese intervened to block amendments that would have merely given force to existing Labor policy.
The decision was less about the numbers in the Senate – it’s pretty hard to get a deal when you’ve given up negotiations – than it was a political decision focused on WA, where Cook, the state’s powerful resources industry and Seven West Media have latched on to the nature positive bills to make an aggressive parochial power play ahead of the state and federal elections.
The shelved bill would have been a step forward, creating an EPA that could make approval and regulatory decisions and impose beefed up penalties. It would have sat alongside an information and data body that, even now, industry groups say is badly needed. The EPA’s independence from the government would have been limited – its chief executive would have been appointed by the minister and there would have been no board – and its powers would have been limited to enforcing the existing laws.
If you listen to Cook and WA industry groups – which the West Australian newspaper does, decanting the claims on to its front page apparently without question – these changes would be a threat to jobs and could lead to skyrocketing electricity and house prices. It’s often ludicrous, but effective politics.
What happens from here is impossible to know. Labor is notionally committed to improving nature laws if returned to power, but what that would mean is an open question. The Coalition promises to rush headlong in the opposite direction, with Peter Dutton having told mining bosses – in the face of all evidence – that nobody can argue Australia’s existing environment protection system is inadequate.
Nature? Unless something gives, the decline will continue – and both parties would probably prefer you didn’t think about it too much.
