There is no such thing as a free lunch
Being environment minister is a hard gig. It often requires difficult choices between environmental and economic priorities. In cabinet, the minister is often up against a phalanx of ministers with economic portfolios and overriding political imperatives such as jobs and growth. In the electoral calculus, job and growth trumps environment.
Wetlands are under threat all around the world but there’s one particular type of wetland that provides a disproportionate ecosystem service in the form of carbon storage that is in dire need of increased protection. We’re talking peatlands, and new research is suggesting it’s way past time we got serious about looking after them.
The Albanese government is now the latest in a string of governments that have tried and failed to reform the law known formally as the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act. This is despite two major independent reviews calling for wholesale change. Labor’s capitulation does not, however, change the facts. Australia’s natural environment is deteriorating rapidly. Laws are urgently needed to protect our nation’s valuable natural assets.
The Government’s ambitious ‘Nature Positive’ initiative appears to have founded on the rocks of realpolitik. Peter Burnett has been closely following the saga of Nature Positive policy reform and believes while the chances are small that legislation establishing an EPA and EIA will be passed before the next election, they are not zero. Indeed, as he explains here, there is a credible pathway that might enable the reforms to be acceptable to all parties and still achieve significant environmental outcomes. This might be critical if the Government wants to burnish its rather dull environmental credentials as it heads into what is expected to be a tight electoral race.
While it might be that the CoPs are not delivering what most people hope for, and what many politicians have us believe they are supposed to deliver, for now it’s the main game in town. And if we want them to have greater impact, maybe we should be acknowledging the true nature of the CoP and throw the spotlight back onto what our own elected leaders are actually achieving. Someone has to set the pace and the rest might follow.
Australia has been a big backer of the idea of ‘Nature Positive’ with the aspiration of living in harmony with Nature by 2050. To be ‘positive’ and live in ‘harmony’ are such noble aspirations, but what do they actually mean in the brutal world of realpolitik? So far, not much, at least in Australia, where the government’s Nature Positive Plan reforms are either stalled in the Senate or deferred. Peter Burnett attended as a delegate to the Nature Positive Summit as a member of the Biodiversity Council, and came away disillusioned. Here he explains why.
Peter Burnett looks at the politics of a possible Senate deal on changes to the government’s draft Nature Positive reforms. Achieving good environmental policy outcomes is becoming increasingly difficult in this political maze.
Will the new Environment Information Australia (EIA) be up to the job? Can it equip us, for example, with the necessary data to discern if the government’s new “nature positive” policies and nature repair markets are delivering real gains, or just biodiversity conservation doublespeak? As the saying goes, the Devil is in the detail. Or in this case, in the lack of it.
Rapid Environmental Impact Assessment, without diluting environment has now become a national priority. What was once a problem of red tape and substandard practice, is now central to the clean energy revolution and vital to our collective future. Throwing money at the problem won’t solve it. Even more data and regulatory guidance won’t solve it, though of course it will make inroads. Solving the problem completely, achieving complete regulatory efficiency and removing a major bottleneck to Australia’s transition to a carbon-neutral economy, will take something out of the box. Maybe we should look at how the courts now do case management.
For policymakers, this suggests environmental laws should define minimum viability thresholds. Some thresholds would be absolute; others would be crossable in one location provided equivalent restoration was done in another. Environmental groups could take satisfaction that thresholds would be maintained in most cases. Ecosystems would function, rivers would flow. But governments would still override thresholds for important economic and social reasons, say to approve a critical minerals project. What’s in it for corporate Australia? Business would gain upfront certainty about what can be approved and quicker approvals for projects. Environmental litigation would fall. But development options would be narrowed and offsets would become more expensive. The government would achieve a key goal: major environmental reform. But it would have to say no more often, and be transparent about crossing environmental thresholds.
Next year, the Australian Parliament will consider one of the most significant environmental reforms in our history with the Government promising legislation to implement its Nature Positive Plan, replacing the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act 1999. The path to this point has been long and winding. First the National Party backflipped on its support for the bill, then the Greens did a backflip on their opposition to it, all in pursuit of politics over policy. Then we come to other cross-bench Senators, whose position is variable at best and unpredictable at worst. We need this to work.
Fully implemented, the ‘Nature Positive’ model on which the reforms are built could completely reframe decisions to approve (or not) development projects following environmental impact assessment (EIA). However, it all comes down to ‘who pays’?
Clean energy developers are caught in a perfect storm, at loggerheads with environmentalists and landholders alike over environmental conditions, proper consultation and compensation, while grappling with long regulatory delays and supply chain blockages for their materials. They see a system that provides environmental approval on paper but seemingly unworkable conditions and intolerable delays in practice. Does the bureaucracy’s left hand, they wonder, know what its right hand is doing? Net zero, nature protection and “rollout rage” feel like a toxic mix. Yet we have to find a quick way to deliver the clean energy projects we urgently need. As tough as this problem appears, elements of a potential solution, at least in outline, are on the table. These elements are: good environmental information, regional environmental planning and meaningful public participation. The government’s Nature Positive Plan for stronger environmental laws promises all three.
Will ‘Nature Positive’ deliver real change or just a new opportunity for box ticking and political window dressing? As a concept, Nature Positive has plenty of potential for good biodiversity outcomes and its endorsement in the Henry Review is a good thing for biodiversity nationally. However, like ESD before it, Nature Positive can be hollowed out or reduced to a slogan if that is where the politics takes it.
The Henry Review found, essentially, that the NSW Biodiversity Act is not working and that biodiversity continues to decline in the state of New South Wales. Although the law is complex, the policy bottom line is simple: biodiversity is protected to a degree, but this will never stand in the way of development prioritised by government. The review proposes to switch off the discretionary ‘balancing’ that occurs under the auspices of the Ecologically Sustainable Development principles (under which the ‘balance’ almost always favours development). And to switch on a ‘nature positive’ framework.
The first version of Australia’s national wellbeing framework “Measuring What Matters” has been released. The basic idea of the report is to shift from our narrow focus on key economic indicators, such as GDP and inflation, to embrace a wider suite of indicators that measure our overall quality of life. In the environment theme, six areas are covered: (urban) air quality; biodiversity; climate resilience; emissions reduction; protected areas; and resource use and waste generation. The headline result has to be that the threatened species index, which tracks the abundance of a selection of threatened species, shows a decline of 55% from a 1985 baseline to 2019, a period of just 34 years. This is a shocking number.