There is no such thing as a free lunch
How is it that with all the brains and capacity locked up in society’s many institutions that humanity is unable to steer towards real sustainability? Could it be that in their current configuration they’re simply impotent in the face of an all-powerful status quo (Business as Usual) that protects the interests of the very rich?
Last year I published a blog The Need for Speed, floating ideas for solving a long-standing problem, the need for quicker environmental approvals. In the lead-up to Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ economic roundtable this week, regulatory ‘streamlining’ is very much back at the top of the public policy, so it’s time for another look. AI is being held up as a panacea for speeding up the process but this overlooks the main issues causing the delay (lack of information and poor coordination between state and federal processes). However, the old EPBC Act has some unused potential that might change the game.
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.
Tosh and rubbish, of course, but this is what happens when you mix growing uncertainty with increasing vulnerability, and a decline of trust in our institutions, and hypercharge it with social media and powerful vested interests trampling principle and convention. Plant this tosh in a rich bed of prejudice and fear, and watch a hundred conspiracies bloom.
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.
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.
Building big on big promises of endless clean energy ignores the limits of our institutions. It’s something rarely considered in the febrile, volatile environment of contemporary politics. We pull our leaders up on the smallest of inconsistencies but let them get away with the biggest of lies. When you next cast your vote, keep in mind that extraordinary promises require extraordinary accountability.
When ‘further consultation’ is code for ‘let’s kick the can down the road’
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.
The unwritten rule of environmental policy is that economy trumps environment. ‘Nature positive’ reforms threaten to put it the other way round, or at least to shift the dial in that direction. And the states (beginning with Western Australia) are not happy about it. Crunch time is approaching.
Back in 2003, PM John Howard’s colleagues were telling him that his entrenched views were standing in the way of sensible policy and that now was a good time to introduce an emissions trading scheme with minimal risk and minimum loss of face. In reply, Howard told his colleagues that his political instincts were right and that the most important players, key Liberal Party backers, agreed with him. The irony was that, while Prime Ministerial power might trump policy power, people power trumps the lot. Two elections later, in 2007, Howard was thrown out, partly because of their lack of action on climate change.
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.
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.
There’s probably not a government on this planet that isn’t telling its people they acknowledge climate change and are making ‘serious’ efforts to combat it. However, in the parentheses at the end of every proclamation is the implicit (sometime explicit) caveat that new policies won’t change the status quo, won’t slow down economic growth, won’t bite the hand of key stakeholders (read fossil fuel sector), won’t cost the voter anything additional and likely won’t even be implemented in the current electoral cycle. Climate delay may sound different to climate denial but it amounts to the same thing.