There is no such thing as a free lunch
The major parties will always be keen to downplay big environmental reform ideas because rocking the boat is simply unacceptable in a political campaign. The solution is to bring the environment ‘in from the cold’; to connect it to the numbers that politicians see as central to what voters think is important.
Are international declarations on the environment worth the paper they’re printed on? Based on the way the Australian Government treats them, they’re not worth anything. Consider what the Australian Government has said recently about forests and climate change
Federal budget: $160 million for nature may deliver only pork and a fudge.
Two spending measures on the Environment – the Environment Restoration Fund & bioregional funds – bear scrutiny. One smells of pork, the other of fudge.
The Federal Minister for the Environment does not have a duty of care to protect young people from the harms of climate change. So says the law. If not the Environment Minister, then who? Our Prime Minister or the Minister for Emissions? Our corporate leaders and billionaires? Or should we look to the world government? Our whole polity is failing us.
A big pledge for a big problem is no solution without integrity. The Government has pledged a billion dollars to save the Great Barrier Reef but even they know it’s pointless without action on climate change.
Does a ‘duty of care’ to future children make any difference to environmental approvals? In practice it seems that the duty of care to children is just one more box to tick and doesn’t change anything. But the implications extend beyond a mere box-ticking exercise.
Unfortunately, it looks to me to be politics all the way down with little priority on good policy reform.
Australia has now moved to commit to net zero carbon emissions by 2050. But it has displayed no interest in the Dasgupta Review or in making serious biodiversity commitments more generally.
These two wetland decisions leave some significant unanswered questions, the most important of which concerns the power of lobbying. These cases provide another illustration of why the EPBC Act is badly in need of reform.
The pathway could lead to anywhere or to nowhere in particular. There is no vision, no sense of where the government wants to go in terms of substantive policy, beyond the barebones commitment to moving to standards-based decisions.
In this case, I think the problem they are solving is the political problem of being seen to be doing something credible about a problem that they either don’t acknowledge or don’t want to engage with.
How good is Australia? How good are Australians? Given our sad record of environmental decline and wretched environmental stewardship, our repeated and growing failure to protect those natural values we told ourselves and the world we would look after, these questions/assertions border on the obscene; and yet they constantly go unchallenged.
Her response was confusing and contradictory. And the Morrison government seems hellbent on pushing through its preferred reforms without safeguards that Samuel says are crucial.
The draft environmental standards are the key to national environmental reform and thus worth a closer look, even without the benefit of the full Samuel Report.
What if Australia introduced environmental standards that were ideal, clearly and accurately identifying what was needed to maintain or enhance the condition of important environmental values such as threatened species? We’d still face significant problems.
While it’s possible that we’ll get a reasonable set of National Environmental Standards out of the current national environmental law review, because talk and even laws are cheap, it’s much less likely that governments would implement them effectively, if left to their own devices.