Morgan Begg: Labor’s radical rewrite of environment laws must be transparent
In Australia, your vote should help determine the future of the country. In reality, however, governments, once elected, sign on to agreements with international bodies with minimal democratic oversight or the knowledge of voters.
A dramatic example of this is playing out right now, with Federal Parliament debating the second phase of the Government’s Nature Positive Plan.
This involves the creation of a new government agency, Environment Protection Australia, and the partial transfer of approvals and enforcement powers from the elected minister to the unelected head of the new agency.
This follows the first phase, passed in late 2023, which creates a nature repair market — a complex government scheme to incentivise businesses to pay people to undertake conservation projects — and precedes phase three, which will complete the Nature Positive plan, including the full empowerment of the EPA, and 30×30, the reservation of 30 per cent of Australia’s seas and land by 2030.
Nature Positive was introduced into the Australian political landscape in December 2022, just six months after the election of the Albanese Government, in the form of a report by the Federal environment department. The plan is a radical rewrite of Australia’s environmental protection laws that threatens the future of Australia’s minerals and agriculture sectors.
One must ask: who voted for Nature Positive? And given it was not a policy of the Government at the 2022 election, where did it come from?
As Aynsley Kellow, emeritus professor of government at the University of Tasmania explains in a new report for the Institute of Public Affairs, Nature Positive is not the work of Australian policymakers, aimed at addressing the nation’s unique biodiversity conditions, but rather is the product of a political campaign undertaken by international bodies and NGOs.
The nature positive concept can be traced back to a 2008 panel in Stockholm that featured in a prominent role Paul Erhlich, the co-author of 1968 book, Population Bomb, that gave rise to an irrational worldwide fear of overpopulation and mass starvation.
That panel was centred on the idea of creating “planetary boundaries” to establish a “safe operating space for humanity”. By 2010, the United Nations had set up the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, which sought to expand nature reserves to 17 per cent of land and 10 per cent of oceans.
This set the foundations for demands for more ambitious targets. By January 2021, the movement had morphed into the High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People, with 50 member states committed to the 30×30 targets.
The former Federal Coalition government joined the High Ambition Coalition in June 2021, and by the end of 2022, the successor Labor Government had outlined the full design — the Nature Positive plan.
It risks putting it mildly that the process pursued by successive Australian governments of wilfully entering into agreements with international bodies, without the scrutiny of Parliament, let alone the electors who will be affected, has been marked by a total lack of governance.
The IPA has made several requests of the Federal environment department, all rejected, seeking documents in relation to the Nature Positive plan. According to the department, they hold some 221,200 documents totalling 1.15 million pages relating to it. But none of us is allowed to see them.
We are told via media reports that the department is holding highly confidential meetings with industry groups, where participants are shown piles of draft documents that they are not allowed to take with them to show members or share with the public.
What is clear is that a powerful new regulatory agency, tasked with meeting arbitrary environmental targets, is a recipe for disaster for our vital agriculture and resources sectors. WA Premier Roger Cook and many industry groups have rightfully called for more detail, fearing Nature Positive “could cause significant delays to environmental approvals”.
Serious questions need to be asked and answered about how such a consequential policy agenda can proceed this far with such a level of opacity.
As a basic first step, Parliament must act to ensure it is reviewing and approving relevant international agreements that, while not technically treaties, are very influential “soft law”.
Because if a government can do this, one can only imagine what it could sign Australians up for next.
Morgan Begg is the director of research at the Institute of Public Affairs.
#Morgan #Begg #Labors #radical #rewrite #environment #laws #transparent