https://www.crikey.com.au/2025/10/29/epbc-act-reforms-murray-watt-compromise-climate-change/
Labor is looking to position itself as an honest broker mediating between the neanderthal Coalition and the loopy Greens on environmental reform. But what about the actual policy and what it’s designed to do? Quote
“No-one will get everything they want,” intoned Murray Watt, the federal minister for the environment, about his incoming bill to amend the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC), reflecting both the transactional character of the Albanese government and the false dichotomy that has always infected the politics of mining and environmental protection in this country.
The politics suit Labor down to the ground (and below it), positioning it as an honest broker mediating between the “drill, baby, drill” ethos of the neanderthal Coalition and the loopy greeniness of the, um, Greens. If they’re equally unhappy, the cartoonists confirm, Watt will have struck gold (or oil).
This narrative of mutually exclusive forces is as old as the first recognition that industry has no inbuilt imperative to not destroy everything (and everyone) in its drive for production and profit.
It’s a nonsense; we have environment laws because there’s no other way to prevent mass extinctions and planetary destruction as natural offshoots of capitalism. Those who advocate for the environment are simply playing defence. This is not a contest of competing ideologies or competing profit motives; it’s money against ecosystem.
The Albanese government flagged its positioning just before this year’s election, when it gutted one aspect of the EPBC Act for the singular and stated purpose of protecting the Tasmanian salmon farming industry from the consequences of its own eye-catching depredations on the local environment. “My government makes no apologies for supporting jobs,” declared the prime minister, affirming that the near-extinct Maugean skate should have spent more of the past 60 million years working on its appeal to voters.
Watt hasn’t released the EPBC amending bill he’s promising to bring to parliament this week, but has been front-running it big time — as have the other parties — so we have a reasonable idea what’s going to be in it.
I won’t go into the detail, because I don’t want to, but really it’s boiling down to a few key reforms. One is the creation of a new National Environment Protection Agency, designed to take the bulk of decision-making over approvals (of, for example, mining projects) away from the department, where more than 90% of decisions are currently made by bureaucrats, and into an ostensibly independent sphere.
Another critical point is where the buck stops. The government has decided that this will remain right where it is: with the minister. Final approvals will continue to be a political choice. There will be no climate trigger or any other automatic constraints on development, with “national interest” trumping all other considerations whenever it’s expedient to play that card.
The climate trigger concept has been flying around for ages: basically, a backstop mechanism that would kill a resources project dead if, for example, it was going to exceed a set maximum emissions output. Good idea, bad fit for a government that loves pretending there’s such a thing as a “transition” fossil fuel that won’t accelerate the end of the climate collapse.
Not even in the conversation is there any idea of acknowledging what the courts have so far declined: the duty of care, as a legal standard, of a government to current and future generations to preserve a liveable environment. It’s not being considered because no governing party would ever want to subject its preferencing of economics over environment to a disinterested arbitrator’s judgment.
This would all make very practical sense if we were arguing about the appropriate balance between workers’ rights and employers’ desires, or whether freedom of religion is more or less important than that of speech — questions with no correct answer but also no existential consequences.
However, the UN has just confirmed that we’ve officially gone past the point of no return on the ambition to restrict global warming to a 1.5 degree increase (remember that?). It’s all very quaint that the Coalition wants to take its denial of the facts of climate change into another decade, but its self-dealt irrelevance as a political entity isn’t accidental.
The environment isn’t a stakeholder, a lobbyist, a donor or a special interest group. It has as much involvement in Australian politics as the soon-to-be-dead Maugean skate.
If Murray Watt turns out to be a genius and his Frankenstein bill gets through, the Coalition and business lobby will congratulate themselves with equal force as the Greens, that it could have been a whole lot worse.
This is a recipe for good politics, undoubtedly. But when the only thing everyone agrees on is that the solution we’ve come up with is definitely wrong — that is, we can be confident that the government will continue to prioritise politics over science (or business) and the law ensures it can — then we remain firmly embedded in the way of thinking that got us to a climate crisis in the first place.
One wonders if this government will ever apply its super-majority to any purpose at all, beyond the politics of its own survival.
Meanwhile, Minister Watt overnight clarified that the government would never use its national interest power to approve a dirty coal mine on some spurious basis of national security, in words confirming that, if politics dictate, it totally will.
- Michael Bradley is a freelance writer and managing partner at Sydney firm Marque Lawyers, which was created in 2008 with the singular ambition of completely changing the way law is practised.
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#AusPol #WhyTheFuckIsLabor #HahahahaLiebs #NatsAreNuts #VoteGreens #VoteProgIndies #ClimateCrisis #BiodiversityCrisis
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Environment | The Guardian US
Climate crisis | The Guardian