Antinuclear

Greg Hunt’s gaffe over UNESCO and the Great Barrier Reef

How Greg Hunt and his department turned good news into an international scandal
The full draft of the Unesco report on climate change reveals many mentions of Australia were actually positive, Guardian, Michael Slezak, 31 May 2016 Greg Hunt has conducted one of the strangest manoeuvres of his already rather gymnastic career, over the erasure of Australia from a United Nations report on climate change.

Guardian Australia had broken the story that all mentions of Australia and the Great Barrier Reef had been scrubbed from the report at the request of the environment department.

Hunt first denied knowing about it but then justified the move with reasons that went beyond those provided by the department.

In fact the full draft report, obtained exclusively by Guardian Australia, reveals many of the mentions of Australia were positive – but their removal turned what would have been a relatively good news story into an international scandal.

The environment department admitted it had requested the removal of the references. The report would have affected tourism by causing “considerable confusion”, it said.

Last year Unesco was on the verge of designating the Great Barrier Reef “in danger”. But, after intense lobbying from Australia, and an increased commitment to deal with water pollution, the UN body decided not to do so for the time being. The department implied that mentioning the reef in the latest report might make people think Unesco had changed its mind about the “in danger” listing.

However, the report listed dozens of sites around the world that are at risk due to climate change – most of which were not on the “in danger” list. And, moreover, everyone – even the Australian government – accepts that the greatest risk to theGreat Barrier Reef is climate change.

The department’s reasoning was a flawed interpretation of the situation. But the minister’s went further.

Within hours of Guardian Australia breaking the story, Hunt went on Network Ten’s The Project to defend his bureaucrats’ move.

Not only was Unesco’s report potentially “confusing”, he said, it contradicted Unesco’s statements about the reef when it decided not to list it as “in danger”.

The missing section of the report on the reef was “at odds with what the highest body in the United Nations system had said”, Hunt claimed.

He said his department simply highlighted to Unesco that this was the case and the UN body decided to “realign with the overarching view of its own global umpire”.

Apparently the only way Unesco could do that was to delete every reference to Australia in the 108-page report, making it the only continent in the world not to feature (even Antarctica had a passing mention).

Hunt is wrong, for several reasons.

First, Unesco did not say it had made a mistake in the initial report and thus decided to “realign” with earlier statements. Rather, in a statement to Guardian Australia, a Unesco spokesman said: “At the request of the government of Australia, references to Australian sites were removed from the report.”……

Nothing in Unesco’s decision or reasoning contradicted the censored sections of the recent report in the slightest.

In fact – and this is what makes Hunt’s reasoning all the more bizarre – the new report was among the most positive of its kind.

June 1, 2016 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, politics international