Antinuclear

Under the cloak of Covid, the government is rushing ill-considered changes to Australia’s environment laws, Guardian Geoff Cousins  4 Sept 20, What a cruel irony it is that just when our prime minister is bemoaning the fact that state governments can adversely affect the economy by closing their borders, his government seeks to pass the health and welfare of our environment and natural world into the hands of these very same states.Despite the dramatic and tragic impacts of the last bushfire season on the Australian community, both physically and economically, and the just released interim report of the royal commission into them, the government seeks to rush ahead with ill-considered changes to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act. This report is peppered with references to the need for national initiatives. It raises the prospect of the national cabinet managing future natural disasters, calls for the immediate rollout of a national emergency warning system and highlights the need for a national app for all such disasters.

And it does all this while lambasting the states for omissions and inefficiencies. Nowhere does it suggest devolving more power to these already incompetent entities. Of course this royal commission is largely focused on natural disasters rather than broader issues of environmental management and climate change, but its findings are telling in their precision: “Current arrangements do not provide a clear mechanism to elevate these matters to national leaders.”

Is it possible that our national leaders don’t want these or any other tricky environmental matters elevated to them? What other conclusion can be reached when the government is trying with such energy to push through “new” legislation that greatly reduces its role in environmental issues?

This is fundamentally the same proposal that Tony Abbott put forward as prime minister. It was defeated then, but the thought is that it might scrape through now under the cloak of Covid. That is the hard-nosed judgment of the same climate deniers and coal lobbyists who have run the Coalition all these years. And Scott Morrison’s hands remain as black as any.

Since there is a full review of current environmental legislation being conducted by Graeme Samuel, which is due to deliver a final report in the blink of an eye (ie October this year) what possible justification can be given for ramrodding legislation into the parliament now?

Just one, it seems. The environment minister, Sussan Ley, puts it succinctly: “It will allow projects to be fast-tracked.” So that is the justification for what the government touts as a new age of environmental legislation. Not to protect the natural world in any way; not to deal with climate change issues in any way; not to aid a new vision for the use of changing technologies and their integration into our systems; not to lessen the terrible devastation of the Murray Darling or the constant loss of habitat for threatened species; not even to try to alleviate the rapidly increasing impact of our bushfires.

Samuel’s interim report recommends “national enforceable standards” as an essential part of keeping the states honest in these matters. How necessary that is when, as Ken Henry so powerfully pointed out, the states have a complete conflict of interest in their receipt of royalties from projects and the fact that they are often the proponents of them. But there is no mention of these national standards in the proposal or of referring relevant conflicts to the federal government. ……

The Australian government is the signatory to all our international commitments that relate to climate and the environment of which there are many, ranging from The World Heritage Convention to the Bonn Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species and at least half a dozen others. The states are signatories to none.

What is the logic in devolving power to the states at a time when these agreements and the obligations therein are becoming increasingly important? None?..

The root cause of all this ill-conceived thinking is a failure to understand what an economy is. In the government’s view it is an entity unto itself – it seems to operate independently of the world in which we live, until events wrench us back to it. According to this theory, the environment is somehow in conflict with the economy rather than the integral, vital essence of it.  ……… https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/04/under-the-cloak-of-covid-the-government-is-rushing-ill-considered-changes-to-australias-environment-laws