Sometimes a warning comes along that is so unequivocal and so unimpeachable, from an objective and authoritative source, that it sets a test for a government where they can either act or they can own the consequences that occur when they fail to act. The report by Prof Graeme Samuel AC into Australia’s environmental laws (the cumbersomely named Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act or EPBC Act) is one of those warnings.
It’s not the first time an Australian government has received advice, information or recommendations that unless our laws and policies change, then our iconic species or our most special places are condemned. Every State of the Environment report, released every four years, has shown that the health of our environment has worsened and the trajectory of decline is accelerating. And there’s not a day that passes where a new study or report is released on the fate of our marsupials or fish, forests or oceans, highlighting everything going in the wrong direction.
Furthermore, every month or so, the environment minister, for the last 20 or more years, has had to put their signature on an updated list of endangered species after scientists have reviewed their status. Each update tracks a species as they move from being vulnerable to being endangered, and then from endangered to critically endangered and finally from being critically endangered to being extinct. If we did this in the human world it would be like having newspaper notices saying “Jane Smith has a cold”, “Jane Smith is in hospital”, “Jane Smith is in palliative care”, “Jane Smith has passed and her funeral is on next Friday, please attend or send flowers if you can”. But in the human world, for each notice saying “Jane Smith has a cold”, more often than not the following notice would record Jane’s return to rude health. Unlike with all of us, this almost never happens with our endangered species. There is much more decline than recovery. No environment minister, whatever their political perspective or intellect or ability, could possibly fail to see this.
The difference between these continuous warnings and what Graeme Samuel has delivered to the government is that it has been delivered into a political context where the issue is politically live, the public is attuned to the problem and the message has come from someone that this government has previously used major reform tasks (in this case, oversight of the banking system) and actually implemented the recommendations. And Samuel himself has set up the test. In the foreword of his 268 page report, just above his signature he writes: “To shy away from the fundamental reforms recommended by this review is to accept the continued decline of our iconic places and the extinction of our most threatened plants, animals and ecosystems. This is unacceptable.”
What Samuel has recommended doesn’t go far enough in all the areas needed to really put a brake on extinction. It’s a compromise position where major industry groups have as much say as scientists and the community on what level of destruction nature is able to take. But putting that aside, his proposed reforms are a major step forward to genuine environmental protections and put us on a path to having a system that will self-correct as it becomes clear the decline is not stopping.
We’d really like to believe that this government is willing to implement these reforms and change the fate of Australia’s flora and fauna. We’ve been looking for signs that they will.
But as we’ve looked for signs that the government is willing to move beyond commissioning an independent review of this Act (as is required by law), to actually be seeking to implement the recommendations, we haven’t seen a lot that has engendered trust that they can or will do this.
In this term alone, the Morrison government has, without consultation subsumed the environment department into the agriculture department; reintroduced a Tony Abbott-era bill that would unwind federal protections and hand environmental protection decisions to the states; failed to make any environmental policy changes in the wake of the Black Summer bushfires; and, in a way that it’s hard not to read as a cynical pattern of avoidance, held on to this review for three months, only to release it during a press conference where the opposition leader was announcing a reshuffle and yet still fail to provide any formal government response to it.
In an era of faltering government accountability, of Trumpian neo-populism, of sports rorts and of “I don’t hold a hose, mate”, the lack of environmental accountability is perhaps the least-explored and will provide the most enduring costs of those failures.
The Samuel report can help to start to change this. Not just in the specific reforms it recommends, but in whether or not this government can be held to account or actually own the consequences of their actions.
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Tim Beshara is manager of policy and strategy and Suzanne Milthorpe is national laws campaign manager at the Wilderness Society.