Australia’s natural environment is in crisis and protecting it must become the top priority in government policy and legislation if it is to have a chance, a former Treasury chief says.
Dr Ken Henry, who led federal Treasury for a decade until 2011 and is now chair of the Australian Climate and Biodiversity Foundation, said governments continued to not give enough attention to the causes of environmental destruction and how policy and management could be changed to turn things around.
He made the comments after leading a scathing review of the New South Wales Biodiversity Conservation Act, which said the laws were failing and were likely to never succeed unless they were overhauled to give nature protection primacy over development, logging, mining and urban expansion.
Henry told the ABC’s RN Breakfast that “every indicator” on the environment was “going in the wrong direction”.
“The first and most important thing is that, if the environment is going to have a chance, then environmental considerations have to have primacy in policy thinking,” he said.
“It’s not going to be any good in the future to say, well, the environment is a nice-to-have but really we’ve got to focus on investment here, or a residential development there, or a mining project here, or continuing to log native forest over there – that those things are more important than the environment.”
Henry said the written objectives of the NSW biodiversity legislation, and other environmental legislation across the country, looked ambitious but they were being undercut by other laws.
“Legislation that deals with rural lands and rural land-clearing, in particular, [but also] legislation that deals with planning, with forestry, with mining – you name it, all of those other acts have primacy over the biodiversity and conservation act, and they are undermining its effectiveness,” he said. “That’s the biggest problem.”
Henry said the 58 recommendations of his review proposed a new standard of “net gain” or “nature positive” that must underpin decisions that affected the environment in NSW. “It’s a massive change, but it’s no more than what’s required,” he said.
He said similar change was needed across the country, reflecting a global framework that the federal environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, endorsed at a meeting in Montreal last year.
On the climate crisis, Henry said Australia was not acting fast enough “but we’ve known this for 20 years”.
He said the nation was at a turning point, pointing to the election of climate-focused independents at the last election, and the Albanese government had ambition on climate, but Labor was using “instruments that are not really up to the task” – an apparent reference to the safeguard mechanism, a policy meant to reduce emissions at industrial sites.
“I really feel for them because the politics … has driven our politicians into a place where they appear to be huddled in the corner, too afraid to do anything sensible to address the mighty challenges,” he said.
‘Intergenerational tragedy’
Henry said the government’s intergenerational report, which had a major focus on the impact of the climate crisis, also showed that unless the economic growth rate increased the government would have to increase tax rates.
He said the country should not be relying on personal income tax as the only growth tax as it damaged economic performance and set up an “intergenerational tragedy”.
“It’s the young people … who are weighed down with Hecs debt, who are going to have repay a mountain of public debt, who are dealing with the consequences of climate change … who are facing diminishing prospects of ever being able to afford a home of their own,” he said. “These poor buggers are also going to be ones who are facing ever increasing average rates of income tax.”
He said mining super profits should be taxed more heavily – an opportunity that was squandered a decade ago “largely because of political stupidity” – to allow company tax for the rest of the country to be cut to drive economic growth.
On nature, Henry’s recommendations included the creation of “no-go” zones in which land-clearing would be banned and major changes to the state’s biodiversity offset scheme, which was found to be “compromised”. A Guardian Australia investigation has revealed serious flaws and conflict of interest concerns in the offset system.
The Henry review is the latest in a number reports that have found Australia’s natural environment is in peril. The five-yearly state of the environment released last year found it was in poor and deteriorating health due to pressure from climate change, habitat loss, invasive species, pollution and mining.
The NSW environment minister, Penny Sharpe, said the state government would consider the Henry review’s recommendations and deliver on commitments to “fix the biodiversity offset scheme, strengthen environmental protections and stop runaway land-clearing”.
Nationally, Plibersek has promised to revamp national environment laws, with legislation expected until next year. She has also set a zero extinction target, but scientific advisers have cast doubt on whether that can be met.
Scientists have called for improved regulation and about $1.7bn in annual funding to give the country a chance to save its nearly 2,000 listed threatened species.
