The Albanese government was elected in 2022 on a promise to reform Australia’s broken environmental laws. The groundbreaking Samuel review of the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act in 2020 recommended it undergo a complete overhaul by 2022. And yet, in April of this year, Labor backflipped on its election promise, indefinitely deferring these reforms.
The past week has seen Opposition Leader Peter Dutton promise to scrap the government’s 2030 climate targets and Climate 200 name its battlegrounds for the 2025 election. These developments are setting the stage for a resurgence of the widely dreaded “climate wars”.
If the past election is anything to go by, the climate debate is quite capable of costing Labor seats — seats it desperately must retain to keep alive its dream of a majority government. But does Labor’s track record in Parliament so far prime it to fight off environmental challenges?
With the indefinite deferral of reforms to the EPBC Act, voters are left with business as usual: 25-year-old laws, first introduced by John Howard, which have been labelled by the independent review as “ineffective” and in need of “fundamental reform”, and widely considered to be unfit for purpose.
Instead of reformed environmental laws, voters will receive the independent Environment Protection Authority, an agency to administer Australia’s environmental protection laws and ensure compliance.
But compliance with laws that in and of themselves do not serve the purposes of environmental protection will not assist progress towards Labor’s conservation targets of no new extinctions of plants and animals and the protection of 30% of land, freshwater and ocean ecosystems by 2030 as part of the Global Biodiversity Framework.
And compliance with laws that do not require the environment minister to consider climate change risks in the approval of new coal and gas projects will not leave Australia in any better of a position to reach its target of reducing emissions by 43% of 2005 levels by 2030, or of limiting climate change to 1.5°C above prehistoric levels.
We know these proposed reforms are baseless, even before mentioning that the Environmental Protection Authority will have broad ministerial “call in powers”, which allow a minister to impose control over any decisions related to environmental matters, even if those decisions should be handled by the EPA. This would essentially give ministers unchecked veto power over the decisions of an ostensibly independent statutory body, failing to remove the influence of unwelcome lobbying efforts or political donations from environmental decisions.
The 2021 State of the Environment report reflects the dire prospects facing Australia’s biodiversity and natural environment. The environment of Australia is, in no uncertain terms, “poor and deteriorating”. The country is breaking records that should not be touched, is a leader in humiliating areas such as mammal extinctions, and can call itself the only developed country in the world classified as a deforestation hotspot. In 2024, the Great Barrier Reef suffered its fifth mass coral bleaching event in eight years.
Our environmental laws are embarrassing us on the world stage — rather than preventing the decline of our natural environment, they are complicit in its destruction. Under these broken laws, according to analysis undertaken by the Climate Council, more than 740 fossil fuel projects have received the green light to continue Australia’s legacy of extraction and exploitation of natural resources. Under these broken laws, the habitats of precious species have been put in harm’s way, in favour of land clearing and development.
Rather than reform these laws, as promised, the Albanese government continues to stand idly by as our natural environment deteriorates, content with a snail’s approach while climate disaster wreaks havoc in Australia and around the world.
Its failure to deliver on arguably its most crucial climate promise of the 2022 election is one voters will likely have at the front of their minds when they head to the ballot box next year. Should the 2025 election become another “climate election”, will the government’s poor efforts to reform Australia’s environmental laws instil confidence that, if reelected, it will put the climate wars to bed?
