Tanya Plibersek delivered her keynote address at the Global Nature Positive Summit in Sydney this morning, but these aren’t triumphant times for her. Apart from raising the obvious question — what on earth does “Nature Positive” actually mean? — it only served to demonstrate just how badly she has failed to deliver as environment minister. Her leadership has devolved from one that promised to fix Australia’s broken environmental laws and reverse years of government inaction to a festival of corporate buzzwords and broken promises.
Worse, given the opportunities handed to her by a parliamentary crossbench strongly inclined to help, she has squandered her own political capital by failing to pass any significant legislation and is instead now picking fights with those whose support she needs to pass legislation.
“Whether it’s extreme Greens, or the extreme climate deniers in the Coalition, extremism is an enemy of progress on the environment,” Plibersek tweeted this week.
Criticism from scientists and environmentalists has also been growing, because it’s obvious that Plibersek’s main obstacle isn’t Parliament — and especially not the progressives in it. The Greens and teals would support what she was promising when she came into the portfolio. What needs to be done is clear. The real question is this: What have you done, Tanya Plibersek? The answers vary significantly depending on which word you emphasise in that question, but none of them are positive.
When Plibersek became environment minister under the newly elected Albanese Labor, she promised to reverse the trend of government negligence by fixing environmental laws that were almost unanimously regarded as broken, and increasing investment in nature protection.
She published the long-awaited State of the Environment report, which the Coalition had been refusing to release. It was, Plibersek said, “a story of crisis and decline in Australia’s environment, and of a decade of government inaction and wilful ignorance”.
Australia is one of the world’s deforestation hotspots and has lost more than 100 species to extinction, including more mammal species than any other continent. Climate change, habitat loss, invasive species, pollution and mining threaten ecosystem collapse across the country.
“I won’t be putting my head in the sand,” she said at the time. “Under Labor the environment is back on the priority list.”
It really had been neglected. A 2019 survey of national environmental budgets showed that Australia’s annual spending on targeted threatened species recovery was $122 million, “around one tenth of that spent by the US endangered species recovery program, and about 15% of what is needed to avoid extinctions and recover threatened species”.
In her 2022 press club speech, Plibersek acknowledged that the cost of reversing this would be more than $1 billion a year. (Other experts would double the cost of basic conservation and species protection.) And yet even this spending was summarily deemed unaffordable by Plibersek — conservation spending has remained at the basement levels to which it sunk under the Coalition.
Instead, Plibersek would fix environmental laws and leverage private investment. Well, that was the rhetoric anyway. Neither has happened.
Under the umbrella name of the Nature Positive Plan, the government soon split its planned legislative program into three parts. The first was the nature repair market, which was legislated in December, establishing a “world-first legislated, national, voluntary biodiversity market”, according to the department hype. Conservationists and even business leaders were more skeptical: Who is going to voluntarily buy these credits? How are they generated and measured? None of these had been established, and “nature repair projects” can’t start until the market governance and methods are established.
The second and third parts of Plibersek’s legislative plans were to create the federal Environmental Protection Australia (EPA) agency; and, the crucial bit, to reform the environment protection and biodiversity (EPBC) laws, with legally enforceable national environmental standards underpinning them.
The latter two are stuck. The resources industry pressured the government to water down the EPA proposal, and neither the Coalition nor the Greens and crossbench will support it. The EPBC laws have seemingly been consigned to the never-never. So real environmental action has been postponed indefinitely. What went wrong?
The story may be familiar from other accounts from across the Albanese government, but it bears repeating: a risk-averse minister has placated the business lobby, and instead of responding to real-world needs has embarked on a painfully incremental, minimalist program of reforms that won’t achieve anything in the current parliamentary period.
It is verging on bizarre that a minister with the reputation and record as solid as Plibersek’s would risk them so meekly, but it’s not unusual among Labor ministers. One would think that after decades in Parliament, mostly in opposition, current cabinet ministers would have been busting to introduce real, significant reforms, and be well-equipped to do so. Instead they seem more intent on … I don’t know what they think they’re doing, to be honest. Treading a middling path to an inglorious victory and a future minority government?
Plibersek and Labor will point to small environmental victories along the way — the expansion of marine reserves and the national ranger program, for example — but what is required is of a different scale, and one beyond the scope of neoliberal status quo politics. What is required was laid out by Plibersek herself. Then ignored.
No environmental good will occur under Albanese and Plibersek while they continue approving new coal and gas ventures and increasing exports; while their government fails to reduce real emissions at all, and instead relies on accounting tricks and unworkable technologies such as carbon capture; while they consult with industry on every environmental law; and while the government spends a hundred times more on fossil fuel subsidies than threatened species conservation.
Nature Positive is the subject of the business investment summit in Sydney, but it’s also just a piece of jargon — “it’s the new net-zero”, said Plibersek without irony — and it boils down to some very basic ideas. First among these is that this government simply refuses to invest real dollars in nature.
Unlike nuclear-powered submarines, or tax breaks for real estate investors, the future of our natural environment is apparently not worthy of funding. Instead we have a half-baked series of investment ideas — offsets, credits, certificates — that seem to suggest a future in which hedge funds and international investors will magically swing in to save our koalas. They won’t. There’s no market for it. Governments need to do such things.
What has Tanya Plibersek achieved as environment minister? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
