.... "The prime minister’s post-Covid-19 plan is to roar ahead with a slate of mega-projects that would be delayed by any
proper consideration of their environmental and Indigenous heritage impacts.
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| Liberals and nationals Fail Australian Forests |
While the EPBC Act rarely leads to any project being given the thumbs down, it does require environmental impacts to be assessed, and this takes time. The government’s solution? Get rid of the federal assessment.
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| Forests are only proven carbon storage |
When parliament resumes next week, Minister for the Environment Sussan Ley will introduce a bill, under the cover of Covid-19, to amend Howard’s EPBC Act and hand the power to the states – which are more vulnerable to the corporate sector – to approve mining, gas fracking, dam building, the rapid expansion of industrial fish farming and the invasion of national parks by private enterprise. She aims to wash her hands of the Commonwealth’s responsibility for environmental assessment and protection.
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The minister is not waiting for the final report, due in October, of her own inquiry into the EPBC Act, headed by businessman Graeme Samuel. Last month she peremptorily dismissed his interim report’s key recommendation that the Commonwealth set up a policing agency to watch over state management of environmental matters. This was despite Samuel’s finding that “Australia’s natural environment and iconic places are in an overall state of decline and are under increasing threat”.
Undoubtedly, the powers to protect Indigenous heritage will be the
next thing shunted to the states. Ley knew the Juukan Gorge caves were to be blown up by Rio Tinto before the event and yet she did nothing. Next, she rejected national heritage protection for the ancient Djab Wurrung eucalypts in Victoria. Handing her powers to the states will spare her from such complicit embarrassment in the future.
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| Koala after wildfire |
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| Australia's climate action record |
With the Greens opposed, it will be up to Labor and the crossbenchers in the senate to take on Scott Morrison’s game plan to relegate environmental powers to weaker state governments while concentrating economic might in Canberra: a boon for corporate environmental exploiters and their lobbyists in both cases.
This is a watershed moment for Australia’s environment. It has taken more than two decades to see any success in our fight to chip away at Howard’s RFAs. And now we face another era wherein policy is being devised to ignore the certainty of environmental devastation for the promise of a quick profit.
In Earth’s sixth great age of extinction, there is a rising tide of opposition to the foolishness, if not criminality, of destroying wildlife habitats – from the deep seas to coral reefs and coastlines to what little is left of woodlands, grasslands and forests.
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| Koala and destroyed forest |
The phenomenon of Extinction Rebellion, temporarily quietened by Covid-19, is just a hint of the public unrest to come unless the needless exploitation of nature and our finest human heritage ends. Earth’s ecosystem is at breaking point. Our human herd is already using nearly twice the living produce this planet is capable of sustaining and yet, everywhere, the clamour is for “growth”.
If the forests continue to fall, everything else will follow. As with whaling in 1978, the time for logging Australia’s wildlife-filled and carbon-rich native forests is up.
For our forests and our wildlife, it’s time."
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