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As the government moved this week to kill off its own environmental reform, there is anger and disappointment within Labor’s ranks over the sacrifice to economic interests. By Jason Koutsoukis.
Environment protection backdown rankles Labor stalwarts
Anthony Albanese’s promise to create an environment protection agency in the current parliamentary term was finally killed off on Wednesday when the Coalition voted with the government to remove the legislation from the official Senate notice paper.
“It’s an old political cliché by now – although apt in this case – but this was an ‘it’s the economy, stupid’ moment, nothing more, nothing less,” one senior Labor insider told The Saturday Paper this week. “This close to an election, we just could not afford to have the most powerful business interests in the country screaming that we were putting thousands of jobs at risk.”
A key election commitment in the lead-up to the 2022 election, the legislation aimed to establish Environment Protection Australia as the country’s first independent national environmental regulator to enforce environmental laws, improve transparency, and speed up development approvals while enacting stronger nature and wildlife protections.
Prime Minister Albanese’s decision to pull the legislation sparked a mixture of outrage and disappointment from both adversaries and allies of the Labor Party.
Among critics are members of the federal Labor caucus who have pushed to strengthen environmental protections, such as Jerome Laxale, Sally Sitou, Josh Burns, Josh Wilson, Kate Thwaites, Alicia Payne and Ged Kearney.
“Bold environmental action isn’t just the right thing to do – it’s a vote-winner. We can reclaim seats lost to the Greens, like Max Chandler-Mather’s, just as we did under Bob Hawke when his environment minister Graham Richardson took on vested interests and delivered – not just when it came to protecting the environment but electorally as well,” said one Labor MP.
Richardson – the New South Wales factional headkicker and outspoken political pragmatist – is still hailed by many as Australia’s greatest environment minister. He was pivotal in securing World Heritage status for the Daintree Rainforest, shielding it from logging and development, and ensuring stage three of Kakadu National Park was protected despite fierce opposition from the mining industry. He also helped secure Australia’s backing of the Madrid Protocol, banning mining in Antarctica. Beyond his environmental wins, Richardson is credited with helping then prime minister Bob Hawke clinch Greens preferences that helped deliver the 1990 election – a political triumph in the midst of a crippling recession.
Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, who had worked closely with Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek’s office on a deal to get the legislation passed, said in a press release that Labor “has abandoned the environment and sent a message to voters everywhere that they cannot be trusted to protect nature”. She called the decision to pull the bill from the Senate notice paper “a stunning capitulation to vested interests in the mining and logging lobby”.
Another Labor caucus member picks up that point. “I think we have forgotten that we can take on vested interests and big money, and win votes,” the member tells The Saturday Paper. “Unfortunately, what we can’t forget – especially Anthony, who was a senior minister at the time – is the mining-tax fight that was driven out of Western Australia and was so damaging to the Rudd government.”
With the election looming and Labor holding nine of Western Australia’s 15 lower house seats – up from five at the previous election – many see that state’s electoral importance as the key reason Albanese killed the legislation. Others point to a range of supplementary factors.
One key factor was the slow rebuild of bureaucratic expertise within the environment department after years of paring back under the Coalition. This arguably delayed the legislation until mid last year – far too late in the electoral cycle for such a contentious law to stand a chance, some say.
There’s also the view that Plibersek, who before the last election had been Labor’s education spokeswoman for six years, herself lacked the depth of experience in the environment portfolio to hit the ground running.
And the factor that’s widely cited is the apparently dysfunctional relationship between Albanese and Plibersek.
“It was obvious Albanese and Plibersek weren’t speaking and their offices weren’t communicating during negotiations with the Greens and cross bench,” says one Labor insider. “The dysfunction was clear and it didn’t help – but ultimately, I don’t think it would have mattered who was environment minister. The PM was always going to do this. It was entirely predictable.”
Sam Szoke-Burke, biodiversity policy and campaign manager for the Wilderness Society, argues that while the government has said some of the right things when it comes to doing more to protect nature, courageous and urgent action has been seriously lacking to implement commitments to fix national environment law, enforce it and stop any new species extinctions.
“Minister Plibersek said her three essential goals were to protect, restore and manage Australia’s environment, and these required new environmental standards, fundamental law reforms, and trust and transparency. What we’ve seen since is unfulfilled promises to establish a regulator and a failure to deal with rampant deforestation,” says Szoke-Burke. “Meanwhile, standards are still nowhere in sight. Funding for nature protection and restoration has stagnated, with the government instead wasting time, focus and political capital on establishing market mechanisms like the nature repair market, the impact of which has so far been illusory.”
While he credits Plibersek for quickly releasing the review of Australia’s national environmental laws commissioned in 2019 by the then prime minister Scott Morrison and led by Professor Graeme Samuel, which concluded that the current Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act was failing to protect Australia’s environment and needed urgent reform, and for publishing the government’s Nature Positive Plan, Szoke-Burke says the approach to environmental policy became muddled.
“Instead of staking out, justifying and defending an inspiring vision for reforms that benefit nature, people and the economy, the government played games with stakeholders. Drafts of proposed changes to national environment law were shared via confidential ‘lock up’ consultations that undermined momentum for the changes. Worse still, the drafts were far from the ‘conceptual shift’ the environment minister had promised.”
Plibersek, for her part, isn’t dwelling on the setbacks to reform, telling The Saturday Paper that voters will have a clear choice at the next election.
“We’ve protected an extra 70 million hectares of Australian oceans and bush – an area bigger than Germany and Italy combined. Thanks to Labor, Australia now protects more ocean than any other country on Earth. The Liberals cut marine parks when they were in government. Labor doubled funding to national parks. The Liberals let feral animals and invasive weeds overrun them.”
Labor, says Plibersek, blocked mining at Jabiluka in the Northern Territory, invested $550 million to protect threatened species, boosted recycling by 1.3 million tonnes, and has taken the lead on the transition to renewable energy.
However, Felicity Wade says Labor Party members are “deeply” disappointed about the failure on the environment protection agency.
“There is no way to hide the despondency across the membership about it,” says Wade, national co-convenor of Labor Environment Action Network, the party’s largest internal pressure group, which counts about 5000 members on its mailing lists. “The bad guys and vested interests are emboldened and all political parties are retreating away from collaboration.”
For Wade, a former director of the Wilderness Society in NSW who joined the party more than a decade ago, the only option now is to take the hit and get on with the work to deliver in the next term of parliament, starting with getting Labor elected.
“Labor is the only party that can go anywhere near delivering an approach that facilitates the economy and safeguards the environment,” says Wade. “Sometimes it stumbles, but the ethical commitment is there … We’ve seen too many reversals of progress over recent decades. We have to take the centre with us.”
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on February 8, 2025 as "Bill killed".
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