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The prime minister bowed to mining interests and poor polling in Western Australia with a last-minute decision to upend a deal with the Greens on the Nature Positive laws. By Mike Seccombe.
Why Albanese killed the Nature Positive deal with the Greens
The Irish actor Richard Harris, perhaps most famous for playing Marcus Aurelius in Gladiator, once observed that the defining characteristic of successful politicians was “selective cowardice”. The last scheduled week of federal parliament provided several examples.
There was Labor’s adoption of a suite of draconian measures against immigrants, put forward in an attempt to prevent the conservative parties portraying them as weak on the issue. Announcing the Coalition’s support for the bills, shadow immigration minister Dan Tehan boasted that his side of politics was “basically running the immigration system” from opposition.
There was legislation to ban children under 16 from social media sites, supported by both major parties despite a wealth of research showing it would do little to protect young people from harm. Populist media championed the changes, however, and both Labor and the Coalition fear it.
Perhaps the most clear-cut example of all, though, related to environment policy.
The short version of the story is that after a long, long stand-off between Labor and the Greens over a package of bills reforming Australia’s environmental protection laws, Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek and Greens spokesperson Sarah Hanson-Young finally reached an agreement that would have allowed their passage through the Senate.
What happened – confirmed for The Saturday Paper by people on both sides of the negotiation – is that the deal was struck on Tuesday morning. It went to Albanese, who signed off on it. Plibersek and Hanson-Young were preparing statements announcing the breakthrough, for release on Wednesday morning.
Then, late on Tuesday, Albanese reversed his position and pranged the whole agreement. What’s more, the Greens were informed that the deal was off before Plibersek was, an extraordinary slap in the face for the Labor minister.
There is no mystery about what caused Albanese to change his mind, for no less a figure than the Labor premier of Western Australia, Roger Cook, has claimed responsibility. Even before he did that, according to Western Australia’s media, the state’s minister for mines and petroleum, David Michael, told some 200 mining industry figures on Tuesday evening the state government had been assured there would be no deal.
Nor is there any mystery about why Albanese went to water: it was a triumph of electoral politics over policy.
Western Australia has not historically been a strong state for federal Labor, but in the 2022 election it picked up nine seats there, an increase of four, while the number of Coalition seats fell to just five. The strong result in the west propelled Labor into government.
Since the election, support for the ALP has declined nationally, to the point where the Dutton opposition is now ahead of the government. But it is still polling well in the west – leading the conservatives, on an average of major polls, 52.6 to 47.4.
Powerful mining interests own most of the west’s media and effectively own both major political parties. Albanese clearly decided, given Labor’s parlous polling numbers and an imminent election, that the government could not risk a fight.
That’s the short version. The longer version of the story makes it even clearer that the prime minister’s decision was a textbook example of selective cowardice.
Before the 2022 election, Labor promised to fix Australia’s inadequate environment laws. There was a template to work from: an independent expert review of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act, led by Professor Graeme Samuel, AC.
The Samuel review was presented to the former Liberal environment minister Sussan Ley on October 30, 2020. It painted a bleak picture of the state of Australia’s natural environment and recommended comprehensive reforms to environmental law and regulation. Ley sat on it for three months before releasing it and then, controversially, did not follow its recommendations.
Labor promised better and in December 2022 formally responded with something called the Nature Positive Plan, which picked up most of the changes Samuel had recommended.
Central to the plan was the establishment of an independent environmental protection agency. When she introduced the bills in May, Plibersek called the new body the “heart” of the reforms, a “tough cop on the beat” that would be able to issue stop-work orders to prevent serious environmental damage and “proactively audit business to ensure they’re doing the right thing”. She stressed that it would act to prevent illegal land clearing. The proposed legislation included potential fines of up to $780 million or prison for up to seven years for serious intentional breaches of federal environment law.
But there was devil in the detail when it came to legislating the planned reforms. The Liberal and National parties, on behalf of vested corporate interests – particularly in mining and forestry – were obstructive. And the Greens insisted their support was contingent on the inclusion of a “climate trigger”, whereby the greenhouse gas emissions of proposed projects would be factored into the environment minister’s final decision on whether proposals should be approved.
This was not a new idea. Indeed, a former Liberal environment minister, Robert Hill, unsuccessfully pushed for a “greenhouse trigger” in the EPBC Act way back in 2000.
In 2005 Labor’s shadow environment minister – one Anthony Albanese – introduced a bill for a “climate change trigger”, but it also did not proceed.
Fast forward almost 20 years, and Albanese not only opposed a climate trigger but spent months publicly berating the Greens for “obstructionism” – for advocating a policy he once championed.
The events of the past week suggest this was but a convenient excuse for inaction. Last weekend, Hanson-Young announced the Greens were dropping their insistence on a climate trigger and were prepared to support Labor’s Nature Positive package of laws if the government agreed to act on native forest logging.
This change brought them closely into accordance with the original Samuel report, to which Labor had committed. Samuel did not call for a climate trigger in the EPBC Act, but did recommend national environmental standards, legally binding on the states, which would apply to existing Regional Forest Agreements (RFAs).
The question is, who’s being obstructive here? In an angry statement after the deal fell over, Hanson-Young put the blame squarely on Albanese.
“The prime minister has been bullied by the mining and logging lobby again,” she said. “Gina Rinehart and the logging lobby seem to have more influence than the rest of the country.”
Perhaps more concerning for Labor, though, was the internal dissent. Felicity Wade, co-convenor of Labor Environment Action Network, stressed that the EPA Albanese killed off was an election commitment and “has been in the national platform since 2018 and is backed by 500 local ALP branches. It is core to our claim of caring about the natural environment.”
The deal struck between Plibersek and Hanson-Young, she said, was “sensible regulatory reform”.
“This was a chance to show strength and conviction ... And we faltered,” lamented Wade.
How Albanese’s act of selective cowardice plays out in the election remains to be seen, but you’d have to think it will damage Labor with environmentally concerned voters, and help the Greens.
Most pundits and psephologists lean towards a hung parliament, in which neither Labor nor the Coalition can govern alone. And that makes the Labor–Greens dynamic very interesting.
For most of this term, Labor has sought to portray the Greens as obstructionist, part of a “noalition” with the Liberal and National parties. Very recently, however, the minor party has become much more accommodating of the government’s agenda.
The first sign was when the Greens waved through two Labor housing policies, the Help to Buy and Build to Rent schemes, which it had previously blocked. Then there was the concession on the Nature Positive bills. And on ABC TV last Sunday, Hanson-Young indicated the party was prepared to be flexible on a number of other items on the government’s agenda, which had piled up at the end of the parliamentary year – which also might be the end of the parliamentary term.
Some read the shift as evidence that the Greens had realised the perception was growing that they were obstructionist, and too often voting with the Coalition parties against Labor, and it was hurting them.
As evidence, they pointed to the party’s under-performance in several recent elections, most notably in Queensland and the ACT.
Party leader Adam Bandt rejects this.
“We end the year with more MPs across the country than we had when we started,” he tells The Saturday Paper, pointing to strong results in the Tasmanian and Northern Territory elections, as well as various local government contests.
“In Queensland, our vote went up, but we lost a seat when LNP preferenced Labor ahead of us. In the ACT, after years in government, our vote dipped by 1 per cent, compared with Labor’s 3 per cent drop.”
The party is still doing well in opinion polls. On average across the major polls, according to analysis by Guardian Australia earlier this month, the Greens were sitting on 13.4 per cent of the first preference vote, up from 12.3 at the 2022 election. Labor was down more than five points, the Coalition up 2.2 and other minor parties and independents also up 2.2.
So the attacks on the Greens had not hurt them much, and seem not to have helped Labor. That said, Bandt worries that internecine hostility between the progressive parties could ultimately only benefit the Coalition. He concedes that the Greens’ efforts over this parliamentary term to push Labor to adopt more progressive policies “haven’t always been pretty” and were a source of frustration to some voters.
“But pressure works,” he says, citing the extra $3 billion for public and community housing that the Greens secured as the price of passing the government’s Housing Australia Future Fund. But with the clock ticking down on the 47th parliament, the progressive party has changed tack. In a new spirit of cooperation on Thursday, the Greens expedited the passage of a raft of Labor bills through the Senate and in return they won a further $500 million for social housing upgrades and a promise there would be no funding for fossil fuel projects under Labor’s Future Made in Australia legislation.
It is notable that in announcing the decision to support Labor’s housing bills, the Greens’ housing spokesperson Max Chandler-Mather emphasised the importance of stopping the Coalition from winning government. So did Hanson-Young in her weekend appearance on the ABC’s Insiders. And so does Bandt.
“There comes a point,” he says, “where you’ve pushed as far as you can. [On the housing bills] we just accepted that Labor wasn’t going to act on negative gearing or capping rent increases. We realised it’s now time to put the legislation through, and turn the focus to the election, where the goal is to keep Dutton out and, in a minority parliament, to tackle some of those bigger issues.”
He enumerated some: extending Medicare to cover dental and mental health, making education and GP visits free, stopping new fossil fuel developments, seriously tackling climate change and environmental degradation and “making those one-in-three big corporations who pay no tax, pay for it”.
It all depends, of course, on the defeat of what Bandt calls the “Trumpian” Dutton opposition and election of a Labor government dependent on the votes of the Greens and community “teal” independents – with whom the Greens maintain close relationships.
“But I think it could be incredibly productive,” he says. “I think this time around, the penny may drop for Labor, that there’s benefit in working well with others.”
His optimism is pretty tenacious, given the recent evidence of Albanese’s attitude.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 30, 2024 as "How Albanese killed Greens deal".
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