By Francesca Davis
The Coalition government has wreaked havoc on the environment. It has undermined international agreements such as the Basel hazardous waste treaty and the Kyoto climate change accord, it has supported projects like Hinchinbrook resort in Queensland and the Jabiluka uranium mine in Kakadu National Park, and it has backed the timber industry in a series of disastrous regional forest agreements. Now Howard has another three years to implement his agenda of freeing business from environmental responsibilities.
The Coalition's commitment to the expansion of the fossil fuel, uranium and forest industries, its retreat from a regulatory approach to environmental protection and obsession with privatising resources guarantee a heightened attack on the environment.
The Howard government's approach to the environment was neatly summarised in the draft oceans policy released earlier this year. The government explained: "Any [environmental] reforms must reflect the need for stability in the investment climate and minimum necessary compliance costs for ecological sustainable commercial ventures".
In plain English: if environmental protection is going to cost business, it won't be implemented.
The Coalition has moved swiftly to guarantee this. It has proposed the most significant changes to environment law since it was first written in the 1970s.
If these changes are accepted, many projects will be free of the requirement of an environmental impact assessment. Agreements between developers and the federal government will not be subject to the Environmental Protection Act if Canberra chooses to waive it.
Commonwealth responsibilities for the environment will be transferred to the states, leaving the environment at the mercy of differing state interests and standards.
At the same time, the government is resisting requirements imposed by international environmental agreements. Its complete disregard of the need for urgent action on greenhouse gases is a clear example. The government has announced its refusal to ratify the Kyoto climate change agreement unless the US does so.
Since it knows the US will not ratify, the Australian government is openly thumbing its nose at environmentalists' and Third World nations' desperate pleas for immediate action to control greenhouse gases to limit global warming and subsequent rises in sea levels.
It appears that Australia has already breached its Kyoto commitment to restrict greenhouse gas emissions to 8% above 1990 levels. The Financial Review reported on October 26 that emissions had risen by 9% above 1990 levels by 1996.
Any attempt to limit greenhouse gas emissions will be motivated by the financial benefits business can gain from it. Business is keen for the government to distribute "pollution permits" and has welcomed legal ownership rights over carbon credits attached to areas of forest, in effect a form of privatisation of air.
The Coalition has made no secret of its plan to expand the oil and minerals industries. The government is supporting developments such as the Stuart shale oil processing plant near the Great Barrier Reef in Queensland, despite the Kyoto agreement's clear call for a move away from fossil fuel dependency.
Producing 15 times Australia's existing oil resources, the shale oil project will be a massive new source of greenhouse gases. Production and use of shale oil emits up to 60% more carbon dioxide than normal oil.
The federal government has given the project a $7 million grant and excise exemptions worth around $40 million. The Queensland government has given $11 million.
Yet the Stuart project is nothing compared to the federal government's plans for expanding uranium mining.
The ALP's "three-mines policy" limited the uranium industry's expansion between 1983 and 1996. The election of the Coalition signalled a dangerous turnaround.
Native title posed a significant block to uranium mining until Howard's racist native title amendment bill was passed. With Australia containing around 40% of the world's uranium, the Coalition sees this as a huge potential money spinner for its big business backers.
There are around 50 known uranium deposits in Australia, and exploration by both domestic and foreign companies continues. Reflecting its confidence in the government's support for uranium, mining giant Rio Tinto has invested $29 million in its Kintyre site in Western Australia for preliminary drilling and establishing a camp.
Trial uranium mining is taking place at Beverley and Honeymoon in South Australia.
Acclaim Uranium NL, established in May 1997, has proposed 15 mines in WA alone.
Acclaim chairperson Bill Hassell is a former leader of WA Liberal Party and is infamous for the vicious campaign he ran against native title rights for Aboriginal people. All but one of Acclaim's leases are subject to native title claims.
The federal government's main problem is public awareness and opposition to the proposed uranium mine at Jabiluka — 80% of Australia's population does not want mining in national parks.
The UNESCO World Heritage Committee inspection team has been in Kakadu since October 25, and activists are pinning their hopes on Kakadu being declared "World Heritage in danger".
However, there is little likelihood that the Coalition will halt the project without massive protests. Getting a uranium mine started at Jabiluka is crucial to breaking public resistance to uranium mining.
When the new legislation is passed and the role of government and the public monitoring of the environmental destruction by business is minimised, the Howard government's main goal will be to eliminate organised public opposition to environmentally damaging projects.
The appointment of Wilson Tuckey as Howard's new forestry and conservation minister is a sign that the environmental movement will be in its sights. Better known as "Iron Bar" Tuckey, reputedly for taking to an Aboriginal opponent with an iron bar, the minister is a notorious reactionary.
In 1988, when he was federal shadow health minister, he argued that people with HIV-AIDS should be isolated or jailed. "People with AIDS don't 'catch' the disease, they let someone give it to them", he declared. He also commented that the "reality of homosexuality is that it hasn't contributed much to Australian society".
More recently, he endorsed Aboriginal affairs minister John Herron's statement that the "stolen generation" benefited from being removed from their families and argued that the government should extinguish native title on pastoral leases.
Steve Ryan, forest campaigner for the Wilderness Society, told Green Left Weekly that Tuckey put forward "a decent position" on forestry issues because a section of the WA National Party is sympathetic to forest conservation, unlike their counterparts in the rest of the country. However, Tuckey's statements so far do not reflect a commitment to conservation.
Interviewed by Laurie Oakes on Channel Nine's Business Sunday program on October 24, Tuckey said that his main goal as minister was to overcome Australia's $1.5 billion trade deficit in forest products and that Australia meet its responsibilities for its own consumption of forest products — not cut down other people's forests.
In response to a question about the possibility of plantation timber meeting that demand, Tuckey said: "I think we'll have grave difficulty convincing investors to make an investment that might return something to their grandson". At the same time, Tuckey denied he was not interested in reducing exploitation of old-growth forests.
Forest protection is one of the few areas where there have been continuing protests and organisation by the environment movement across the country. The regional forest agreements have been widely unpopular and have not put a stop to local grassroots actions.
In June, new regulations came into effect that restrict public access to areas of state forests without a permit. As dissatisfaction with regional forest agreements continues to grow, moves to prevent the public from viewing forest destruction and to stop activists from protesting against logging within the affected forests are no coincidence.
Tuckey made his hostility to forest activists very clear: "I don't want stunts, I want statistics. The reality is that it's far too important a debate to be trivialised by people climbing trees."
There is little doubt that the Coalition sees protection of the environment as an annoying cost to big business. While $1.25 billion was earmarked for a special Natural Heritage Trust, funded from the privatisation of Telstra, a study by the Australian Conservation Foundation has shown that over half of the money has been used to replace core funding for the environment or has been spent as handouts to business ventures with little or no environmental value.
Environmentally disastrous irrigation drainage schemes in Shepparton, Victoria, and elsewhere have received funding. Irrigation for the Bright golf course in Victoria and the funding of "Future Profit officers" for several agricultural industry groups in Queensland are other examples.
An astounding $12 million was granted to repair the Hume Dam. Not only was there no environmental benefit, but the repairs are the legal responsibility of the irrigators.
In response to moves by the Coalition to divest the federal and state governments of regulatory powers, the peak environmental organisations have decided to focus their strategies much more on corporations.
"The nature of public campaigning will be quite different. As governments become less powerful, we need to influence where power lies — in business and corporations", the Wilderness Society's Steve Ryan told Green Left Weekly.
TWS plans to do this through lobbying and consumer campaigns. Ryan cites the Jabiluka campaign's lobbying of Westpac shareholders as an example.
Results from this lobbying have yet to be seen. Far more problematic for Energy Resources of Australia, the company behind the Jabiluka mine, has been the presence of hundreds of protesters outside the mine site and supporting rallies in the cities.
With the Coalition scaling back environmental protection and safeguards at a rapid rate, a discussion within the environmental movement of tactics and strategies would certainly be timely.