Tasmanian leaders struggle with a basic fact: environment laws should protect the environment

The Guardian

6 hours ago

Tasmania has a complicated relationship with its natural beauty. Australia's smallest state is marketed for its 'clean and green' environment and produce, and the government runs tourism campaigns with the tagline 'come down for air' that lean heavily on its stunning landscapes, coastlines and wildlife.
But the state also has a hard-earned reputation for backing environmentally damaging industries that grab national, and sometimes international, attention: hydroelectric dam expansion, logging of old-growth forests and, most recently, salmon farming.
The response to criticism of these industries often includes a reference to more than half of the state being protected in either public or private reserves. It's a good line, but one that doesn't survive much scrutiny. The Tasmanian world heritage wilderness covers about 20% of the state, but development, logging and mining are allowed in some areas counted as protected.
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Where the line is deployed, it is mostly to suggest that nature already gets a pretty good run and environment protection should be reduced. The Liberal state government used it to defend a yet-to-be-delivered policy of opening up nearly 40,000 hectares of protected forests for logging – a step that would reduce the amount of the state that is in protected reserves to less than 50%, and that even some members of the timber industry say makes little sense.
On Saturday, the Tasmanian Labor leader, Dean Winter, rolled out the line out as he launched an equally remarkable policy before the state election on 19 July: that the state's industries should not have to answer to Australia's environment laws.
To be fair, that's not how he put it. Winter said he would make a case to the federal environment minister, Murray Watt, that industries including salmon farming, energy and mining should be granted a similar exemption from the national Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act that has been granted to native forestry.
In his view, it would allow industries to be assessed through a 'streamlined single regulatory framework'. He said it would not mean that laws were bypassed, only that environmental assessments weren't duplicated.
In an interview with The Australian, Winter said this approach 'works well' for forestry. He suggested it would have led to faster approvals on some long-running contentious proposals, including a windfarm planned for an environmentally sensitive island used by migratory birds, a tailings dam on the edge of the Tarkine wilderness, and salmon farming in Macquarie harbour.
The Liberal government, led by premier Jeremy Rockliff, pumped out a press release saying it also wanted faster approvals, accusing Winter of stealing a policy it released earlier this year.
Both parties have a point. It is widely acknowledged that the EPBC Act is not fit for purpose. Decisions on some developments have taken longer than necessary.
On the other hand, some developments are problematic and shouldn't be approved quickly, or at all. It says something about the debate that this even needs saying, but: environment laws should protect the environment.
A 2021 five-yearly state of the environment report found that wasn't happening – that nature was in poor and deteriorating health, in part because forest and other vegetation has continued to be knocked down without proper oversight.
Where do Winter's claims about native forest logging fit into this? Awkwardly, at best.
The exemption for logging in the EPBC Act is included in regional forest agreements signed between the Commonwealth and individual states. Small problem: the states have not always lived up to their commitments.
In 2006, then Australian Greens leader Bob Brown won a federal court case against Forestry Tasmania over its failure to protect three endangered species. It didn't last - the wording of the agreement was changed to prevent further challenges, and the judgment overturned - but more cases followed. Most notably, a landmark judgment in 2020 found that a Victorian logger had breached the terms of a forestry agreement and should be subject to the EPBC Act.
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The latter failure was recognised by former consumer watchdog chair Graeme Samuel in a once-a-decade statutory review of the EPBC Act in 2020. He concluded there were 'fundamental shortcomings' in how the system was working and significant change was needed. He called for the introduction of national environmental standards – benchmarks against which major operations, including logging, would be measured – and an accreditation system that included 'strong Commonwealth oversight'.
In other words, Samuel found the current system wasn't actually 'working well'. The former federal environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, agreed that a revamp of the EPBC Act should include national environmental standards being applied to regional forest agreements.
That revamp is still yet to happen. The work to re-write the laws was delayed in the last parliamentary term, and is now starting again under the new minister.
It is too soon to know where Watt will land on the forestry exemption, and a range of other issues. For the moment he is sticking to federal Labor's mantra – that a deal can be reached to satisfy industry and conservation advocates.
Quite how that will happen, given the evidence of environmental decline and the extent to which it is disregarded by those who wear being anti-green as a badge of honour, is difficult to imagine. Not impossible. But difficult.
Speaking before he met interest groups last week, Watt says he thought environmental standards would be a necessary part of it, but he had an open mind. The Tasmanian debate is playing out in parallel to this, but an air of unreality hangs over what most people agree is an unnecessary early election.
Neither major party has explained why they implicitly disagree with Samuel on regional forest agreements. Neither has levelled with the public about the economic decline of the native forestry industry, other than to promise they will support jobs in what Winter calls 'traditional industries'. Meanwhile, nearly 90% of Australian timber comes from plantations.
Both parties say they won't deal with the Greens, who go into the election with five out of 35 MPs and a good chance of again being a key balance-of-power player. And a Tasmanian state of the environment report released last year gathers dust.
It told a similar story to the national report – that, on a majority of indicators, nature in the state was in poor or declining health. The Liberals accepted only six of the report's 16 recommendations in full and announced no new policies to address the problems identified. Labor didn't respond at all.