Inside Tanya Plibersek’s delay in fixing ‘broken’ environment laws

Tanya Plibersek’s appointment as environment minister sparked widespread optimism among conservation groups, most of whom list new national laws as their top priority to fix what she declared were “broken” environmental protections.

That was in March 2022. Last week, almost the entire conservation movement felt deep disappointment in the minister’s failure to deliver on that promise.

Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek can’t say when her “nature positive plan” will be completed.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Plibersek represents the socially progressive electorate of Sydney and is a senior figure in Labor’s green-tinged Left faction. She came to the portfolio with a reform agenda mapped out in Labor’s election campaign.

That pledge included setting up an Environment Protection Agency to handle development decisions and enforce regulations, national standards that would rule out damage to critical habitats, and comprehensive changes to strengthen the Environment Protection Biodiversity Conservation Act.

In December 2022, she promised to release draft laws for a “nature positive plan” by the end of 2023.

After missing the deadline for the legislation overhaul, Plibersek said on Tuesday that she would pursue the changes in stages, starting with a commitment to bring new laws for an EPA to parliament in the coming weeks.

But she declined to put a timeframe on national standards and legislation reform, which ecologists say is crucial to deliver another of Plibersek’s 2022 promises – ending native species extinctions.

The Australian Conservation Foundation, one of Australia’s biggest green groups, responded with unusually strident criticism, saying it was “frustrated and deeply disappointed by the Albanese government’s failure to deliver the full reform of the national environment law”.

Birdlife Australia chief executive Kate Millar, who represents one of the most popular environment groups in the country, said new legislation was needed “to stop destruction of important habitat and measures to support the recovery of threatened species”.

“How can we expect EPA to halt extinctions when the laws that it is enforcing are fundamentally broken?” Millar said.

But not all lobby groups were so critical.

The EPA will have powers to check if developers are complying with their environmental obligations and issue heavy fines or even stop-work orders. But when it comes to decisions on whether a new development can go ahead, Plibersek can override the EPA to approve projects deemed in the national interest.

Minerals Council of Australia chief executive Tania Constable said it was a positive signal from the government that the EPA was designed so the minister retained decision-making powers.

But Amelia Young, campaign director for the Wilderness Society, said “nature needs a proper EPA”, with powers like those of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, which as the watchdog for financial markets cannot be overridden by the finance minister.

West Australian Premier Roger Cook told The Australian Financial Review this month that new nature protections could disproportionately impact his state and its miners, who want development assessments fast-tracked.

On Tuesday, the Chamber of Minerals and Energy of Western Australia backed Plibersek’s announcement that she would implement the reforms in stages, while it urged the Cook government to “maintain its advocacy for Western Australia”.

The slowdown of environment protection reforms is viewed by Labor insiders and green groups as a ploy to shore up the government’s prospects at the next federal election, especially in the resource-rich states of Queensland and Western Australia. The election is expected to be held by May next year.

Plibersek, however, rejected suggestions she had bowed to Cook’s pressure.

“Western Australia doesn’t mark my homework,” she said.

A once-in-a-decade review of national environment laws, released in 2020, called for comprehensive reform to prevent the “continued decline of our iconic places and the extinction of our most threatened plants, animals and ecosystems”.

Plibersek said in December 2022 that “Australia’s environment laws are broken”. She committed to delivering the review’s recommendations and preventing further native species extinctions.

Australia’s extinction rate is one of the worst in the world. About 100 unique flora and fauna species have been wiped out since colonisation, and 1900 threatened species now at a heightened risk of extinction.

Plibersek expanded the so-called water trigger law last year, which requires an extra layer of expert assessment for gas fracking projects, to also include conventional gas extraction.

She said this week that her EPA was another important step in an ongoing process.

“The current act runs to well over a thousand pages. What we replace it with will be similar in size and complexity. It is a big and complex drafting task,” Plibersek said.

Ecology professor Brendan Wintle of the not-for-profit Biodiversity Council said weak environment laws meant hundreds of thousands of hectares of native habitat were cleared every year and further delays made further wildlife losses more likely.

“Every year that we don’t have proper protections of critical habitat leads to an ongoing decline in species and a higher risk of extinctions,” Wintle said.

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