Full text of Tony Abbott's address to the Sydney Institute

LIBERAL leaders don’t normally seek to make the environment a political battle ground but my initial policy agenda speech is on the environment.

LIBERAL leaders don't normally seek to make the environment a political battle ground but my initial policy agenda speech is on the environment: first, because it will be a vote-changing issue in this year's election; second, because the environmental debate should be much more than an argument over climate change; and third, because it's a good conservative principle that each generation should aim to leave the planet in better shape than we found it.

As anyone who has lived there would know, I represent in the parliament a part of Sydney that’s passionate about the environment. Why wouldn’t people who live near the world’s finest harbour, a few minutes’ drive from famous beaches or a stone’s throw from national parks regard preserving this heritage as among our most important tasks? Few recent changes, for instance, have given the people of the Warringah peninsula more satisfaction than the return of whales to Sydney’s coastal waters.

As a local MP, I instinctively resolved never to be outdone as a practical environmentalist. My first big campaigns were to prevent the sell-off and over-development of surplus defence land on Sydney Harbour’s foreshores and to prevent the once almost unregulated proliferation of ugly and intrusive telecommunications infrastructure in people’s neighbourhoods.

My first task in government, as the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister (among other things) for Youth Affairs, was the establishment of the Green Corps, a traineeship programme giving young people six months work in environmental restoration such as weed or feral animal eradication and the construction of national park infrastructure. My chief disappointment at that time was the former Government’s tendency to see the Green Corps as more of a niche training programme than a mobilisation of young Australians’ environmental commitment for land care on a grand scale.

As a child exploring the bushland near the family home, a teenager canoeing down New South Wales’ coastal rivers, a student trekking through the wilderness to Sydney’s west or, these days, as a surfer and volunteer firefighter, I have always had a strong consciousness of environmental values and an appreciation of the need to protect the one planet that we have to live on. My key difference with the contemporary green movement is about how best to preserve the environment, not the importance of the task. My key disagreement with the Labor Party on this issue is wanting to make a practical difference rather than exploiting the environment for political advantage.

The political left shouldn’t be seen as “owning” the environment (it’s too important for that) and I am determined to challenge any assumption that it does. Conservative political parties and the conservationist movement both want to preserve what’s best in our heritage. Different emphases notwithstanding, they have a shared respect for the natural order of things. It was, after all, the Fraser Government (not the Whitlam or the Hawke governments) that protected the Barrier Reef and Fraser Island, established the Kakadu National Park, ended Australian whaling and saved Antarctica from development. It was the Howard Government (not the current one) that led the campaign against Japanese whaling, established mandatory renewable energy targets for the power industry, and committed $10 billion to restoring the Murray-Darling basin.

It’s high time that the green movement rethought its habitual preference for Labor because actual environmental improvements are more likely to come from conservative governments (that get things done) than from Labor ones (that have a tendency to lock land up without maintaining it). The environmental movement would be challenged, I think, to nominate any substantial achievement during the Rudd Government’s first two years besides the formal ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, compliance with which was actually the work of John Howard rather than Kevin Rudd.

Of course, Australia has a role in reducing global emissions but we can’t save the world from climate change on our own. To act alone would simply export emissions (and jobs) to other countries. Not only has the Rudd Government’s grandstanding on climate change failed. It’s masked the near total neglect of those environmental problems that Australians alone can fix. In the past two years, there has been almost no progress on improving water use in the Murray-Darling basin, only modest additional use of renewable energy, and no further support for more effective land care. In fact, funding for solar panels, water recycling and land care programmes has been cut. Instead, there’s been a great deal of political barracking plus obsessive support for an emissions trading scheme: a great big new tax on everything that merely masquerades as a programme to improve the environment.

In the next few weeks, I will outline the Coalition’s thinking on how to foster environmental improvements that will reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Reducing emissions matters because many scientists think that they are having a serious impact on climate. Australia should be a good international citizen and play our part in any effective international campaign to reduce the risk of man-made climate change. In the wake of Copenhagen, though, not even Mr Rudd thinks that the world is likely to heed so-called moral leadership from Australia. Australia, he now says, will do no more and no less than other countries which has been the Coalition’s position all along.

A unilateral emissions tax here in Australia would do next to nothing for the environment but would seriously damage the competitive position of our export industries. In the long run, it would damage our ability to fund the environmental improvements here in Australia that only Australians can bring about. Tonight, I will outline the Coalition’s thinking on the most important domestic environmental problems and how they might be tackled. First, though, I should point out that the Prime Minister’s environmental grandstanding has been typical of his general approach to government. On the environment, Mr Rudd has been worse than all talk and no action. On this subject especially, his rhetoric has been indulgent and his proposed action futile.

Announcing that climate change is the “great moral challenge of our time”, as if war, injustice, poverty and man’s inhumanity to man are somehow second order issues, is typical of the Prime Minister’s rhetorical overkill. If it’s the subject that he’s currently talking about, it must be the most important one in the world. This is the conceit which explains how he can have several “number one” priorities and how the announcement of a mere campaign (against obesity, binge drinking or executive pay, for instance), if it’s his, is tantamount to Australia declaring war.

Announcing a policy that will cut our children’s and our grandchildren’s emissions (like his policy to raise the pension age by 2023 or to end the Aboriginal life expectancy gap within a generation) is typical of the Prime Minister’s tendency to set targets that he will never have to meet or take responsibility for. As well, his tendency to focus on issues that require the cooperation of others gives him an escape clause when things don’t work out. He takes the credit for everything but accepts the blame for nothing. It seems that nothing of any significance can happen in our country – Cate Blanchett can’t have a baby, for instance; Mother Mary MacKillop can’t approach canonisation, for example; a sparrow can hardly fall, in fact – without the Prime Minister somehow becoming involved, TV cameras in tow.

The problem with wanting to be at the centre of everything is that nothing is ever really quite concentrated on. Not trusting other people or delegating means that it’s very hard ever to get anything done. People are starting to get the impression with Mr Rudd that it’s all about him. By contrast, the Coalition’s aim, on environmental policy as well as more generally, will be to understand the relevant problem, to talk to the relevant stakeholders, to devise an achievable improvement, to be able to explain it, and to know how to deliver it.

Australia’s biggest environmental problem is reconciling the human, economic and environmental demands on the Murray-Darling basin. It’s an environmental problem, certainly, because low environmental flows are impacting on wildlife and wetlands. It’s an economic problem because the basin provides one third of Australia’s food supply and much of our agricultural exports. It’s a human problem, fundamentally, because the millions of Australians living in the catchment largely depend on its rivers for their livelihood and even for their drinking water.

Despite its importance, the Murray-Darling basin is unlikely ever to be the subject of an international conference because it’s a problem that only Australians can fix. Australians alone can make a difference here. We shouldn’t wait for the international community to reduce its emissions or rely on the drought to break. In paying so much more attention to climate change than to the Murray-Darling basin, Mr Rudd has focused on problems that are other people’s responsibility as much as our own and on possible solutions that other countries must embrace as well as ourselves. Global problems might be more interesting than domestic ones to a former diplomat but governments which want to make a difference know where their most pressing responsibilities are and where their real power lies.

The essential problem in the Murray-Darling basin is that there’s rarely enough water to meet human needs, environmental flows and irrigation allocations. Water has been over-allocated because no state government has an equal responsibility to everyone with a stake in the system. After years of frustration at the slow pace of reform, the Howard Government’s 2007 $10 billion plan involved improving irrigation infrastructure to make existing water rights more productive, buying out unviable irrigators and, most importantly, changing governance arrangements so that each state couldn’t sacrifice the interests of the others. When Victoria proved a consistent, election-year stumbling block to achieving these outcomes, Kevin Rudd accused the then Prime Minister of being unable to make the federation work or to rise above playing the “blame game”.

Two years on, Mr Rudd has paid a high price to meet Victoria’s objections. He’s put an extra billion dollars on the table and effectively surrendered the objective of putting water management above state parochialism. In a sign of how little has changed, South Australia has lodged the papers for a High Court challenge against people allegedly filching Adelaide’s water supply and is currently sending begging letters to NSW requesting a fairer flow of floodwaters.

So far, the Rudd Government has spent almost a billion dollars on water buybacks but a relative pittance on improved irrigation infrastructure even though this could, according to a recent ACIL analysis, much more than pay for itself through the value of water saved. Prior to the last election, for instance, Mr Rudd promised to spend $100 million to re-engineer Menindee Lakes and thus save 200 billion litres of water a year. Instead, the Prime Minister’s inaction means that the floodwaters about to fill this storage will be subject to the usual unnecessary losses through evaporation and leakage.

The Government’s focus on buying back water rights is understandable because many irrigators would like a cash windfall but it ignores the problem inherent in a “right” to water that in most seasons doesn’t exist. Buy backs have a place but too much money has been spent buying “rights” rather than actually saving water. They run the risk of taking out of production farms on which whole communities depend for their livelihood. The danger in being so focused on buy-backs is that government can spend vast sums without achieving a rational allocation of water rights that are likely to be sustainable in normal seasons.

In this, as in so many areas, the Commonwealth government has political responsibility without commensurate legal authority. Because spending money is the Commonwealth’s principal practical way to make a difference here (allocating water rights and the regulation of infrastructure are, after all, state powers), the Federal Government can easily become bogged down in sub-optimal or even in counter-productive measures. For its part, the Howard Government sought to overcome this by using its proposed spending as a bargaining chip in negotiations for a referral of powers from the states to the Commonwealth. Because this has since been compromised, notwithstanding Mr Rudd’s presumed influence and authority with the state Labor governments, the overall management of the Murray-Darling basin is still bedevilled by the fact that no one is really in charge.

As far as is possible under the existing arrangements, the next Coalition federal government will work with irrigators and water authorities to upgrade infrastructure to minimize wastage of this precious resource. As well, the next Coalition government will renew its predecessor’s invitation to the states to refer power over Murray-Darling water management to the Commonwealth.

As John Howard frequently observed, rivers don’t acknowledge state borders. If there is one environmental planning issue crying out for a national rather than a state-by-state approach, it’s management of a catchment extending across Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria on which South Australia is critically dependent.

On this issue, decisions taken in one state are too important for the future of the other states to be left in state hands. If the states prove unwilling by mid-2012 to refer to the Commonwealth such powers as are necessary to manage Murray-Darling water, a Coalition government elected this year will put the appropriate constitutional change to the people at a referendum in conjunction with the 2013 election. It should not have taken more than 100 years to sort out the management of Australia’s largest river system. Another term of parliament should not pass without this matter being substantially resolved. 

As people familiar with the Australian landscape know, human impact on habitat is putting our native flora and fauna under constant pressure. We can do our best to preserve wilderness areas that are not subject to much human encroachment but, as the march of the cane toad or the bitou bush demonstrates, even the most inaccessible regions are vulnerable to the invasion of introduced species and exotic plants. There are risks involved in attempting to control these through technology or the introduction of predators, important though this can be. In the end, it often takes people to remedy the damage that other people have done.

Intensive labour is required if weeds and feral animals are to be removed and if national park infrastructure is to be maintained. Notwithstanding the scientific breakthroughs of researchers with the CSIRO and our universities, the dedication of Australia’s 4000 land care groups and the professionalism of our farmers and foresters, Australia is losing the battle against environmental degradation. Properly restoring only the most obviously degraded land would require a labour force that just isn’t there.

On the Warringah peninsula, for instance, Middle Creek between Oxford Falls and Narrabeen Lagoon flows through an area of extremely degraded bush alongside the Wakehurst Parkway. Nearly a hundred years of exposure to garden run-off, sewerage overflow, and the seeds which birds, animals and passing traffic have deposited has turned the valley floor into a tangle of morning glory, elephant ear, privet bushes and asparagus weed in which a few remnant gums and palms struggle to survive.

Over the past 15 years, the intermittent attention of a Green Corps team, a few Work for the Dole crews, local volunteers and council bush regenerators have largely failed to make a difference. There just hasn’t been a sufficiently large, sufficiently motivated and sufficiently sustained workforce to get such a big area of weeds under control. This is just one example of the thousands of locations where riparian vegetation, urban bush and degraded farmland needs the sustained attention of a large labour force in order to be restored to something like original condition.

Over 11 years, the 18,000 people who cumulatively participated in the Howard Government’s Green Corps planted more than 14 million trees, erected more than 8000 kilometres of fencing and undertook more than 5000 flora and fauna surveys. The main problem with the Green Corps was that it was too small – there were never enough Green Corps teams to deal with all the environmental restoration projects submitted by councils, landcare groups, and national parks. Too many of them involved studying a problem rather than fixing it. As well, the original Green Corps format, individual teams of ten young environmental trainees with a supervisor/trainer, did not lend itself to tackling larger restoration projects.

Unfortunately, the Rudd Government’s version of Green Corps – rebadged as the Green Jobs Corps – if anything, will be much less suited to serious environmental restoration. Instead of being a full time, hands-on, environmental traineeship for young volunteers, the Rudd Government has turned it into a virtual Work for the Dole programme. Participants must have been previously unemployed for 12 months and will receive the dole plus about $20 a week for their trouble. Participants in such a programme may not require the same variety of different environmental work experiences but they will almost certainly lack the commitment and motivation that full-time trainees bring to their work.

Over the next few months, along with the Shadow Minister for the Environment, Greg Hunt, I will be talking to organizations such as Conservation Volunteers Australia and Greening Australia (the bodies that formulated and subsequently ran the original Green Corps) about the potential for a much larger and more capable national conservation corps. I have in mind a standing environmental workforce, perhaps 15,000 strong, comprised of short-term trainees plus regular workers and supervisors capable of supplying the skilled, motivated and sustained attention that large-scale environmental remediation needs. This won’t be the 10,000 six month traineeships for unemployed people, spread out over three years, that the Rudd Government has announced. It would be a 15,000 strong environmental workforce – a standing green army, if you like, or a land army, if you’d prefer - that’s available on an ongoing basis (over and above the existing efforts of councils and national parks) and supplemented by volunteers to tackle the local and regional environmental priorities that most urgently need the sustained application of labour.

This new conservation corps wouldn’t be a traineeship programme or an employment programme with mere spin-off benefits for the environment. It would be Australia’s first deployment of large numbers of people on behalf of the environment and the first time that we have approached environmental remediation with the same seriousness and level of organization that we have brought, say, to dealing with bushfires or other local and regional emergencies.

Over the next few months, I will be inviting relevant organizations to put proposals along these lines to the Coalition for possible adoption as policy in the run up to the election. At, say, an average cost per place of $50,000 a year, a 15,000 strong conservation corps would be expensive – although not on the scale of the Rudd Government’s unfunded stimulus measures. It would be an order of magnitude altogether greater than previous spending on green jobs that would indicate a new willingness to tackle environmental problems that have been festering for generations. Along with its other new policy proposals, the Coalition will announce the savings and revenue measures from which it will be funded in good time for the election.

For at least a generation, a large percentage of Australians have ranked the environment as an important issue; so important that the Green vote is now about 10 per cent. Still, actually working for a better environment is something that people mostly have to volunteer for and that today’s farmers, miners and foresters have mostly grafted onto their principal task of making a living. Rather than being a full-time, permanent job, practical environmentalism has been more of an interest or a hobby. It’s time to give more Australians the chance to make this a career, a vocation, a mission.

A concern to protect the environment should mean much more than voting Green or joining Greenpeace. It should mean preferring those trying to do good rather than merely to look good on this issue. It should mean preferring a government that will make a practical difference rather than one that strikes poses and breaks promises.

My vision for Australia is a country where, individually and collectively, we can more often be our best selves. As anyone familiar with us knows, Australians are generous, decent, optimistic and committed people who want to be good for those around them. Our concern for the environment reflects this striving. Of course, things don’t always work out. Still, government’s job is to try to make it easier for people to be their best. We should never conclude that what’s been done so far to manage Murray-Darling water or to preserve our natural heritage is the most we can manage. I know that we can do better and I invite my fellow Australians to join me to make that happen.