UN clean bill of health gives the lie to reef madness

oz oped illo for tomorrow the 9th of july, to go with the greg sheridan piece.

Let me ask you this. What status does the Great Barrier Reef enjoy in official international agencies? Is it “at risk”? In danger? On probation? Is it on a special watch list?

You could be forgiven for thinking something like this was the case.

In fact, the World Heritage Committee of UNESCO has given the Great Barrier Reef a clean bill of health and indeed lavished praise on the Abbott government for its management pro­gram for the reef.

This has been a big policy commitment from the government, overseen by Environment Minister Greg Hunt. It has been fully recognised internationally. Far from pariah status, the government is the pin-up boy of the WHC.

When it came to office, the Abbott government found there were five proposals for the disposal of dredging material into the Great Barrier Reef marine park, an area that encompasses about 350,000sq km.

Hunt is one of the strong performers in Tony Abbott’s cabinet. His success comes from policy authority sensibly delegated by Abbott, sufficient energy and a grasp of the processes of government to get things done, an encyclopedic knowledge of his portfolio and very good public presentation skills.

He found alternatives to the proposals to dump dredging material into the GBR marine park. This was the critical decision. But also important is the permanent ban on big-project dredge material going into the park.

In co-operation with the Queensland government, and with the full backing of Abbott, Hunt proceeded to produce the Reef 2050 Plan and to commit more than $2 billion over 10 years to its welfare.

There are a range of advisory and consultative bodies, and funding has been increased to control the crown of thorns starfish. All the normal elements of a big, co-ordinated government program are there.

Although Hunt is one of its better communicators, the Abbott government still has not got the credit for this that it deserves. This partly reflects the government’s limitations as a storyteller and partly the way, on environmental issues especially, the game is stacked against it.

Media organisations are not fulfilling their obligations to render reality accurately.

Hunt’s efforts also involved a very big diplomatic exercise.

The World Heritage Committee is one of the more credible elements of the UN system, a system that overwhelmingly lacks credibility. Almost always, when you hear the words that Australia risks international isolation over some policy matter or other, it is pure baloney. Asia could not care less whether we are a republic, as Paul Keating once alleged, nor could it care less what our marriage arrangements are, as some Coalition politicians have alleged.

But there is a degree of international interest in the Great Barrier Reef, as US President Barack Obama’s foolish and ill-informed remarks at the G20 summit in Brisbane attest.

So while Canberra was taking serious action on the reef, it needed to inform all the stakeholders in the WHC process, all the member governments and all the relevant diplomats. And despite an unremitting and deeply dishonest campaign against the government by the usual green suspects, it was successful in doing so.

So much so that at the WHC meeting last week the representatives of Japan, South Korea, Portugal, Lebanon, Vietnam, Finland, Malaysia, Poland, The Philippines, India, Jamaica, Turkey, Serbia and Peru each made individual comments supporting and praising the performance of the Abbott government on the reef.

Far from being “on probation”, Canberra was returned to the normal five-year reporting cycle for World Heritage areas.

Portugal, which a year ago in Doha had been critical of Australia, said through its representative: “Portugal is happy to see Australia has acknowledged the concerns of the committee and has taken action … The future of this unique property looks promising.”

There is endless documentation of this kind. By any measure the management plan for the reef is effective and has been recognised as such internationally.

Yet driving along in suburban Melbourne last week, when I heard the first radio reports of the outcome, the distinct impression I got was that Australia had just barely avoided the ignominy of having the reef declared to be “in danger” and was on probation.

Here is the real nub of the matter. The World Wildlife Fund put out a statement saying Australia was “on probation”. This is just wrong.

Greenpeace put out similar statements. Given that some time ago Greenpeace was caught red-handed using photographs of a damaged reef in The Philippines to illustrate what it claimed was damage to the Great Barrier Reef, you might have thought savvy media organisations would have been sceptical about such green organisation claims.

One of the real disabilities of the environment debate in Australia is that the ABC and Fairfax Media tend to simply report the claims of green activist groups as though they were incontestable facts, when often they are at the very least highly tendentious interpretations, or misinterpretations. This was especially the case all through the climate change and carbon tax debates.

The Rudd and Gillard governments had set up a range of evangelising climate change pro­pa­ganda outfits that had a spurious claim to authority because they were government-backed and funded.

With the exception of a couple of necessarily small-scale free-market think tank efforts — notably that of the Institute of Public Affairs — there was really no one to subject these often preposterous claims to any reality check. The big circuit-breaker was the Productivity Commission’s report.

To convince us that the whole world was implementing carbon taxes — whereas almost no one was — even the most attenuated measures, things like our own petrol excises, were classed by the evangelisers as carbon taxes.

Similarly, endless guests on ABC talk shows went on at length about China’s carbon markets. Yet no interviewer in my memory ever bothered to point out that these markets were tiny, affected almost no part of the Chinese economy, and the carbon permits were free, nearly free or overwhelmingly given away. What tiny carbon markets China does have recently saw their prices collapse.

In other words, the prevalence of climate-alarm evangelist groups, and the media’s lazy inclination to treat their pronouncements as factually accurate, has led to a systemic failure on the media’s part to present reality accurately. The Great Barrier Reef is the latest doleful example.