By Lisa Macdonald
While electioneering in January 1996. John Howard pledged that his government would "make the largest commitment to environmental action by any national government in Australia's history".
Howard was, of course, indulging in the usual practice of politicians during election campaigns — lying through his teeth. Few environmentalists, with the notable exception of the leaders of organisations such as the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) and the Wilderness Society (TWS), actually believed him.
The speed and thoroughness with which the federal government has removed impediments to big business's extraction of maximum profits from our natural environment is no less alarming for having expected it.
When the numerous assaults on different aspects of the environment over the last 15 months are examined, the urgency of stopping this government is absolutely clear. That the peak environment organisations are not willing to lead in such a campaign is equally clear.
Within a fortnight of being elected, and just four months after most Australians made their opposition to uranium sales and nuclear testing abundantly clear around the French tests in the Pacific, the federal minister for resources, Warwick Parer, announced that the government would be "delighted" to sell uranium to Indonesia for its nuclear power program.
That indicated the government's plans to expand the ALP's three-mines policy and allow unlimited uranium mining. Since then, Western Mining Corporation has announced a $1.25 billion expansion of its Olympic Dam mine in South Australia, and uranium mines have been approved in Kakadu and Ruddall River national parks.
By June, the government had launched its assault on our native forests. It increased the woodchip export quota by 1 million tonnes and removed quotas altogether for woodchips from private forests.
The ACF and TWS organised media conferences and meetings with the ministers, but, despite opinion polls indicating 80% public opposition to woodchipping in native forests, they did not attempt to repeat the mass rallies against woodchipping of two years earlier. Those rallies forced the Labor government to present a plan, albeit inadequate, for a reserve system to protect high conservation value forests.
In a further gift to the timber corporations, the Coalition changed the annual woodchip licences to three-year licences, thereby also removing an annual focus for anti-logging protests.
By the time of its first budget, the government realised there was going to be little resistance from an environment movement demobilised by the peak bodies' narrow lobbying approach. The promised allocation of $318 million to re-green cleared agricultural lands was deferred.
A week later, federal environment minister Senator Robert Hill announced consent for Keith Williams' massive tourist development at Port Hinchinbrook — adjacent to the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Area and the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area — despite widespread public opposition and without a full environmental impact statement.
In the next assault on rapidly diminishing native forests, Hill and Parer issued a statement on December 17: "As far as practicable, the Commonwealth will aim to exclude from new [forest] reserves areas of high mineral potential". Exploration and mining were to be allowed in vast areas of native forest, including old growth and wilderness, that would otherwise have been protected.
As well, they announced, mining will be permitted in "informal" forest reserve areas — that is, in forests that have been reserved but are deemed by the government to have "not so great conservation value".
Once again, despite a poll conducted for the Australian Heritage Commission which found that 81% of the public oppose mining in wilderness areas, none of the peak environment organisations did more than issue outraged media releases and request discussions with the government.
Big business's response was much clearer. The mining corporations immediately declared that all conservation reserves should be open to "multiple land use" (i.e. mining). The National Association of Forest Industries demanded that logging be allowed in all forest reserves that are opened to mining.
Despite having held its fire against the Coalition during the election campaign and causing it little discomfort since, in January the ACF's federal funding was cut by 42%. The more radical Friends of the Earth lost all funding.
A few weeks later, the federally funded Environmental Defenders Offices were warned that they would be stripped of funding unless they stopped taking legal action against state and federal governments to enforce forest codes of practice and environmental impact assessment laws. Last month, the EDOs' power to litigate against breaches of environment policy was terminated.
In late February, the first of the federal-state regional forest agreements was signed in Victoria. Covering 1.2 million hectares of East Gippsland, the 20-year deal reserves only 0.6% more forest than at present, excludes from protection large areas of old growth forest which contain many of the region's threatened species and places no limit on the amount of woodchips than can be exported from the area.
In mid-April, the government announced regulations to remove export controls on hardwood woodchips. While the Wilderness Society has launched a consumer boycott against Boral, and a few small groups of committed activists are camped out in some of the threatened areas in an attempt to prevent logging, these actions are largely isolated from the environment movement bureaucracies that have the resources to build a serious and effective campaign against the government's entire forest policy.
Facing little opposition, the government made further environment funding cuts in the May 13 budget. These included abolition of the Energy Research and Development Corporation, underlining the government's reactionary energy policy, already evident in its efforts to block any binding international agreement on targets for reduced greenhouse gas emissions.
Like the federal Labor government before it, the Coalition is doing its utmost to protect the interests of the oil, coal and gas corporations which are making huge profits from ecologically disastrous production methods.
The Coalition got its bill to privatise Telstra through parliament with the public support of some leaders of the ACF, the World Wide Fund for Nature, TWS and the Wildlife Preservation Society. Having sacrificed the public ownership of the second most profitable Australian company in exchange for a promise of a $1.1 billion Natural Heritage Trust Fund, these organisations bear some responsibility for the Coalition's latest manoeuvre to ensure that the NHTF serves its immediate political needs, with little regard for the environment.
Not prepared to allocate the resources necessary for substantial job creation from general revenue, Howard has instead instructed that all NHTF spending proposals be vetted by the employment committee of cabinet. The funds allocated to environmental repair and preservation in the NHTF were, from the start, grossly inadequate. Now, it seems, they may not be used for this purpose at all.
The NHTF bill, passed by the Senate on May 15, assigns management of the fund to just two people, Senator Hill and minister for primary industries John Anderson. Hill has refused to put any limit on using money from the fund for commercial subsidies or to put conditions on grants so that recipients are prevented from clearing native vegetation.
Considered alongside the current efforts to allow the upgrading of pastoral leases to freehold — removing up to 42% of Australia's land mass from government environmental regulation — it is clear that the Coalition is systematically sacrificing the environment to shore up its electoral base in rural Australia and ongoing support from big business.
But perhaps the clearest indication of the government's bottom line on environment policy — and why it is absurd to believe that lobbying by the peak environment organisations can have any success — is contained in a leaked government "vision statement" reported in the media on May 10.
The statement directs Environment Australia (created in September when the government collapsed the Australian Nature Conservation Agency, the Commonwealth Environment Protection Agency and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park into one office to ensure that they "put the government's interests first") to conduct all its work within the framework of the government's economic goals. The department must try to operate as an environmental advocate without contradicting the policy priorities of other departments. including primary industries and energy, minerals and resources, and forestry.
The Howard government is well advanced in its project of giving carte blanche to uranium mining and woodchip companies, major greenhouse gas producing industries and big developers to profit further from the destruction of our land, waters, forests and air.
That it has been able to proceed so rapidly is in no small part due to the inadequacies of the current environment movement leadership. Overcoming illusions in capitalist politicians and political processes — and the related unwillingness to organise and mobilise public opinion in uncompromising defence of the environment — is an essential step in the struggle to stop the Howard government.