Labor's new environment laws won't be ‘credible' unless new projects consider climate change, advocates warn
The latest attempt to rewrite federal environmental protection laws won't be 'credible' unless it forces decision-makers to consider climate change when assessing projects, advocates have warned, as consultation on the changes begins.
Select environment groups, miners, business and farming chiefs joined the new environment minister, Murray Watt, for a roundtable in Canberra on Thursday.
The Climate Council chief executive, Amanda McKenzie, said the laws would remain 'broken' without some mechanism to account for climate impacts, which she described as the 'biggest concern for Australia's environment'.
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'It is not good enough for the Australian government to push climate change out of the frame,' McKenzie said.
'This is the biggest impact on the Australian environment, and the law simply won't be credible if it does not consider the biggest impact on the Australian environment.'
While not ruling it out, Watt again played down the idea, as he insisted emissions from heavy polluting projects were already managed in other ways.
'My argument is that there are a range of mechanisms already in place, both domestically and internationally, to manage the climate impacts of developments,' he said.
'I recognise there are groups who still want us to go further, there are groups who don't want us to go further, and we'll be listening to that feedback on the way through.'
The issue of inserting climate into federal nature laws shapes as a major challenge for Watt as attempts to win broad support for a long-awaited overhaul of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act.
Five years after Graeme Samuel's review of the EPBC Act, stakeholders from across the board are generally optimistic that changes to the John Howard-era laws can finally be enacted.
Labor's proposal to create a federal environment protection agency collapsed in the final months of the last parliament after Anthony Albanese pushed it off the agenda amid concerns about a pre-election backlash in Western Australia.
Speaking after Thursday's roundtable meeting, Watt said Labor's thumping federal election win created a 'very clear mandate' to establish the EPA 2.0 and fix the nature laws.
The new minister wants to push changes through federal parliament within 18 months, likely as one package of laws rather than in multiple stages as his predecessor Tanya Plibersek attempted to do.
Watt said there was support among the invited stakeholders on five broad principles: national environmental standards, streamlined approvals, regional planning, a more 'robust' offsets regime and better data on environmental impacts.
However, Watt acknowledged disagreements between industry and environmentalist in other areas, including the powers of the EPA and the issue of adding climate to nature laws.
The Greens and climate activists have long advocated for a 'climate trigger' – a mechanism to account for a project's pollution in environmental assessments – as a vehicle to stop new fossil fuel projects.
In 2005, Albanese himself – then a shadow minister fighting the Howard government – said 'the glaring gap in matters of national environmental significance is climate change'.
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The now prime minister has long since changed his tune, firmly rejecting the idea after the Greens pushed it during negotiations with Plibersek in the previous term.
The provisional approval of a 40-year extension to Woodside's North West Shelf gas plant has ignited fresh calls for 'climate considerations' to be added to the laws, including from the Labor MP, Jerome Laxale.
Watt didn't shut the door on the idea after Wednesday's meeting, saying it was 'too early to be committing to particular things in the legislation'.
However, he reiterated the government's view that emissions from major projects were already regulated under the safeguard mechanism.
Watt also argued that an export project's scope three emissions – pollution from Australian fossil fuels after they are sold overseas – was managed through other countries' commitments under the Paris climate agreement.
Speaking after the roundtable, McKenzie and the Australian Conservation Foundation chief executive, Kelly O'Shannessy, stressed they were not wedded to a specific 'climate trigger' model – just the firm view that climate impact must be considered in the environmental assessment process.
The Greens environment spokesperson, Sarah Hanson-Young, called for a moratorium on the clearing of critical habitat and approval of fossil fuel projects until the new nature laws were in place.
Miners staunchly oppose the introduction of a 'climate trigger', fearing such a provision could torpedo the approval of projects.
Peak mining groups the Minerals Council of Australia (MCA), Chamber of Minerals and Energy WA (CME) and Association of Mining and Exploration Companies (AMEC) were among the invitees to Wednesday's roundtable in Canberra.
The chief executive of AMEC, Warren Pearce, said a 'pretty frank' Watt was clearly intent on legislating changes in the first half of the new parliamentary term.
'There are still differing views, but there is a clear desire to get this done from all stakeholders,' he said.
'AMEC will continue to advocate for greater efficiency, a removal of duplication between State and Federal processes, and a workable process that can be implemented to provide improved environmental protections.'
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The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Labor eyes ambitious tax reform but it must be ready for vicious backlash from vested interests
There was a hint of frustration in Anthony Albanese's voice when he spoke to the Canberra press gallery for the first time after Labor's thumping election victory on 3 May. In the prime minister's courtyard at Parliament House, he was asked if he planned to use his soaring political capital for major reforms of the tax or superannuation systems. Badly needed, and often talked about in the abstract, this kind of action had waited for a long time for the necessary political ambition. Albanese said he wouldn't get ahead of himself in the opening weeks of his second term in power. He insisted Labor had already been bold, delivering on its promises in the first three years. Sign up for Guardian Australia's breaking news email Fast forward to Wednesday, while the PM was pressing the diplomatic flesh at the G7 summit in Canada, the treasurer, Jim Chalmers, showed the first signs of that reform ambition. In a speech to the National Press Club in Canberra, Chalmers signalled Labor was willing to consider changes to the tax system at the looming productivity summit in August, recognition that fixing longstanding problems was needed to right the budget's structural deficit. The speech was an implicit recognition that Labor's tax changes in the first term barely touched the edges of deeper structural problems in Australia's tax system. Chalmers, a student of economic reformer Paul Keating, said any progress on productivity or budget sustainability would be impossible without proper consideration of tax reform, a challenge he conceded would be 'hard and contested' with benefits that were not always immediate. Even someone with a passing interest in federal politics should know the scale of the problem is vast: some $1tn in government debt and soaring spending, held up by a system overly reliant on income tax from an ageing population – a problem that will only get worse due to the ageing population. For years Chalmers has been eager to point out the five main pressures on the budget are not going to get any easier without proper attention. Spending on health, aged care, the national disability insurance scheme, defence and interest from government debt will keep treasurers and finance ministers up at night for years to come. The government's revenue base is being eroded from declining fuel and tobacco excises, and in the long term will take a hit from lower tax receipts from fossil fuel extraction. The early stages of Labor's plans seem to include lower income taxes, but no changes to the 25-year-old GST. Chalmers is upfront, saying tax overall needs to rise. Whether it is indeed possible to meaningfully lower income taxes without broadening or raising the GST is unclear. Economists argue taxing consumption through mechanisms such as the GST is efficient, while taxing incomes isn't. Parliamentary Budget Office figures show the GST causes about 8 cents in economic loss for each dollar gained, compared with 24 cents for income tax or 40 cents for corporate tax. Two major pieces of work should be the starting point, acknowledging that any change which makes it into law will inevitably create some winners and some losers. Chalmers was working for then treasurer Wayne Swan when Ken Henry handed his landmark tax review to the Rudd government in late 2009. Both men marked up copies of the document over the course of the summer, leaving them to 'disgorge' sand from the beach by the time they made it back to Canberra. Many of the review's 138 recommendations never saw the light of day. Today, the former Treasury secretary says, the system is in even worse shape. Henry has called for wholesale reform, including increasing the GST to pay for company and personal income tax cuts, as well as comprehensive road user charging, replacing stamp duties, increasing taxes on super profits from the mining sector, an economy-wide price on carbon and changes to fringe benefits and superannuation taxes. Henry's review is best remembered for recommending the mining tax, an idea which prompted a furious campaign of resistance against the government. Chalmers has acknowledged the politics of the review were mishandled, that it was kept secret too long before ultimately crashing into Labor's leadership wars. Sign up to Breaking News Australia Get the most important news as it breaks after newsletter promotion The second substantive report with proposals ready to go is the white paper released by teal independent Allegra Spender in the last term of parliament. In a different political reality, Spender would be part of the Liberal party's economic team, and her significant work comes with buy-in from Henry and other leading tax voices including Robert Breunig from the Australian National University's Tax and Transfer Policy Institute, and Robert Carling from the Centre for Independent Studies. Chalmers assigned a staffer to monitor the white paper process, at a time when Spender was one of the few MPs actually prepared to talk about meaningful tax reform. The Wentworth MP wants the coming reform push to look at business investment and corporate taxes, the under-performing petroleum resource rent tax, road user charging, indexation of income brackets, unhelpful state taxes and the GST. Spender has more guts than either of the major parties in one specific area as well. She has called for a review of Western Australia's insanely generous GST deal, which respected economist Saul Eslake calls the worst public policy decision of the 21st century. WA's state Labor government handed down a budget with a $2.5bn surplus this week, but taxpayers from every other state are paying $54bn to the state due to perceived unfairness in the grants commission process. This special treatment agreed by then treasurer Scott Morrison and locked in by Anthony Albanese to maintain Labor's political stocks in the West will see the nation's richest state receive an extra $21.1bn from federal taxpayers over the next four years alone. Family trusts, the legal tax structures used by millions of Australians to lower their tax liabilities, also look likely to come under increased scrutiny as part of the latest reform push. Chalmers and Albanese will convene their productivity summit in the cabinet room on 19 August. If they want their record to be considered alongside the Hawke-Keating and Howard-Costello governments, the political conditions could hardly be better. Labor must prepare itself for the predictable backlash from vested interests unwilling to countenance changes to cushy arrangements and handy loopholes. Only a serious government prepared to expend political capital will be able to make the system fairer and fit for a 21st century country facing major demographic and economic challenges. If Labor really has the ambition Anthony Albanese insists it does, meaningful tax reform might become the make-or-break test of the government's second term.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Victoria's Liberals saved John Pesutto from bankruptcy. But can they save themselves from all-out war?
As his party room imploded last year, plagued by infighting and a looming defamation trial, John Pesutto placed a blank sheet of butcher's paper in front of his colleagues. In the dying days of his tenure as opposition leader, Pesutto asked MPs what should have been simple questions to answer: What are our values? What do we stand for? His attempt to unify a deeply divided party failed spectacularly. Almost a year later, there is no consensus answer to those questions. Factional grievances have intensified, with MPs now warning of 'all-out war' and outlining 'completely brutal' schemes to gain control of the party. A bitter rift between Pesutto and fellow Liberal Moira Deeming, who successfully sued him for defamation after he falsely implied she sympathised with neo-Nazis, has left the party room, its organisational wing and dwindling membership divided. Many senior Liberals are despondent. There have been, according to some, more than two years of 'shit fights', 'constant stupidity and self-harm' that have allowed 'an inept Labor government' to evade scrutiny, despite the best efforts of a few opposition MPs. Some hope the party's decision to loan Pesutto $1.5m so he can pay Deeming's legal fees, avoiding bankruptcy, may lead to a truce. But others suggest animosity runs deep and the party will struggle to heal while both remain in the party room. On Thursday night, members of the party's administrative committee handed over their phones to an official before voting in a secret ballot. Pesutto, who had only a matter of days to raise $2.3m, outlined a last-minute loan deal using his superannuation as security, repayable with a commercial interest rate. This was, for some on the committee, the first time they had been briefed on the proposal despite reading about it in the media for several weeks. When Deeming's lawyers filed a bankruptcy notice against Pesutto, the Victorian Liberal party president, Philip Davis, began to canvass the views of his colleagues. Those strongly opposed were kept in the dark until the secret ballot. 'My position is well known,' said one admin member contacted by Davis. 'No, no, no, no, how many times can I say no.' Sign up for Guardian Australia's breaking news email Several members of the committee were furious at the prospect of party money being spent on an internal dispute, rather than on campaigning to beat Labor. The proposal, first reported by Guardian Australia, was pushed by Pesutto's supporters as a way to avoid an expensive byelection in his seat of Hawthorn and to ensure, in their view, that moderate MPs were not pushed out of the party. Even before the meeting was called, Pesutto's supporters put pressure on the party leader, Brad Battin, to endorse the loan and give it momentum. 'We're already in a shit fight, but if Brad doesn't support a loan, it will lead to all-out war,' threatened one Liberal MP who declined to be named so they could speak freely. Another MP said Battin 'should not be the one to stand in the way of a deal that has support' from the party room and a majority of the committee. This did not go down well with some on the committee. 'All this media stuff is emotional blackmail,' said one committee member who declined to be named given the tense nature of discussions. When the deal was ultimately approved, Davis emailed party members to claim it would 'settle the matter once and for all' and allow the party to move on without further distraction. Battin, who endorsed the motion, said it would 'avoid further financial and reputational damage' and also declared the matter resolved, with the party now 'united, disciplined and determined' to focus on the future. Not everyone agrees. Before the meeting, Deeming said she was dismayed a loan deal was even being considered. She said it ran 'against the grain of everything we believe as Liberals' and claimed it would be a 'direct rebuke' of the federal court judgment. 'I assume that they will continue with their quest to try to annihilate me,' Deeming said in reference to some of her party room colleagues. Pesutto's supporters remain bitter the party only intervened at the final hour after relentless pressure to do, in their view, the right thing. Others won't forget that Deeming's legal team threatened to chase money from Pesutto's supporters should he not be able to pay. Correspondence named former Liberal premiers Jeff Kennett, Denis Napthine and Ted Baillieu, and Victorian MPs David Southwick and Georgie Crozier as people who may be held liable. 'How can those two MPs sit in the party room with someone who was willing to do that and trust her?' said one Liberal source. 'They will always be looking over their shoulder.' Deeming did not respond to that comment, but a source close to her denied any allegation that she was untrustworthy, dishonest or a bully. Her financial backer, the New South Wales property developer Hilton Grugeon, who is owed $2.3m, said he was not bothered by the damage this would have unleashed on the party. 'I supported [the Liberals] when they were unsupportable,' Grugeon said. 'But I cannot care what happens to a party that wants to look the other way while their leader beats up on a woman who did nothing wrong.' Sign up to Breaking News Australia Get the most important news as it breaks after newsletter promotion Shortly before lodging defamation proceedings against Pesutto, Deeming outlined a vision of the Liberal party that is antithetical to some of her colleagues. In late May, Deeming told the podcast Club Grubbery praised the rightwing South Australian senator Alex Antic's ability to control his state branch and said 'nobody can get rid of him'. 'We need to take back ownership of the party of the centre right,' Deeming said, before speaking to its rank-and-file. 'This is your party. You own it, it's yours. Do not cede this ground.' 'We've really got to get really mercenary about it,' said Deeming, who raised the prospect of working with Antic and Liberal senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price to recruit more like-minded members. 'We've got to get completely brutal.' But many moderates, including former federal vice-president Tom Harley, warn any push to become more conservative would make the party electorally irrelevant. Harley is scathing of the party's internal divisions, describing them as being in a state of 'constant stupidity and self-harm'. 'The Liberal party in Victoria is stuck talking to a small section of itself in the corner,' Harley said. 'We must focus on the issues that matter to people, not who goes to which lavatory.' Others, including the federal Liberal MP Jason Wood, believe factionalism is tearing the state party apart, rather than being a disagreement about values. 'Hopefully all this sorts itself and everyone takes a chill pill but, sadly, people are putting their factions first,' Wood said. Many Victorian Liberals deny they have factions equivalent to the rigid blocs that divide power in the Labor party. But they don't dispute that their party is bitterly divided. On Friday morning, Pesutto said he was 'grateful and humbled' by the party's decision to save him from bankruptcy and his colleagues would 'focus all our energy on winning the next state election'. But some didn't get the memo. Within hours of the deal being approved, one unnamed conservative MP told the Herald Sun that Battin's leadership was in question and 'the conservative block will want a 'please explain''. One senior Liberal operative not authorised to speak publicly believes the party's leadership team allowed the saga to remain unresolved for too long. They argue the damage will now be difficult to contain, despite a resolution being reached. 'If there had been good leadership of the party, the John and Moira saga might have been dealt with very differently and much quicker,' the source said. 'But no one stood up. They all thought, 'oh this will be fine, it will be buried'. But it wasn't buried. And that's how we've got to this stage.' On Thursday night, just hours after the loan was secured, some members of Deeming's branch urged each other to draw a line under the scandal and focus attention on Labor. 'Let's move on now,' said one member in a WhatsApp message leaked to Guardian Australia. 'We have got an election to win.' One of Deeming's closest allies, her husband, Andrew, replied saying, 'sadly it's not that easy to just move on'. 'Personally, my kids have nightmares because of this. Moira still gets abusive messages because of this. Politically, the party just reinforced all its negative stereotypes that they are anti-woman, that they are an old boys club,' Andrew Deeming said. 'How can we convince the public that the Liberal party cares about them when the Liberal party has given effective support to an MP who defamed his own colleague?' The text messages show Moira Deeming is bitterly disappointed by the organisational wing's conduct. 'They literally sent a bulk email to brag about earning interest off ruining my life and destroying my family,' she wrote. 'Disgusting.' Deeming confirmed she sent the message and told Guardian Australia it explained her motivation for uploading an image on social media that said: 'They financially profited off her trauma. They told the world they did her a favour. This is what institutional abuse looks like.' 'Clearly, it is undeniable that there are deep wounds,' Deeming said. 'There have been wrongs done. The things I needed were full exoneration and my loan repaid. I now have those two things.' Pesutto may have been saved from bankruptcy, but the Victorian Liberals' internal battles are far from over.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Inflexible autocrat, unchecked power – Coriolanus is ‘never not timely'. So why is this Shakespeare play so rarely staged?
When Bell Shakespeare artistic director Peter Evans was handed the keys to the company's new home at Pier 2/3 in Sydney's Walsh Bay, he knew precisely with which play he wanted to christen the space. With its generously proportioned stage, and unusually intimate 250-seat audience accommodation, Coriolanus – one of Shakespeare's most political, and least-performed, tragedies – was his top pick. It didn't happen. The national theatre company instead opted for Shakespeare's crowd pleasers – Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth – to introduce audiences to its new harbourside performance space, the Neilson Nutshell. But three years on, Evans has finally got his way as Bell Shakespeare tackles Coriolanus for the first time in almost three decades. In the new production, Shakespeare's bruising exploration of politics, power and civic identity plays out in front of an audience split into two sides; where you sit will determine whose side the cast assumes you are on, patrician or plebeian. Palestinian Australian actor and Logie winner Hazem Shammas plays Coriolanus, a decorated general whose rigid elitism and disdain for the common people make him both hero and heretic. Shammas played Macbeth for Bell Shakespeare two years ago and Evans finds the juxtaposition of the two roles compelling: while Macbeth charts the psychological collapse of an ambitious man, Coriolanus is all rigidity and resolve – a man with no time for soliloquies or self-doubt. His inflexible convictions on the right of Rome's elite to continue wielding unchecked power fly in the face of the fledgling republic's ambitions for democracy, an experiment dependant on compromise. Sign up for our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning Coriolanus cannot bend so he breaks, and in spectacular fashion; banished from Rome, the general switches sides and joins the enemy, his love for his city turned to vengeance in a binary act of political spite. The political thriller transforms into a revenge drama. 'Coriolanus is absolutely a character of conviction, and he has very clear and elitist views of the way Rome should work,' says Evans. 'And what makes him remarkable is how, to his own detriment, he steadfastly sticks to those convictions. 'I'm interested in how complicated that makes the audience feel when they're watching it – you disagree with him, but you can also see the appeal of his certainty.' With its precarious dance between autocracy and democracy, Evans resisted mapping the play, set in the fledgling democracy of the Roman Republic circa 490BCE, too neatly onto 'modern headlines'. And Coriolanus is, after all, the antithesis of a populist leader. Evans has staged the play in another distinctive time and place: post–cold war eastern Europe in the early 1990s, as it picks itself up from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain. 'There was this hope that [eastern Europe] would become this great liberal democracy,' he says. 'And then, of course, through the '90s we get the rise of the oligarchs, and end up in what is another autocracy and a very specific kind of a leader, led by an elite.' Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion Coriolanus remains one of Shakespeare's least performed plays; this is only the second time Bell Shakespeare has staged it since the company was established in 1990. 'Even though it has the most amazing domestic scenes – and Coriolanus's mother and wife are extraordinary characters – it's certainly more overtly political than many of the others,' Evans says. 'It shows us that while complete conviction can be compelling in a politician, if they are inflexible, then it will eventually lead to an autocratic rule.' Coriolanus may not have the marquee appeal of a Macbeth or Hamlet, but Evans contends that its relevance is perennially urgent. 'A play like this is never not timely. In the last five to 10 years, western democracy has come under question … and certainly, when I was growing up, that would have been unthinkable.' Coriolanus plays in Sydney's Neilson Nutshell until 20 July, then the Arts Centre Melbourne from 24 July to 10 August
