Environment as Quality of Life: The Whitlam Government 1972-1975

By Peter Burnett

Author’s Note: This is another in our series covering the environmental policies of past Australian Governments

Most Australians have heard of ‘the Dismissal’, but to actually remember it you’d have to be at least into your 50s. The government headed by Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was perhaps Australia’s most controversial, and certainly the only one to have be sacked by the Governor General.

This was a bold and sometimes reckless government, with a ‘crash through or crash’ reputation.

But it was also a visionary government. Even now, many Australians would know of Whitlam’s 1972 ‘It’s time’ election slogan and policy speech, though few would recall anyone else’s election policy speech, including those of our current leaders.

Whitlam and Environment

Environment had become a ‘thing’ by 1972, and Whitlam was all for it. However, the relevant parts of his policy speech were cast in terms of quality of life rather than environment per se. He did however make specific environmental commitments relating to urban tree-planting, national parks, water conservation and heritage.

Once Whitlam came to power, and consistent with his ‘crash through or crash’ reputation, he focused on passing legislation. His Government did not waste much time developing policy statements; they were a government of action.

To the extent that it articulated an environmental vision, it is best captured in the Governor-General’s Speech on the opening of the Parliament in 1973:

“[My Government] is, however, deeply conscious that economic growth and material well-being no longer reflect the whole aspirations and expectation of the Australian community, and that prosperity alone is no longer exactly equated with true progress. The Department of the Environment and Conservation proposes to develop a ‘human progress’ index to reflect the new and emerging human and social values in a modern society.

“In planning for this generation, my Government intends to protect the rights and national inheritance of future generations of Australians. The Government will institute a program requiring environment impact statements for all major projects involving national funds and national constitutional powers.

From vision to action

This sense of an enduring quality of life, which echoed campaign policy speeches, flowed through to three of the four laws that constitute the bulk of the environmental record of the Whitlam Government. (The promised human progress index never saw the light of day.)

The Environment Protection (Impact of Proposals) Act 1974 (EPIP Act) delivered on the commitment in the Governor General’s speech to require environmental impact statements.

The National Parks and Wildlife Conservation Act 1975 provided for the establishment of federal parks and reserves, while the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Act 1975 established the GBR Marine Park and the GBR Marine Park Authority to look after it.

From the 1960s, the Queensland Government had advocated oil drilling on the Great Barrier Reef – the world’s largest structure made of living organisms, and one of the most complex known ecosystems. The Wallace Royal Commission into drilling on the Reef, called by the Gorton Government in 1970, reported in 1974 but Whitlam immediately announced an intention to pass what became the Marine Park Act, to protect the reef from oil drilling.

The Australian Heritage Commission Act 1975 which established the Australian Heritage Commission and the Register of the National Estate, which would eventually list more 13,000 natural, Indigenous and historic places around the country.

While the EPIP Act was directed to the utilitarian purpose of improved environmental decision making, the remaining three laws concerned either the protection of natural places of significance to the nation and the conservation of its heritage. As Minister for Urban and Regional Development Tom Uren put it when introducing the Heritage Commission Act, the Government’s philosophy was to “beat the bulldozer mentality”.

The Whitlam government also made an early federal foray into water policy. In a ministerial statement entitled A National Approach to Water Resources Management, environment minister Moss Cass articulated the need for an integrated and planning-based approach to water resource management, applying social as well as economic objectives and the polluter-pays principle, supported by an extensive program of data-gathering and analysis.

Mainstream to the modern eye

All of this seems fairly mainstream stuff now, but it was radical at the time.

EIA was still cutting edge, having made its first appearance only five years before in the US National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA). And heritage had only recently entered the popular consciousness with the imposition of ‘Green Bans’, by the radical Builders’ Labourers’ Federation, on demolition sites in The Rocks and other inner-Sydney locations in the early 1970s.

All of these laws took the Federal Government into the States’ backyards, not only Constitutionally but literally. And, as anyone who’s watched our State governments over time would expect, the States opposed such intrusions vigorously. The Feds, after all, were tromping all over traditional State responsibilities.

And yet, the statements about water resource management would not raise a policy eyebrow these days.

We’ve come such a long way since then … or have we?

Image: Whitlam’s Ministry in 1974. (National Archives of Australia, the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license)

From the promise of technology to the ‘tragedy of the commons’

Why ‘technology, not taxes’ is such a bad idea

By David Salt

Rarely has it been stated so clearly, so explicitly: ‘Technology, not taxes’ will be the pathway to a sustainable and prosperous future.

What I’m talking about, if it’s not apparent, is the Australian Government’s response to climate change. Our national government is playing the same game it has played for years: refusing to commit to real and significant action on reducing our country’s carbon emissions by claiming it’ll cost our country too much and that technology will solve the problem in the years ahead.

It’s a morally bankrupt and false argument on so many levels, not the least of which is that it fails to acknowledge the cost we’re increasingly paying by doing nothing – think dying coral reefs, continental-scale wild-fires and – this week’s disaster – historically huge flooding*.

Buried at the heart of the ‘technology, not taxes’ mantra, however, is a political truth: big change is hard to sell and voters would rather go for the option that doesn’t require personal sacrifice. And technology is just the trick to enable the government to sell the lie that we can ‘have our cake and eat it’ – in other words, we can keep growing our carbon emitting activities without concern because science will develop a pill to deal with those pesky environmental climate problems.

From the tragedy of the commons

About a year ago I wrote a blog on the Government hiding behind techno-tricks to convince us the Great Barrier Reef was being saved when in actual fact it was being left to rot. I quoted an eminent ecologist named Garrett Hardin, author of the famous essay ‘The tragedy of the Commons’. Given the ‘Technology, not taxes’ approach adopted by the Government it’s worth repeating that quote here.

Hardin observed: “An implicit and almost universal assumption of discussions published in professional and semi popular scientific journals is that the problem under discussion has a technical solution. A technical solution may be defined as one that requires a change only in the techniques of the natural sciences, demanding little or nothing in the way of change in human values or ideas of morality.”

What he was alluding to was that population growth and resource degradation are deep seated problems connected to human values and ideas of what we think is right and wrong. Technical solutions (coming out of scientific journals) are handy when it comes to solving the emerging issues associated with our rampant economic growth but they don’t address the underlying driver. And, conveniently for politicians selling technological fixes, they don’t challenge our values or appetite to consume.

Hardin’s observation was made back in 1968. It was both perspicacious and bold for this was a time in which humans were literally reaching for the Moon, and many really believed that science and technology could move worlds. The environment movement hadn’t really taken off and ‘climate change’ wasn’t even a thing (though even then atmospheric scientists were well aware that levels of carbon dioxide were steadily on the increase).

However, even back then, a growing number of scientists were noting our rates of economic growth were simply unsustainable while broader society was increasingly concerned about dying rivers, toxic pollution and disappearing wildlife. These fears would crystallise in the coming decades but be largely discounted and ignored by our political elites. And one common trick they have used to discount these fears has been to claim technology will provide the solution.

False promise

Fifty years on and our understanding is much improved on the scale and nature of the environmental degradation we have set in train. Earlier forecasts of killer weather, wide spread wildfires and mass coral death have proved to be well founded. Climate change is real, present and already costing us billions of dollars. And our best science is telling us this is only the beginning.

Given this understanding, and being honest about what we are actually experiencing, it seems simply incredible our government is choosing to deny the importance of this issue. We need to act as a society and our actions need to be fundamental and across all sectors. To achieve this we need strong leadership.

Instead, we have a government who has distilled their response to climate down into a simple and glib three word slogan – ‘technology, not taxes’. It’s a promise that the broader electorate doesn’t have to worry about climate change, that no-one has to change anything about the way they live, and that somewhere down the line science will yield a solution to one of humanity’s biggest and most complex challenges.

But this is a false and disingenuous promise of the worst kind. It’s a thin tissue of obfuscation, lies and smoke designed to kick the can down the road rather than acknowledge that deep and fundamental change needs to happen. It is the antithesis of leadership and, if we simply accept it, we are leaving an existential problem for our children to deal with; and they won’t be thanking us for it.

Image by Iván Tamás from Pixabay

*What’s the connection between climate change with the floods Australia is enduring at the moment (impacting on around 10 million Australians in every mainland state and territory)?
Consider this statement from The Climate Council:
‘FLOOD DISASTERS, such as those currently unfolding in New South Wales and parts of Southern Queensland, are made more likely by climate change, say experts from the Climate Council.

“The intense rainfall and floods that have devastated NSW communities are taking place in an atmosphere made warmer and wetter by climate change, which is driven by the burning of coal, oil, and gas,” said Climate Council spokesperson Professor Will Steffen.

“For many communities dealing with floods right now, this is the latest in a line of climate change-exacerbated extreme weather events they have faced, including drought, the Black Summer bushfires, and scorching heatwaves,” he added.

Global temperatures have risen 1.1°C since pre-industrial levels, and this has led to a 7 percent increase in water vapour in the atmosphere—increasing the likelihood of extreme downpours.

“Climate change is harming the health, safety, and livelihoods of Australians, racking up billions of dollars in economic losses, and damaging many of our unique ecosystems. It’s time for all levels of government and businesses to step up their climate action efforts to protect people, our environment and the economy,” said Professor Steffen.

“We must take decisive action this decade to bring climate change under control. Australia must get to net zero emissions well before 2040, and accelerate efforts to shift away from coal and gas to a fully renewables-powered economy,” he said.

‘Standards’ in name only?

The government’s National Environmental Standards don’t do what you might expect

By Peter Burnett

Last month the federal government introduced the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Amendment (Standards and Assurance) Bill 2021 (the Standards and Assurance Bill).

The Standards and Assurance Bill is a follow-on to an earlier bill (the Streamlining Bill), which I’ve written about before (see Red Lines for Green Values).

The Streamlining Bill would amend the EPBC Act to ‘streamline’ environmental decision-making by enabling development approvals, following environmental impact assessment, to be devolved to states and territories. This idea used to be called the ‘one-stop shop’ approach but the government now calls it ‘single-touch approvals’.

The Standards and Assurance Bill provides for National Environmental Standards; it also establishes an independent statutory position of Environment Assurance Commissioner, tasked mainly with monitoring and auditing decision-making by states under devolved arrangements.

The standards should set hard environmental bottom lines, but if this bill goes through, they won’t. More on this in a minute, but first a little context.

Where are we going with this?

The government presents both bills as first steps in responding to the comprehensive reforms recommended by Professor Graham Samuel in his 2020 Independent Review of the EPBC Act.

While it is true that Professor Samuel envisaged the devolution of development approvals to the states as part of his reform package, it is quite a stretch to argue that these two bills are the first steps of a comprehensive reform process, for several reasons.

The most significant reason is that the government has not tabled a response to the Samuel Review and so we have no idea what the government’s environmental reform agenda is, if indeed it has one.

If these two bills are the first steps, then they are steps towards a secret, perhaps even unknown, destination. All we know about the government’s intentions is that its policy narrative on environmental reform has rarely strayed beyond its ‘cutting-green-tape’ mantra of regulatory efficiency.

Stuck in the Senate

But back to the two bills. The Streamlining Bill got stuck in the Senate after three crucial cross-benchers opposed it, not because they were fundamentally opposed to devolution, but because they wanted to be satisfied that devolved approvals would be made properly.

At that point, in November 2020, the government had tabled neither the Samuel Review, nor the template for bilateral agreements setting out accreditation arrangements. In other words, it was asking the Parliament to take it on trust (see Trust us? Well let’s look at your record.)

The government then introduced the Standards and Assurance Bill in February 2021. Environment minister Sussan Ley presented the Bill as a step in the reform process but, in the absence of a broader vision from the government, it’s hard not to see the Bill as an attempt to get the Streamlining Bill over the line by responding to cross bench concerns.

At first blush, the Standards and Assurance Bill does advance two key recommendations from Professor Samuel.

The problem is, that’s all it does. It’s very concerning that the government is resorting to a piecemeal approach to legislative reform.

With yet more horrific environmental news emerging in recent weeks (see ‘Existential threat to our survival’: see the 19 Australian ecosystems already collapsing), the government’s approach is mystifying: they just don’t seem to get how urgent the need for action is, or don’t want to.

When is a standard not a standard?

As to the Standards and Assurance Bill itself, it’s the provisions on the standards that worry me.

In fact, I don’t think the ‘standards’ are standards at all. If standards for decisions are set by law, you’d be forgiven for expecting that an environmental approval that failed to meet the standards would automatically be invalid and that an interested party could get a court decision to that effect.

Not so with these standards. Here, compliance with standards will be a subjective question for the decision-maker. And the question will not be about compliance, but inconsistency. In other words, the question for the federal environment minister, or an accredited state decision-maker, won’t be ‘have I complied with the standard?’ but ‘in my opinion, is this decision not inconsistent with the standards?’

Because the question of inconsistency is made a matter of opinion, the courts will tend to uphold any decision based on that opinion, provided there is a rationality of some sort to it, because the courts are extremely reluctant to substitute their opinion for that of a statutory decision-maker.

This is particularly the case when one reads on in the bill and discovers that, in forming her or his opinion about inconsistency, the decision-maker can have regard to federal or state policy, plans, programs or spending decisions, indeed anything that might conceivably be relevant.

Lowering the bar

This opens up a giant back door to ‘trade-off’ decisions, the very antithesis of meeting standards.

The explanatory memorandum tabled by the government gives the example of a decision-maker approving impacts on the values of a National Heritage place if those impacts are ‘balanced by mechanisms that promote those values (which may, for example, be delivered through funding of activities by a state relating to the promotion of those values)’.

I have my own examples, hypothetical of course.

The federal environment minister might decide that a decision to demolish part of the Australian War Memorial (a National Heritage place) is ‘balanced’ by a government decision to spend a lot of money on building a new exhibition hall. Thus a standard that says the fabric of heritage buildings should be conserved could be met by demolishing some of that fabric!

Or a state minister might decide that the loss of a population of a critically endangered species is ‘balanced’ by an investment in research on the species, even if the standard says that all populations of critically endangered species should be maintained.

Note that these ‘balancing’ decisions would not required to comply with federal offsets policy, even though they are offsets by another name. So the bill opens a possible reduction in standards.

And just in case a nervous state decision-maker thought they couldn’t come up with a ‘balancing’ state policy, plan, program or spending decision (hardly likely), they can apply to the federal minister for an exemption in the ‘public interest’! Perhaps states will resort to this if they want to approve a controversial development and shift the environmental blame to Canberra!

But wait, there’s more

As if this wasn’t enough, the minister said in her second reading speech that the initial set of standards would reflect the existing EPBC Act, ie she will ignore the standards recommended by Professor Samuel, even though she’s had them since 30 October last year. The problem with the existing standards is that they are all either process driven, or so broad that only the most extreme decision would contravene them.

Moreover, once the states are accredited under existing standards, they, and development interests, can be expected to push back hard against any proposals to tighten the standards, probably relying on arguments about moving the goal posts and costing jobs.

Standards in name only

It all boils down to this: if the Standards and Assurance Bill is passed, the standards we will get will be standards in name only. They won’t be a step forward, but backwards.

Cross-benchers looking to be satisfied that devolved approvals would protect the environment are surely facing disappointment.

Postscript: The Senate Environment and Communications Committee is conducting an Inquiry into the Standards and Assurance Bill. Submissions are due by 25 March. See: https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Environment_and_Communications/Protectionandbiocon

Image by Alain Audet from Pixabay

How good is Australia?!!

How deep have we stuck our head in the sand when it comes to the environment?

By David Salt

On May 19 2019 the Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison, tweeted his now trademark catchcry following his ‘miracle’ election victory: “How good is Australia! How good are Australians!” (noting he was making a statement, not asking a question).

It’s now a standard part of his language of spin (how good is this, how good is that…) and it’s also much parodied. But in parodying ‘Scotty from Marketing’ I fear we often trivialise some of the damage his government is presiding over.

The opposition claims Australia is going backwards when it comes to productivity, equity, corruption, debt and trust; and have put forward numbers suggesting Australia is slipping back when compared with other nations.

However, for my money, the true problem with Australia’s performance is what we’re allowing to happen to the environment. We’re witnessing collapse after environmental collapse and our response it to talk up small victories (like our fight against plastic pollution) while ignoring the big picture. Our PM would have has pat ourselves on the back rather than focus on our withering natural heritage. We refuse to accept any form of responsible stewardship for our own environment while also shirking international effort to do better.

How good is Australia? How good are Australians? Consider these recent reports.

Australia the only developed nation on world list of deforestation hotspots
Australia remains one of the world’s hotspots for deforestation according to a new report by WWF, which finds an area six times the size of Tasmania has been cleared globally since 2004. The analysis identifies 24 “deforestation fronts” worldwide where a total of 43 million hectares of forest was destroyed in the period from 2004 until 2017.

Urgent action needed to save 19 ‘collapsing’ Australian ecosystemsA ‘confronting and sobering’ report details degradation of coral reefs, outback deserts, tropical savanna, Murray-Darling waterways, mangroves and forests.

Great Barrier Reef found to be in failing health as world heritage review loomsA government report card has found the marine environment along the Great Barrier Reef’s coastline remains in poor health, prompting conservationists to call for urgent action ahead of a world heritage committee meeting this year.

Implications of the 2019–2020 megafires for the conservation of Australian vegetation
More than 150 species of native vascular plants are estimated to have experienced fire across 90% or more of their ranges. More than three quarters of rainforest communities were burnt in parts of New South Wales. These contain many ancient Gondwanan plant lineages that are now only found in small, fragmented ranges.

The 2020 Threatened Species Index
Australia’s new Threatened Species Index (TSX) for birds, mammals and plants was released in December last year. According to the data released in the 2020 TSX, threatened plants have declined by 72% between 1995 and 2017 on average across all sites. At sites where conservation management actions were taken this decline is less pronounced, with a 60% average decline over the same time period. At sites with no known management, the average decline was 80%.

Australia confirms extinction of 13 more species, including first reptile since colonisationThis latest update cements Australia’s reputation as the mammal extinction capital of the world with 34 extinct mammal species. The next nearest nation is Haiti with 9 extinct mammal species.

These are all recent reports and they are all saying the same thing. Our environment is in severe decline.

How good is Australia? Well, in one respect we are world leaders. As Suzanne Milthorpe from the Wilderness Society puts it (following on from the announcement that 13 more species are now confirmed as extinct): “It’s official; 34 mammal species have been lost from Australia and as these species are found nowhere else, we’ve also lost them from the planet and from all of time. There’s not another country, rich or poor, that has anything like this record.”

Unaccountable, opaque and disingenuous

If that wasn’t bad enough, our national government is telling the world we’re doing a great job when it comes to reducing carbon emissions (something I discussed a year ago in Five lies that stain a nation’s soul) and we’re the world’s best coral reef managers (again, something the evidence categorically refutes, see ‘Best managed reef in the world’ down the drain).

The world is struggling with global change and climate disruption. In Australia, we’re doing our best to ignore what’s happening in our own backyard while denying we have any culpability.

To add injury to insult, our national government is attempting to shirk its responsibility to protect our national heritage by disabling key powers in our national environmental law (the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, EPBC Act); reducing accountability by cutting funds to the Auditor General; and reducing transparency by abusing Freedom of Information (FOI) provisions surrounding environmental decisions.

Just yesterday the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) filed a case at the Administrative Appeals Tribunal challenging Environment Minister Sussan Ley’s refusal to release documents requested under Freedom of Information laws about 15 ‘fast tracked’ environmental approvals. ACF’s case will challenge the Government’s use of ‘national cabinet’ exemptions to avoid FOI disclosures.

How good is Australia? How good are Australians? Given our sad record of environmental decline and wretched environmental stewardship, our repeated and growing failure to protect those natural values we told ourselves and the world we would look after, these questions/assertions border on the obscene; and yet they constantly go unchallenged.

Australia is doing an awful job of looking after its environmental heritage for today’s generation and generations to come. It’s time we stopped burying our head in the sand, for that is exactly what we are doing when we allow our national leaders to discount our common future. Consider Australia’s Deputy Prime Minister’s recent declaration (reported in The Guardian): “We are not worried, or I’m certainly not worried, about what might happen in 30 years’ time.”

How good is Australia?

Image: Image by smadalsl from Pixabay

A toe in the water: Australia gets its first Federal environment minister (1971) and the world comes together in Stockholm (1972)

How do you deal with this thing called ‘the Environment’?

By Peter Burnett

Author’s Note: This is the second in an occasional series reflecting on the history of Australian environmental policy.

Nineteen Sixty Nine was a year of great environmental concern in the West. These concerns had been growing for some time, and were coming to a head. In America, there was a huge oil spill from a drilling platform off Santa Barbara, California, while in Ohio the heavily polluted Cuyahoga River, which flows into Lake Erie, caught fire!

Nineteen Sixty Nine was also the year in which the Gorton Coalition Government was elected in Australia. (If you’ve seen David Williamson’s play Don’s Party, it’s that election.)

In 1970 Gorton called a half-senate election — ie, a general election, but only for half of the members of the Senate. We’ve only had four of these, of which 1970 was the last, so they are something of a Constitutional curiosity. But I digress.

One of Gorton’s policy commitments in the half-Senate campaign was to establish an Office of the Environment within the Prime Minister’s Department. In his campaign opening Gorton acknowledged ‘mounting, and justified, concern’ about the risks of pollution which ‘represent[ed] a failure to take fully into account the environmental consequences of our actions …’

The first Minister for the Environment

Gorton fulfilled his commitment and set up an Office of the Environment in the Prime Minister’s Department. However, he was soon replaced as Prime Minister by William (Bill) McMahon. McMahon made environment a portfolio and appointed Peter Howson as the first federal environment minister in May 1971.

There was a big international environment meeting scheduled for 1972. In fact, the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, to be held at Stockholm, was the first of what would become regular decadal international meetings between governments on the environment.

In the lead up to the Stockholm Conference, Howson made a Ministerial Statement to Parliament under the bland title ‘Australian Environment: Commonwealth Policy and Achievements’. The statement was pretty much intended to put a political toe in the water.

The key factor stressed in the statement was that the Commonwealth saw itself as having limited powers in an area. It saw the environment as being primarily a State responsibility. This was certainly true historically and the Commonwealth would not test its constitutional powers on the environment until the Tasmanian Dam case, a decade later.

Howson’s Ministerial Statement told of the recent establishment of a council of federal and state environment ministers, the Australian Environment Council, and announced a new requirement for “impact statements” to inform Cabinet decisions with environmental implications.

This was the first Australian requirement for environmental impact assessment. The idea was copied from the United States National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA) although, unlike in the USA, there was no legislative backing.

Environmental principles

The Statement was also significant in its early domestic articulation of a number major principles of environmental policy. Two of the most important were the ‘polluter pays’ principle and the principle of harmonising international environmental standards to avoid trade distortions.

Both principles came from the OECD, which had recently moved into environmental issues, establishing a high level Environment Policy Committee, known as ‘EPOC’, in 1971. EPOC still exists today.

Although both the ‘polluter pays’ and ‘harmonised standards’ principles were really just applications of mainstream economics, their articulation as environmental policy broke significant new ground.

Despite regarding environment as mostly a State matter, Howson’s statement recognised that environmental concerns were a national problem requiring Commonwealth leadership, including public advocacy where necessary. This would obviously apply in international affairs but could also apply domestically because environmental problems were not confined to State boundaries.

The statement also recognised that environmental issues are not just a set of problems with common themes, but manifestations of an overarching challenge:

"So far as the Commonwealth is concerned the question is one of devising a pattern of national development in which environmental objectives go hand in hand with economic, social and cultural goals. Our philosophy is directed to this end—to devising and developing such a pattern in co-operation with the States, with local government, with business and industry and the community as a whole." [Emphasis added]

Indeed,

"The threat to man's environment is world-wide. It makes no distinctions. There is much to be gained, therefore, by Australia sharing its problems and the search for solutions with others."

And as a result:

"We are prepared to use all the international machinery at our disposal to achieve the sort of co-operation required for global action and to protect our own interests in problems with environmental implications."

On paper at least, Australia was recognising environment as an issue at all scales from local to global, and was reaching for some sort of overarching goal that would integrate environmental and other objectives – in other words, some form of sustainability.

This anticipated the soon-to-be-made Stockholm Declaration but doesn’t mean that the Australian government was prescient — the Government would have had fore-knowledge of the likely content of the Declaration through the circulation of official drafts.

The first major international environment meeting

In his later statement to the Stockholm Conference, Howson emphasised the need for better decision-making, firstly in terms of the need for environmental data to measure the full impact of human actions on the environment, and secondly in terms of improving the way in which economics addresses environmental issues, ‘though a spurious mathematical precision has to be avoided’.

As it turned out, excessive precision has never been the problem with environmental decision-making! Quite the opposite in fact: environmental decisions plagued by a lack of basic information, underdone policy guidance and in many cases a high degree of opacity.

Of course, Australia was not a major player at Stockholm and when we look at the Conference more broadly, the big story is that developing countries of the global South quickly forced a dramatic broadening of the original pollution-based agenda of rich Western countries, which, confusingly, also form the bulk of the global North.

Most members of the South were prepared to talk about fixing pollution, essentially a side-effect of the ever-increasing rate at which the North was consuming the Earth’s resources, as long as this didn’t constrain their right to a fair share of Earth’s resources. India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s intervention was pivotal. Her statement that ‘poverty is the worst form of pollution’ must rank as one of the most powerful short sentences ever spoken in diplomacy.

More like a foot than a toe

Back home, it seems that the significance of Stockholm didn’t sink in at the time. Records in the National Archives show that officials briefed the government that ‘in substance, the Stockholm Declaration is a miscellany of injunctions to which individual objection would be difficult to carry in a Stockholm forum. The whole is not greater than the sum of the parts …’

With the benefit of hindsight, the officials were wrong. The whole was greater than the sum of the parts. The pattern of North-South relations and the institutions spawned by the Stockholm Conference, especially UNEP (the United Nations Environment Program), still very much influence international environmental policy today.

The same is true of Howsen’s Ministerial Statement. Reflecting on it in his autobiography, Howson said that the Statement was more significant than he thought at the time, and I think he was right. Rather than a toe in the water, it was more like a foot (no pun intended).

Yet, these days, Howson and the Stockholm Declaration are largely forgotten. Such are the vicissitudes of history.

Fast forward fifty years to today and it seems that while the players have changed, too much of the script remains the same!

Image: The United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE) meets at Folkets Hus, Stockholm, in 1972. This became known as the Stockholm Conference, and was the first time governments met globally to talk about ‘the environment’. (Image by Yutaka Nagata, UN).