Category: law

The fifth and final transformation: Restoring trust in decision-making

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By Peter Burnett

This is the last of my series of blogs arguing there are five transformations implicit in Professor Graeme Samuel’s review of national environmental law,* to which the Albanese government will respond in early December.

The first four transformations were to:

The fifth and final transformation is to restore trust in environmental decision-making.

Trust makes the world go round

It’s true, trust makes the world go round.

Democracies in particular depend upon it. Just look at the polarisation, indeed tribalisation, that has occurred in the United States, culminating in the insurrection at the Capitol building in Washington on 6 January 2021.

Trust in government has declined in Australia as well. According to the respected Scanlan Research Institute, trust in the federal government (measured as people saying that they trusted the government at least most of the time) reached a low of 27% in 2013.

This recovered dramatically with the pandemic — trust in the federal government had more than doubled by 2020, to 55% — but it started to drop back again last year (48%). Even if trust were to stabilise around 50%, which seems unlikely, that’s not a great result.

There is no trust in our nation’s most important environmental law

Against that backdrop, it is not surprising that one of the main findings of the Samuel Review of the EPBC Act was that it was not trusted, either by business, who are regulated by the Act, nor by the wider community, who rely on it to protect the environment.

Business views the EPBC Act as cumbersome, involving duplication between federal and state systems; slow decision-making; and as facilitating legal challenges intended to delay projects and drive up costs for business (sometimes called ‘lawfare’).

Businesses are concerned in particular by long delays — for business, time is money.

A major project, such as a mine, can take nearly 3 years to assess and approve. For a business, this is far too long. Most people would acknowledge this.

The community on the other hand, are frustrated by the Act, viewing their participation as limited and process-oriented.

Often, people cannot see how the various environmental, economic and social considerations are weighed by the environment minister and are left with a general perception that outcomes are unclear, if not unsatisfactory. Compliance and enforcement are seen (rightly) as weak and environmental monitoring ineffective (also, clearly correct).

According to Professor Samuel, environmental groups often bring legal challenges because of these frustrations. They have the sense that decisions are out of step with community values, but do not have sufficient ready access to information to know exactly why.

Samuel’s recipe for restoring trust

Happily, Samuel had a recipe for restoring trust in the EPBC Act (or its successor).

His most important recommendation supporting trust is the fundamental shift from process-based decision-making to outcome-based decisions, applying the new national environmental standards (which I discussed as the first transformation). Standards would be supported by regional plans and stronger institutions, including information systems and compliance regimes.

If we had a set of environmental standards spelling out just what we need to protect and conserve, and knew that the environment minister was a) required by law to take decisions reflecting these standards and b) properly supported in taking those decisions by well-designed and well-funded systems, we could all sleep more easily.

But it’s not just the results that matter, but how we get there as well.

Professor Samuel’s other recommendations for restoring trust relate to efficiency, transparency and accountability in decision-making processes. He proposed:

  • Giving the community much more access to information, including Plain English guidance; opportunities to participate; access to information being considered; and routinely-given reasons for decisions.
  • A new and more influential set of statutory advisory committees, including an new and overarching Ecologically Sustainable Development (ESD) Committee to provide transparent policy advice to the minister on overall progress towards the outcomes set out in the standards
  • Adding ‘limited merits review’ (explained below) of development approvals to the existing broad standing of community groups to seek ‘judicial review’ in the courts (also explained below).

Judicial review, which is currently available for EPBC decisions, is the right to ask a court to overturn a decision, but only on the legalities — eg, that the minister failed to follow due process by not consulting everyone affected — and not on the merits, which concern the pros and cons of the final decision itself.

Merits review, often sought through a tribunal rather than a court, but not currently available for the most significant EPBC decisions, would get down to the pros and cons of the decision. Samuel’s ‘limits’ to this kind of review include confining merits review to decisions that have material environmental impacts and good prospects of success.

This is designed minimise review of minor decisions, or those that lack merit and promote delay.

For constitutional reasons Samuel could not simply recommend that the Parliament block all delaying actions by prohibiting access to the courts.

Will the cooks follow the recipe?

You have no doubt guessed from my description of Professor Samuel’s recommendations as involving ‘five transformations’ that I think his approach is ground-breaking.

As he himself hinted, the switch to a standards-based decision-making alone is transformative.

In this context, his further recommendations for increased transparency and accountability are icing on the reform cake. That’s not to say they are not important or long overdue.

But will the government go down this track? We’ll know very soon.

I think they will go for the general approach. However, the devil will be in the detail, especially in the detail of the standards.

The Morrison government pretended to start down the Samuel track by proposing an initial set of draft standards that simply repeated various process-based requirements from the existing EPBC Act. These ‘standards’ added nothing to existing rules and so would not have changed decisions. It was an attempt to pull the wool over our eyes.

If the standards-based approach is to work, it is essential that they spell out, in unqualified detail, exactly how much of the ‘matters of national environmental significance’ we must protect and conserve, if we are to maintain quality of life for ourselves and for future generations.

This will not be easy to do — hopefully our ecologists are up for the job!

We’ll also need some good lawyers — it is essential that the standards contain no ‘weasel words’, as Professor Samuel likes to say.

At the end of the day, people will only trust environmental laws that truly protect and conserve the environment. Transparency and accountability are important, but cannot carry the day by themselves.

Banner image: Trust makes the world go round. If the government wants trust restored in its national environmental law it’ll need to ensure it is efficient, transparent, accountable, but most importantly, that it delivers real outcomes. (Image by Tahlia Stanton from Pixabay)

Getting results: the first transformation of our national environmental law starts with ‘standards’

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By Peter Burnett

‘All that’s gold does not glitter’.

So opens the poem that Bilbo Baggins, a Hobbit, wrote to his cousin Frodo, the hero of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

In my last blog I argued that, underlying the definitely non-glittering recommendations of the Samuel Review of Australia’s main national environmental law, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act, lay policy gold, a call for five major transformations in law and policy.

The first of these was to shift from a regulatory regime that was prescriptive and focussed on processes, to one built around the setting and pursuing of national environmental outcomes.

In doing so we would get away from our current ‘box-ticking’ approach to regulation, under which decision-makers (typically the environment minister) consider various factors such as biodiversity loss and the precautionary principle but, at the end of the day, decide pretty much anything they want to.

The main driver of this shift in Professor Samuel’s recommended reforms is the creation of statutory ‘national environmental standards.’

Standards both old and new

We are already used to environmental standards in dealing with certain issues. We have, for example, had standards for ambient air quality and contaminated site remediation for decades.

But we have gone down a different track with nature conservation. Early battles focused on saving precious places from development and indeed the environment movement in Australia was built on some of these, such as the (unsuccessful) fight to save Lake Pedder in the 1970s and the (successful) fight to save the Franklin River in the 1980s.

These were more battles of the heart than the head.

Things shifted in the 1990s. Under the banner of ‘sustainable development’, or, in Australia, ‘Ecologically Sustainable Development’ (ESD), we became more focused on conserving entire landscapes and ecosystems.

But we struggled to pin down exactly what we were trying to achieve. Unable to answer the question, ‘how much environment is enough?’, something we could have worked out if we had done enough science and environmental monitoring, we defaulted to a legalistic approach in which we asked decision-makers to ‘consider’ or ‘have regard to’ certain principles such as precaution or intergenerational equity.

The trouble with such principles is that they are too general to serve as standards and instead become ‘mandatory considerations’ in discretionary decision-making (ie, boxes to be ticked).

The only real limit on this discretion-based decision-making is the ability of the courts to strike down a truly egregious decision on grounds of ‘irrationally’.

The first transformation

Discretionary, bottom-up decision-making is no way to achieve a consistent and ecologically sustainable outcome. Professor Samuel therefore recommended flipping the system on its head: spell out what an ecologically sustainable environment looks like, partly through National Environmental Standards and partly through a comprehensive environmental planning regime, and then require that individual development decisions comply with these standards and plans.

Although transformative, this change seems straight-forward enough; why haven’t we been doing this all along?

One reason is ‘path dependency’. Because many conservation problems first emerged as place-based or issue-specific concerns, we started dealing with them on a reactive, case-by-case basis. This is how our system deals with most issues, environmental or otherwise. As such it was as comfortable as a pair of old slippers — and in we slipped.

Another reason is that we haven’t had the comprehensive environmental information or the deep ecological understanding we needed to draw a line between harm that ecosystems can absorb without losing their identity (resilience), and harm that they cannot absorb. We still can’t do that precisely, although technology and good science have brought us a long way.

More significantly, it is only now that most members of the political class, and indeed a majority in society, are coming to understand and accept that if we don’t act soon, it may be too late.

What would these standards look like?

If standards are central to halting environmental decline, what would they look like? Well, the devil is in the detail, but Professor Samuel included some draft standards in his report, so I’ll use elements of the threatened species standard to give you a brief taste.

In part, this draft standard just repeats some existing formulae, for example that approved developments should not be ‘inconsistent with’ relevant recovery plans.

On the other hand, it also introduces new requirements. One of these is that decisions must take cumulative impacts into account. Another is that decisions must avoid adverse impacts to critical habitat and ensure ‘no net reduction’ of critical habitat.

Note the use of the word ‘net’, which implies that environmental offsets could be used.

So, would they work?

My general view is that Samuel’s draft standards would deliver significant marginal gains, but are not worded tightly enough to halt further major environmental decline.

Just looking at the examples above, I think the following changes (and complementary measures) are needed to make the standard strong enough to halt decline:

  • it is not enough that developments ‘not be inconsistent with’ recovery plans — they need to comply with plans; moreover, the plans themselves must spell things out with much greater precision than existing plans, eg by mapping critical habitat to be protected
  • taking cumulative impacts into account is a significant advance, but doing so requires a major national exercise in gathering and maintaining environmental data over time
  • if a species is to recover, decision-makers must not approve impacts to critical habitat, rather than simply ‘avoiding’ them
  • further, if there is to be ‘no net reduction’ in critical habitat, then offset rules would have to be so stringent that I doubt whether they can be met in practice, which probably means that the word ‘net’ should go from this requirement.

And will standards become reality?

Having National Environmental Standards would be truly transformative for environmental decision-making and in my view they could indeed be policy gold, as long as we get the detail right.

By the same token, standards lack lustre for a reason. As you can see from these brief examples, formulating the right words of protection is not that hard. The real challenge is to build political support for the tough decisions that strong standards imply.

Banner image: Good clear environmental standards could provide a pathway to transform our national environmental law into something that makes a real difference. (Image by David Salt)

Should we include a climate-change trigger in national environmental law?

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By Peter Burnett

In Australia this week, all eyes (well most of them) are on Canberra for the first sitting of Parliament since Labor came to power in May. The first order of business is the promised Climate Change Bill, to enshrine the government’s promised 43% target.

While public debate on the bill has focused on the target itself and the nature of a possible ‘ratcheting mechanism’ to raise the target over time, there’s also been quite a bit of attention given to something that definitely won’t be included: a ‘climate trigger’ for environmental approval of large projects such as mines and dams.

Let me explain.

Triggering the EPBC Act

For constitutional reasons, our main national environmental law, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act), is based on a set of ‘triggers’. These are formally known as ‘matters of national environmental significance’. The triggers cover various things you’d expect to be of national significance, such as impacts to World Heritage places and threatened species, but not the most obvious candidate of all, climate change.

The EPBC Act was drafted by the conservative Howard Coalition government in the late 1990s as part of an overhaul of national environmental law. This bold reform was an unlikely project for a conservative government, but came about for two reasons.

First, Howard had courted the environment movement quite successfully in the 1996 election campaign, largely by promising a large pot of money (the National Heritage Trust) in exchange for privatising the national phone company, Telstra. There was a sentiment at the time that perhaps conservatives could care for the environment as well as progressives, by investing in it.

Second, Howard’s environment minister, Senator Robert Hill, was not just a skilled political operator, but a genuine environmental reformer (though perhaps a flawed one — see below).

In particular, Hill demonstrated an ability to navigate obstacles in government where others would have foundered on the political rocks.

Kyoto and the climate trigger

Despite Hill’s commitment to reforming environmental law he also led the Howard Government’s negotiating team at Kyoto, securing the notorious ‘Australia clause’, under which Australia was allowed to increase its emissions to 108% of 1990 levels, despite other rich countries being locked-into cuts.

Beyond this, also notoriously, Howard refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, despite Australia’s easy ride through with the Australia clause.

Howard had a real thing about action on climate change. Despite Australia’s easy ride, early on his major concern seemed to be that Australia might be taken for a ride, by being required to do more than its fair share of the ‘heavy lifting’. Later on, he seemed determined to hold out on ratification as a way of supporting the USA under George W Bush.

You can see why, despite being the most obvious candidate, climate was never going to be a trigger in the EPBC Act. Unfortunately for the government though, it had to do a deal with a minor party, the Australian Democrats, to get the EPBC Bill through the Senate.

Howard agreed to more than 400 Democrat amendments to secure passage, but wouldn’t include a climate trigger.

A climate trigger discussion paper

The government did however agree to consult about including a climate trigger by later amendment, and released a discussion paper on the topic at the end of 1999.

An obvious issue was the emissions threshold for the trigger. The lowest number discussed was 500,000 tonnes CO2-equivalent. This was said to capture 92% of emissions from new major facilities, such as power stations and aluminium smelters, then under construction.

Interestingly, today’s ‘safeguard mechanism’, enacted by the Abbott Government to support its Emissions Reduction Fund and requiring large emitters (currently 215 of them) to meet an individually-tailored emissions cap, has a threshold of 100,000 tonnes.

Even more interestingly, while the discussion paper canvassed some of the more technical issues associated with defining the trigger in some detail, such as whether emission estimates would be based on average or peak capacity, it completely avoided the significant issue of what kinds of requirements might be imposed on a new facility once the trigger was, well, triggered.

The discussion paper said this was because approval decisions had to be consistent with the principles of ecologically sustainable development and should take account of issues such as jobs and international competitiveness. (Had they addressed the issue, I think the most likely approach at the time would have been to require that the proponent use ‘best available low-emission technology at reasonable cost’.)

Then there was the issue of carbon emissions from land clearing. The discussion paper simply excluded this topic; the implication was that land clearing was not a ‘project’.

I think this explanation and exclusion are tendentious. I suspect that the government never intended to introduce a trigger, but simply to go through the motions. In that context, any content beyond the barest minimum could expose the government to enemy political fire, for no gain (to them).

Back to the future

So, there we have it. No climate trigger. But should we have one now?

Labor is promising to re-orient the safeguard mechanism, under which emissions from the major facilities are capped.

The previous government kept resetting the caps, giving emitters an easy ride in meeting them. Now, the government will lower the caps progressively, as the theory says such a scheme should, forcing facilities to lower emissions or buy emissions credits.

Under that scenario, it doesn’t make much sense to apply a climate trigger to major facilities — anyone building such a facility already knows that its emissions will be subject to a reducing cap.

Even if a climate trigger applied, what conditions could the environment minister impose that would achieve more than keeping emissions under a reducing cap? (In theory, a trigger would allow the minister to block a project entirely, this seems unlikely).

What about land-clearing?

Then there’s land clearing. Although the significance of land clearing is usually seen in terms of habitat loss, it is also significant for carbon emissions where the vegetation concerned is of high quality (low quality regrowth areas are marginal in terms of carbon emissions).

At present there is no land clearing trigger in the EPBC Act, even for biodiversity-related reasons. And, unlike industrial facilities, there are no climate-related laws applying to land clearing.

Thus, above a certain extent and quality, there is a case for a climate trigger relating to land clearing.

However, states and territories all regulate land clearing for other reasons. Due to the complexities of doubling-up on land regulation, it might be more effective to combine a trigger with a national standard for land clearing and to switch off the trigger in states where clearing laws meet the standard.

And in the end?

At the end of the day, given Labor’s plans for the safeguard mechanism, the case for a ‘climate trigger’ is particular rather than general. It would make sense for the clearing of significant areas of land containing old-growth and other high quality vegetation, but that’s about all.

In any event, a climate trigger is off the agenda as an amendment to the Climate Change Bill, given climate minister Chris Bowen’s statement that the government would rather pursue its climate target on a non-statutory basis, than have policy change forced on it by legislative amendment.

But there will be a second opportunity, when environment minister Tanya Plibersek delivers on her commitment to introduce major reforms to the EPBC Act in 2023.

Then, unlike now, the government won’t have the clean option of simply walking away, because so much of the non-climate environmental reform agenda hangs off that reform.

Banner image by Yazril Tri Mulyana from Pixabay

So, who actually does have the ‘duty of care’? Who is responsible for tomorrow?

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By David Salt

The Federal Minister for the Environment does not have a duty of care to protect young people from the harms of climate change. This was the unanimous finding of the Federal Court earlier this week. It was a finding that left high school students crying, legal scholars frowning and Sussan Ley, the Federal Minister for the Environment, beaming.

Given this, the big question I want answered is, if not the Minister for the Environment, then where (and with whom) does the ‘duty of care’ lie?

Many reasons

Much has been made about the Court decision and why the judges overturned an earlier decision that the Minister did have a duty of care when approving fossil fuel developments. (And for one of the best analyses of the legal case around this issue I’d point you to the excellent Sustainability Bite Does a ‘duty of care’ to future children make any difference to environmental approvals? written by my colleague Peter Burnett; who, incidentally, predicted exactly this outcome.)

Another excellent summary of this decision can be found at The Conversation (Today’s disappointing federal court decision undoes 20 years of climate litigation progress in Australia) which neatly brings together the facts, history and findings surrounding this appeal.

At the end of the day the three judges each ruled in favour of the Environment Minister who, in her appeal against the original finding, contended that the stated duty should not be imposed on the Minister. However, each judge had their own reasoning for why this should be.

One judge said that climate change is a matter for government, not the courts. The ‘duty’ involves “questions of policy (scientific, economic, social, industrial and political) […] unsuitable for the Judicial branch to resolve”

Another said there wasn’t a direct link between minister’s power to approve the coal mine and the effect this would have on the children.

And the third said the EPBC Act (under which the fossil fuel development was being approved and which the Minister is responsible for) doesn’t create a duty-of-care relationship between the Minister and the children. He added that establishing a standard of care isn’t feasible and that it’s not currently foreseeable that approving the coal mine extension would cause the children personal injury, as the law is understood.

If not the Minister, then who?

All well and good, and I expect this makes much sense to all the lawyers out there. But, for me, it begs the question: if not the Minister, then who should hold the duty of care?

If we are allowing a development today that is harming the people of tomorrow, then shouldn’t someone be responsible for allowing this development to proceed?

Of course, the people of tomorrow include the youth of today. Some of these young people are profoundly worried about what they are seeing around them, about what the science is telling us.

For God’s sake, it’s not even being worried about gloomy forecasts; society is actually experiencing the horror of climate change as we speak. Climate enhanced flooding is wiping away families, businesses, hopes and histories up and down Australia’s east coast. Climate-enhanced wildfires are scorching communities, forest biomes and wildlife with a ferocity and at a scale never before witnessed. We’re losing our coral reefs, our wetlands and woodlands. We’re trashing our natural heritage and our prospects for the future.

Young people see this, they can connect the dots; and they despair at the denialism and prevarication being shown by government. Many are self-organizing and protesting on the streets calling for change (only to be rebuked by our Prime Minister).

Others are exploring different pathways to get the ‘grown ups’ to do the right thing for the future they will inherit; and one of these pathways involves testing our laws about who is taking responsibility for developments (like new coal mines and gas projects) that will only be adding to the already catastrophic level of carbon emissions our species are producing.

Where to look

I don’t appreciate the detail of the law on this but, like the students at the centre of this current court case, it seems to me that our political representative who has been made Minister for the Environment is a logical place to aim.

But, as the courts have ruled, this is a question of policy, not law! This is for the politicians to fix up.

What?

Our political leaders are refusing to engage with climate change on any meaningful level. They’re happy to fight about over-the-horizon net zero targets that they will never be responsible for. They pay lip service to the mounting scientific evidence while happily turning a blind eye to the growing pile of misinformation and corporate malfeasance seeking to distract us from any measure to constrain (or reduce) our carbon economy.

If not the Environment Minister, then who? Our Prime Minister or the Minister for Emissions? Their track record for lies and integrity is even worse than our Environment Minister’s.

Is it the responsibility of our corporate leaders and billionaires? Seems their short-term interests are tied to unbounded economic growth, so I doubt we’ll see much effort here.

Or should we look to the world government to impose effective and just sustainability limits on us all. Sorry, I forgot; there’s no such thing as a world government (though conspiracy theorists like to pretend that one exists).

There are, of course, international agreements that sovereign nations can enter into on how we care for the environment and the future. Think Ramsar Convention, Convention on Biological Diversity, Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement; Australia has signed up to all of them, and then failed to meet our commitments on any of them, just like all other nations.

At the end of the day, whether you’re thinking (or acting) globally or locally, no-one is actually responsible for tomorrow. ‘Duty of care’ for tomorrow is more a ‘vibe*’ than an ‘actionable’ item.

If duty of care on climate change is a question of policy more than a question of law then our whole polity is failing us and is in need of transformation. Who’s up for some serious reform?

*‘Vibe’ is a particularly Australian term arising from the cult classic 1999 movie The Castle in which a lawyer, Dennis Denuto, struggles to articulate to the judge why his clients, the Kerrigans, should be allowed to keep their home and not be compulsorily acquired for an airport development. Denuto says: “In summing up: it’s the Constitution, it’s Mabo, it’s the vibe and… no, that’s it. It’s the vibe.”

Banner image by byrev @ Pixabay

Does a ‘duty of care’ to future children make any difference to environmental approvals?

By Peter Burnett

Do you think our political leaders, our representatives, owe the children of the future, our children, a duty of care? I think most people would.

But what does that actually mean in practice?

Should a duty of care apply if the political leader is wearing a second hat as a regulator? What if the law the regulator is applying says nothing about a duty of care?

Our legal system is grappling with this issue right now.

Last year, in a case known as Sharma v Minister for the Environment, the Federal Court of Australia found that the environment minister, in her statutory capacity as a regulator under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act), owed Australian children a common law (ie, non-statutory) duty of care not to injure them by approving a development that would exacerbate climate change.

At the time, the minister was considering making a statutory decision to approve an extension to the Vickery coal mine in NSW.

Is it okay to develop a coal mine if it results in increased emissions?

As I wrote in an earlier blog, the implication of the case for decisions under the EPBC Act (and other regulatory laws) was that regulators, when considering whether to approve a development, must now turn their mind to an additional mandatory consideration, the likelihood of harm, at least to children, if not others.

In that discussion, I argued that the decision was legally incorrect and would likely be overturned on appeal. In fact, an appeal has been heard, though not yet decided.

In the meantime, the original decision stands and must be applied — ie, regulators must consider the likelihood of future harm to children from a development.

What does this mean in practice? Well, documents released recently under freedom of information (FoI) laws have revealed how the environment minister was advised by her department concerning this new-found duty of care.

The documents concern another coal mine extension, this time by Glencore of its Mangoola mine in the NSW Hunter Valley.

For completeness, the Court also found that human safety is a mandatory relevant consideration under the EPBC Act, including when affected by the emission of greenhouse gases (GHG).

Rather than this being part of a duty of care, the Court said this implication was found in the ‘subject-matter, scope and purpose’ of the EPBC Act.

As a result, if a proposed development in fact posed a ‘real risk’ to human safety of Australians (not just children) the Minister should give ‘at least elevated weight’ to the need to avoid that risk.

This part of the decision may be less vulnerable on appeal because it results from the Court’s interpretation of the Act, rather than the (more radical) application of a duty of care from outside the Act.

Requirements on Minister: EPBC Act plus duty of care

The EPBC Act contains a fairly standard process for granting environmental approvals, based on considering an environmental impact assessment (EIA) and applying various statutory criteria.

Although the EPBC Act does not extend directly to climate impacts, it does cover indirect impacts on things that it does proect, eg threatened species. And GHG can have an indirect impact on threatened species, by changing the climate.

So, it is common under the EPBC Act to consider climate impacts from projects that are large GHG emitters, like coal mines.

Consistent with the Sharma decision, when environment minister Sussan Ley considered the Mangoola mine, she considered, in addition to the usual statutory matters, her duty of care to avoid causing harm to Australian children, as a result of GHG emissions from both the mine itself (scope 1 and 2) and the coal it would produce (scope 3).

Minister’s decision on climate impacts of mine

The minister decided that, even having regard both to her additional duty of care to children and the implied statutory duty to consider human safety, it was not necessary to refuse the mine extension, or to impose additional climate-related conditions.

While these duties might have been new, it turned out that considering those duties simply took the minister down the same path of reasoning that she and her predecessors had used before when considering indirect climate impacts.

This reasoning has been validated by earlier court decisions and it goes like this:

First, if the mine didn’t go ahead, potential customers would simply burn coal from other mines, with no overall difference for the climate (the market substitution argument).

Second, if this is wrong, and the mine does increase GHG emissions, national and international policies, such as ‘nationally determined contributions’ under the Paris Agreement, would prevent overall emission increases, because countries have agreed to phase coal down (the climate policy argument).

And Ley added a new argument: the coal phase down would be reinforced by private company commitments: mine proponent Glencore had itself adopted a target of reducing total global emissions from its operations (scope 1, 2 and 3) by 50% by 2035, reducing to net-zero by 2050.

Just more boxes to tick? Is that it?

So, at the end of the day, even considering a new duty to children and giving ‘elevated’ weight to human safety consistent with the Sharma decision, the minister ended up at the same place as earlier decisions.

The mine could go ahead because it would not increase emissions, or, alternatively, any increase would be ‘extremely small’.

Plus, of course, there were social and economic benefits that made approval, on balance, ‘appropriate’.

It turned out that the duty of care to children and human safety were just two more boxes to tick.

So, does it matter then whether the government wins or loses the Sharma appeal if the result is the same?

You might think not, but I can however see two reasons why it matters.

It does matter

First, Sharma found the environment minister had a duty of care. While this duty might not change environmental outcomes now, if the duty is upheld it will invite compensation claims in future decades, based on harm generated by approval decisions taken now.

This creates risks for government.

The second implication is environmental and political. If the duty of care to children remains, this will confirm a higher profile for the climate implications of development decisions. I think this increases the chances that someone will take the ‘market substitution’ and ‘climate policy’ arguments to the High Court.

I know I told you that these arguments had already been accepted in earlier Federal Court decisions. But I think there are grounds for challenging this.

Why? I’ll tell you in another blog, but a High Court appeal would put climate change issues before the highest court in the land. And that’s not something to be sneezed at.

The implications of this? If the children win again in court, I think the government will move in Parliament to legislate these legal and political risks away.

So the children will probably lose even if they win.

Banner image: On the one hand coal gives us ‘cheap’ energy. On the other, it emits a lot of GHG likely to harm future generations of children. (Image by Pavlofox @ Pixabay).

Administrative law: like the Curate’s egg, boring in parts, but environmentally useful nonetheless

By Peter Burnett

“Off with her head”, said the Queen of Hearts to Alice in Wonderland, when Alice couldn’t read the values of some face-down playing cards. The word of the Queen of Hearts was law. Not a good law, actually.

In the real world, ‘Bad King John’ of England (1166-1216) wanted his word to be law as well. While he might not have been quite so capricious as the Queen of Hearts, he was arbitrary and unjust enough to drive his barons to rebellion.

And that rebellion was settled by a set of rules called the Magna Carta in 1215.

While the Magna Carta is best known for establishing the mother of Parliaments and guaranteeing trial by jury (at least for ‘free men’), it also contained a number of guarantees against arbitrary action by the King and his officials — in other words, by government.

For example, King John guaranteed not to take anyone’s corn or chattels without payment and not to appoint incompetent or corrupt judges and officials.

As a result, the Magna Carta is also known for establishing the principle that government is not above the law and thus cannot behave in arbitrary and unjust ways.

This is the foundational principle of administrative law.

Now some believe ‘law’ is dry and boring, with the very mention of administrative law enough to send you to sleep.

I’m here to convince you that administrative law is far too important to be boring, though I will concede that it can be dry and tedious in the detail. In his book The Rule of Law, one of the great modern British judges, (Lord) Tom Bingham, gives the example par excellence of a tedious regulation:

    Any reference in these regulations to a regulation is a reference to a regulation contained in these regulations. (!!)

And administrative law certainly has failings, as we shall see.

What has this got to do with the environment?

How is this relevant to the environment?

Anyone who has followed environmental issues through the courts will know that many court cases concerning the environment turn not on environment-specific principles (such as precaution or intergenerational equity), but on general principles of administrative law.

One such principle is that decision-makers should not be biased, or even appear biased.

A recent, if extreme, example of an environmental case involving that principle concerned the proposed extension to New Acland Coal’s mine near Oakey, Queensland.

This case has a history of appeals and re-hearings too long to recount, but in brief, an environmental assessment was done and a draft approval issued. However, because there were objections raised, the case was referred to the Land Court of Queensland, which had the role of making non-binding recommendations to the Minister for Natural Resources.

The key point for our purposes is that when the case eventually reached the High Court, they sent it back to the Queensland Land Court for a third hearing. This unusual outcome was required because the first and second hearings were affected by the appearance of bias, rendering both hearings invalid.

In the first hearing, the judge had apparently been deeply offended by a newspaper article on the mine extension, raising the possibility that his subsequent decision to recommend against approving the development might have been biased by his taking offence, while the reasoning of the judge in the second hearing became ‘infected’ by the apprehended bias of the first because she adopted some of his findings (at the direction of one of the intermediate appeal courts).

The High Court’s decision was hailed by the Environmental Defender’s Office as a major victory, and in one sense it is. High standards of decision-making have been upheld.

Yet the case also highlights the process-heavy downside of administrative law. Even if the third hearing is finalised without further appeal, there will have been a total of seven court hearings and a decisional timeframe spanning nine years and counting.

And we still don’t know whether the mine will be approved!

Of course, this is grist to the mill to industry and politicians running a campaign against ‘lawfare and green tape’, but the delays are more due to poor regulatory design than to administrative law itself.

A new line of attack

One feature of administrative law is that although its substantive principles are relatively constant, governments provide new ways to apply those principles by passing a constant stream of new laws.

Take for example the current challenge by the Environment Centre of the Northern Territory (ECNT) to the $21 million grant by Minister for Resources Keith Pitt to Imperial Oil and Gas, to expedite gas exploration activities in the Beetaloo Basin in the Northern Territory.

In the past, it has not been easy to bring legal challenges to government decisions to give money away. Some recent High Court decisions and federal legislation have changed this.

For example, since 2013, federal government grants must comply with the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Act, which requires, among other things, that the minister making the grant be ‘satisfied, after making reasonable inquiries, that the expenditure would be a proper use of [public] money’.

A ‘proper’ use of money is defined in the Act as one that is ‘efficient, effective, economical and ethical’.

ECNT’s argument is that Minister Pitt committed an (administrative) error of law by failing to make enquiries about the climate risks associated with the development of the Beetaloo Basin, as well as the economic risks of that development as the world transitions to a zero carbon economy.

As far as I can tell this is the first time this line of attack has been used, although the Beechworth Lawn Tennis Club, which is challenging the ‘Sports Rorts’ grants made by the Australian Sports Commission, may well be using similar arguments. (Did I hear you mention ‘car parks’ as well?)

Boring in parts, but definitely useful

So, there you have it. While aspects of administrative law can be boring, overall it is far too useful in securing good environmental decisions to be ignored.

It does however have its problems, as the tortured and scandalously expensive chain of decisions in the New Acland Coal case show.

As a result, one of the challenges of environmental reform, beyond saving the environment of course, is to design decision-making processes that are not only fair and effective, but efficient as well.

Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

Three experts and a politician in a sandpit – who has the real insight on climate policy in a connected society

By David Salt

The scientist, the economist and the lawyer

There were three people at the bar – a scientist, a lawyer and an economist – arguing about how to solve the intractable problem of sustainability, and specifically climate change.

The scientist said we just need to know a little more, remove some of the uncertainty around our knowledge on the earth system (and what humans are doing to it), and then society would fall behind the overwhelming scientific consensus that something needs to happen.

The lawyer said we just need better laws proscribing what’s acceptable and what’s not. Better rules are the solution.

The economist said we just need to provide the right incentives for people to begin doing the right thing and discourage them from doing the wrong thing. Bad behaviour, said the economist, should simply cost more making it ‘common sense’ to be sustainable.

Enter the politician

“You mean, like putting a price on carbon?” said a greying, white gentleman in an expensive suit who had butted into the conversation. “That worked a treat for Australia’s climate change policy.”

“Actually,” said the economist, “it did work well until it was canned by the Abbott Government in 2013.”

“But that’s the point,” purred the politician. “We proposed to ‘axe the tax’ and the people voted us in and we did… axe the tax that is. Putting a price on carbon was electoral poison and may we never hear of it again.”

“And you, Ms Scientist,” he said turning on the person representing science…

“It’s ‘doctor’ actually…” stammered the scientist; but was totally ignored by the politician who was building up a good head of righteous steam.

“…how effective has all your additional science reportage been in winning hearts and minds? For God’s sake, the IPCC’s Sixth Report read like a horror movie in terms of what it’s predicting. Yet we were able to deflect its potency by describing it as horror porn and pointing out we were actually beating our emission targets. It quickly faded from the news cycle.

“And as for you, Ms Lawyer, it’s all well and good to let scared children block coal developments by dragging our Minister for the Environment through the court saying she’s abandoned her duty of care to the future but just you watch happens on appeal.

“Mark my words,” he boomed, “No higher court will uphold a judgement that threatens to block every major economic development that brings with it a residue of environmental harm. To do so would kill the economy, the voters won’t hear of it.

“No, don’t you worry your pretty little heads with all this sustainability clap trap. The adults are in charge, and we’ll make sure there’ll be technology aplenty to ensure our thriving economy continues apace!

“And don’t forget whose taxes keep you happy and out of danger playing away in your little academic sandpits,” he finished with a flourish.

Shifting piles of sand

“You might be surprised what you find in sandpits, Mr Member of Parliament,” hissed back the scientist. “Back in the 80s, physicists experimented with models of sandpiles and discovered they were complex systems. The more grains you add to a pile of sand, the more unstable it becomes. It moves into what’s called a critical state.

“As the pile grows, more and more parts of the sand slope become unstable requiring just one more grain of sand to trigger a slide. At a certain point there are enough small triggers across the pile that setting off one small slide creates an avalanche that can rearrange the whole pile.

“You might think you’re safe from one of the small slides but the interconnected critical nature of the pile means change will occur well away from the initiating disturbance.”

“Thanks for that,” quipped the politician. “I’ll remember that next time a blunder into a sandpit.”

Pile high society

“You don’t get it, do you?” snapped the economist. “Our colleague is actually describing society. You and your conservative brethren are trying to hold things in the same state because that best serves your vested interests, your fossil fuel backers. But our sandpile society is slowly building up a resistance to your efforts. And when the instability corrects itself, your lack of action means the correction will be big.

“Companies and governments, though not the Australian Government, are trying to figure out how to sustain themselves in this increasingly uncertain climate-afflicted world. More and more countries are signing up to economic measures like a price on carbon. Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanisms are being developed by the G7. Even coal companies, irony of irony, are feeling the heat as insurance companies refuse to insure them; companies are having to figure out how they can do this themselves.

“All these things are little patches of instability on the sandpile and it’s making the whole sandpile unstable. This is not just a physics model, economists recognise it all too well and have seen it at play in every economic upheaval from the Great Depression to the GFC.”

“And you piss on the law, Mr Politician,” chimed in the lawyer. “But do you not see what’s happening everywhere at the moment?

“It’s not just a few children disillusioned at your deceit and lack of action. It’s courts at all levels calling you out. The whole Sydney City Council just endorsed the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty and, of course, most of the world signed up to the Paris Agreement. Citizens everywhere are now standing up and demanding what our governments are actually doing to meet these agreement.

“A Dutch court, in a landmark ruling, has just ordered Royal Dutch Shell to drastically deepen planned greenhouse gas emission cuts. This could trigger legal action against energy companies around the world.

“And a Paris court has found the French Government legally responsible for its failure to meet targets intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

“So, Mr Politician,” said the scientist, taking back the reins of the argument. “What does it mean for your efforts to stop change when all sectors of society – law, economics and science just to mention three – begin building in checks and balances to force change? Your malfeasance enables you to disable some of our efforts – ‘axe the tax’, as you say – but over time the little efforts across society build up, the triggers accumulate, the demographics change and the evidence emerges.

“I’d say you’re sitting on a hypercritical pile of sand being peppered by little grains of sand. And each new grain, each new disturbance, could trigger the slide that triggers the avalanche. And when that happens, your smug self-assurance over the success of the games you’ve been playing will be unable to staunch the flow.”

Nowhere to sit

“And if we’ve scared you out of the sandpit, Mr Politician, think of it as a game of musical chairs,” observed the economist. “Unfortunately, I can’t hear the music anymore.

“And, thanks to you and your efforts, it looks like Australia doesn’t have a chair to sit on.”

Image: In the sandpit of life, a single grain of sand can change everything if the circumstances are ripe. For an excellent article on sandpiles as models of economic growth and disruption, see https://www.mauldineconomics.com/frontlinethoughts/the-growing-economic-sandpile
(Image by Nuwanga Mavinda from Pixabay)

Sharma v Minister for the Environment

A big win for children on climate change, but for how long?

By Peter Burnett

Never underestimate children. Last week I was telling my family, over dinner, about a recent decision by Justice Bromberg in the Federal Court, concerning climate change. You’ve probably seen media reports of the case, Sharma v Minister for the Environment; in part because it features a group of children.

“The case was brought by half a dozen teenagers,” I pronounced, pleased to be able to talk about my work, “represented by a nun in her eighties.

“There were eight children,” corrected my 11-year-old granddaughter, who is in Year 6.

Well picked up granddaughter, there were indeed eight.

While my main purpose here is to discuss the court case, I have to say it’s heart-warming to see such awareness in one so young. After all, the case concerned her future. Yet it is also heart rending, given the Court’s finding that the climate future facing today’s children was ‘potentially catastrophic’.

The court challenge

The children sought a declaration that the federal environment minister owed them a duty of care in relation to a proposal by a subsidiary of Whitehaven Coal to undertake a major expansion of its Vickery mine in northern NSW.

The Environment Minister came into the equation because the mine could only proceed if she approved it under the EPBC Act, an approval the minister had not yet given.

The expansion would extract an additional 33 million tonnes of coal over 25 years, which would generate 100 million tonnes of C02 when burned.

This is equivalent to about a quarter of Australia’s annual emissions. Although the Court found that, in isolation, these emissions would result in a global temperature increase of only one eighteen-thousandth of a degree Celsius, it rejected an argument that it should disregard this increase as negligible under a legal rule known as de minimis.

The argument for the Minister owing a duty of care was that potentially catastrophic future climate impacts were the foreseeable result of approving the mine and that the children were so vulnerable and so closely and directly affected by a decision under the control of the Minister that she ought to take reasonable care to avoid personal injury to them.

The Minister’s arguments in reply were based on the EPBC Act being a statutory scheme that should, for reasons of both principle and legal interpretation, be regarded as not amenable to common law principles of negligence. A common law duty of care would, the Minister argued, skew her regulatory task.

Interestingly, the minister did not challenge evidence from Emeritus Professor Will Steffen and other experts about the future impacts of climate change on the children. Clearly the government did not want to open itself to accusations of denialism by putting the facts in question, and so it relied exclusively on legal arguments.

The court decision

The Court accepted the argument that the minister owed the children a duty of care not to injure them when exercising her power under the EPBC Act to approve or not approve the mine extension. However, because the judge was not satisfied that there was a reasonable apprehension that this duty would be breached (basically because it was too early to know what the minister might decide), he refused to grant an injunction.

This simple decision sits atop nearly 150 pages of complex legal analysis about the law of negligence, the circumstances in which the courts might find a novel duty of care, such as the one here, and the interaction between statutory schemes such as the EPBC Act and the common law of negligence.

Implications of the decision

There’s enough raw material in this decision for a PhD thesis. So for present circumstances, let’s just look at implications and prospects.

If the decision stands, the implication of the case for decisions under the EPBC Act is that the Minister, when considering whether to approve a development, must now turn her mind to an additional mandatory consideration, the likelihood of personal injury, at least to children if not to others.

This would most likely be of relevance in situations similar to this case; ie, to very large fossil fuel projects, given their climate impacts. The ironic fact that the EPBC Act does not directly regulate climate impacts would not affect this outcome.

It is also conceivable that the precedent might apply to other projects with very large impacts, for example where a project might lead to extensive contamination of the waters of the Great Artesian Basin.

The decision also has potential implications far beyond the EPBC Act. If this duty exists under that Act, it may also apply to other government decisions, possibly even to Cabinet and Budget decisions. And if the duty applies to the minister in approving a mine, it may also apply to those, like Whitehaven, who build and operate mines.

The prospects of the decision standing

This is only the latest in a series of cases which have put fairly adventurous arguments before the courts in the hope of giving the EPBC Act some real teeth. Unlike most of the other cases, on this occasion the arguments have been successful.

However, I think this decision will be appealed and overturned. The arguments would be complex, but in my view, the one most likely to succeed is straight-forward: that the EPBC Act contains a specific direction to the minister to the effect that, in deciding whether or not to approve a development, he or she must only consider the things listed in the relevant division of the Act. That division makes no mention of a duty of care.

If I am right, in one sense it will be back to business as usual, with the Environment Minister approving individual developments on the basis that their impacts are ‘not unacceptable’, while the environment continues to decline.

However, climate litigation is becoming more common around the world as climate risks and impacts increase. Corporations are becoming increasingly responsive to those risks. Even if the case is reversed on appeal, the decision will have given Australian businesses pause for thought and can only add to the momentum towards ‘net zero by 2050′, even in the absence of a government policy to that effect.

Image by Wi Pa from Pixabay

Dead in the water

Making more of the Royal Commission into ‘our greatest environmental catastrophe’

By David Salt

We all know the Murray Darling Basin is in trouble. We’ve all seen the graphic images of millions of fish gasping for air as they died and heard the desperate stories of towns running dry. But we also know the causes of this distress are complex and involve multiple layers of government, countless players and many vested interests. In an effort to uncover the truth behind this mess, the South Australian State Government set up a Royal Commission in 2018 to examine the effectiveness of the $13 billion Basin Plan, supposedly a blue print for saving the mighty Murray Darling River system.

Earlier this year Richard Beasley, Senior Counsel Assisting at the Murray-Darling Royal Commission, published a book, Dead in the water, on what the Royal Commission found. You should read it. It should also be mandatory reading for anyone interested in the failure of our environmental law and policy.

Many angry texts have been written about how our environment has been let down by government but this book stands head and shoulders above them all in terms of forensic rage. Dead in the water takes readers on a whistle stop tour of the ill-fated Basin Plan, one of our Nation’s biggest environmental investments. The Plan was supposed to repair the mighty Murray Darling River system but is instead enabling (and probably accelerating) its continued degradation and desecration.

If you want to read the full 756-page Royal Commission Report, please do. The Analysis & Policy Observatory has a neat summary of it here, together with a link to download the full report.

If you want to read a single plain-speaking, short article on the Report and what it found, you could do worse than scanning this story in The Guardian (summed up by its title: ‘Murray-Darling basin royal commission report finds gross maladministration’).

But if you want to experience the full rage of how bastard politics and corporate power was able to pervert science while despoiling some of our most prized natural and cultural heritage while having the audacity to claim the opposite, then read Dead in the water. It will leave you very angry. Indeed, Beasley subtitled his book – ‘A very angry book’. A bit of background helps you understand why.

An ill-fated Royal Commission

Beasley’s perspective on the management of the Murray Darling Basin was informed by his experience as Senior Counsel Assisting at the Royal Commission.

The Royal Commission was established in 2018 by the South Australian Labor State Government to investigate the Basin Plan and how it impacts on South Australia. South Australia has a keen interest in this as it sits at the end of the Murray River. Leading the investigation was Commissioner Bret Walker SC, often said to be Australia’s pre-eminent senior counsel.

Walker handed down a damning report at the beginning of 2019. Among other things, he found that Commonwealth officials had committed gross maladministration, negligence and unlawful actions in drawing up the multibillion-dollar deal to save Australia’s largest river system; that the Plan ignored potentially “catastrophic” risks of climate change and failed to make use of the best science available. He concluded that the Basin Plan needed a complete overhaul including reallocating more water from irrigation to the environment.

Unfortunately, politics dogged the Royal Commission at every step. The Commonwealth Government prevented public servants from the Murray-Darling Basin Authority and the Department of Agriculture and Water Resources from appearing at the Royal Commission (the two key agencies overseeing the Basin Plan); and when Commissioner Walker asked for more time to complete his investigation the South Australian Government, now a conservative Liberal Government after a recent election, turned him down. When Walker submitted his 746-page report (containing 111 findings and 44 recommendations) they were warmly welcomed by the SA Government and then politely ignored.

A very angry book

Richard Beasley witnessed all this, indeed was a central player in the Commission’s search for truth.

I can’t imagine how it must have felt to hear and see and read all the testimonies from multiple experts, stakeholders and witnesses on the degrading state of the Basin and the inadequacy of the Basin Plan to address this decline. To hear statement after statement that the Basin Plan clearly is not based on the best science available, is unlawful, probably unconstitutional, and definitely not fit for purpose.

And rather than have the bureaucrats, managers and public servants responsible for implementing the plan explain and justify why it is as it is, the Federal Government gags them, prevents them from speaking. And then the final report is effectively forgotten because there’s been a change in the South Australian state government.

If I were watching all this I think I’d whither with rage, shrivel with impotence. What would you do?

Richard Beasley walked away from the Royal Commission and wrote an angry book. And, because he’s a skilful writer with a lawyer’s sharp eye for detail and a wicked sense of humour, he laced his observations with wry humour, amusing anecdotes and personal asides. And his anger is palpable, and there are expletives aplenty.

Beasley didn’t want to simply serve up a slightly more plain-speaking version of the Royal Commission Report; he wanted to record his fury at the environmental disaster that is unfolding up and down our nation’s most important river systems. He wanted to enrage his readers about the deep injustices this disaster is propagating across the landscape (for starters the appalling dispossession of First Nations people). And he wanted to highlight the horrific failure in governance that has allowed this to happen.

We need more angry books

I wish there were more ‘Richard Beasleys’ out there who could capture so well the multi-dimensional nature surrounding poor governance, ecosystem collapse and the subsequent societal loss it brings. Unfortunately, I don’t think there are many like him around. Most scientists, for example, are scared to get too emotional or personal in order to tell stories that really move people (and I say this having worked in science communication and with scientists for over 30 years).

I’m sure part of Beasley’s intent with Dead in the water was to vent his own rage. But possibly the greater aim was to enrage the broader community to challenge our governments (at all levels) on their appalling mismanagement of our natural heritage. I know I finished the book feeling quite outraged at what has been allowed to occur.

Beasley’s book carries the subtitle: “A very angry book about our greatest environmental catastrophe… the Murray Darling Basin”. I think it’s possible to cast the Great Barrier Reef, our Box Gum Grassy Woodlands and many of our forest systems in the same light. If only we had more storytellers like Richard Beasley to get people angry enough to demand real action on all these catastrophes from our elected leaders.

A major report excoriated Australia’s environment laws. Sussan Ley’s response is confused and risky

By Peter Burnett

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

It’s official: Australia’s natural environment and iconic places are in deep trouble. They can’t withstand current and future threats, including climate change. And the national laws protecting them are flawed and badly outdated.

You could hardly imagine a worse report on the state of Australia’s environment, and the law’s capacity to protect it, than that released yesterday. The review of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity (EPBC) Act, by former competition watchdog chair Professor Graeme Samuel, did not mince words. Without urgent changes, most of Australia’s threatened plants, animals and ecosystems will become extinct.

Federal environment minister Sussan Ley released the report yesterday after sitting on it for three months. And she showed little sign of being spurred into action by Samuel’s scathing assessment.

Her response was confusing and contradictory. And the Morrison government seems hellbent on pushing through its preferred reforms without safeguards that Samuel says are crucial.

A bleak assessment

I was a federal environment official for 13 years, and from 2007 to 2012 was responsible for administering and reforming the EPBC Act. I believe Samuel’s report is a very good one.

Samuel has maintained the course laid out in his interim report last July. He found the state of Australia’s natural environment and iconic places is declining and under increasing threat.

Moreover, he says, the EPBC Act is outdated and requires fundamental reform. The current approach results in piecemeal decisions rather than holistic environmental management, which he sees as essential for success. He went on:

The resounding message that I heard throughout the review is that Australians do not trust that the EPBC Act is delivering for the environment, for business or for the community.

A proposed way forward

Samuel recommended a suite of reforms, many of which were foreshadowed in his interim report. They include:

  • national environmental standards, legally binding on the states and others, to guide development decisions and provide the ability to measure outcomes
  • applying the new standards to existing Regional Forest Agreements (RFAs). Such a move could open up the forest debate in a way not seen since the 1990s
  • accrediting the regulatory processes and environmental policies of the states and territories, to ensure they can meet the new standards. Accredited regimes would be audited by an Environment Assurance Commissioner
  • a “quantum shift” in the availability of environmental information, such as accurate mapping of habitat for threatened species
  • an overhaul of environmental offsets, which compensate for environmental destruction by improving nature elsewhere. Offsets have become a routine development cost applied to proponents, rather than last-resort compensation invested in environmental restoration.

Under-resourcing is a major problem with the EPBC Act, and Samuel’s report reiterates this. For example, as I’ve noted previously, “bioregional plans” of land areas – intended to define the environmental values and objectives of a region – have never been funded.

Respecting Indigenous knowledge

One long-overdue reform would require decision-makers to respectfully consider Indigenous views and knowledge. Samuel found the law was failing in this regard.

He recommended national standards for Indigenous engagement and participation in decision-making. This would be developed through an Indigenous-led process and complemented by a comprehensive review of national cultural heritage protections.

The recommendations follow an international outcry last year over mining giant Rio Tinto’s destruction of 46,000-year-old caves at Juukan Gorge in Western Australia. In Samuel’s words:

National-level protection of the cultural heritage of Indigenous Australians is a long way out of step with community expectations. As a nation, we must do better.

Confusing signals

The government’s position on Samuel’s reforms is confusing. Ley yesterday welcomed the review and said the government was “committed to working through the full detail of the recommendations with stakeholders”.

But she last year ruled out Samuel’s call for an independent regulator to oversee federal environment laws. And her government is still prepared to devolve federal approvals to the states before Samuel’s new national standards are in place.

In July last year, Ley seized on interim reforms proposed by Samuel that suited her government’s agenda – streamlining the environmental approvals process – and started working towards them.

In September, the government pushed the change through parliament’s lower house, denying independent MP Zali Steggall the chance to move amendments to allow national environment standards.

Ley yesterday reiterated the government’s commitment to the standards – yet indicated the government would soon seek to progress the legislation through the Senate, then develop the new standards later.

Samuel did include devolution to the states in his first of three tranches of reform – the first to start by early 2021. But his first tranche also includes important safeguards. These include the new national environmental standards, the Environment Assurance Commissioner, various statutory committees, Indigenous reforms and more.

The government’s proposed unbundling of the reforms doesn’t pass the pub test. It would tempt the states to take accreditation under the existing, discredited rules and resist later attempts to hold them to higher standards. In this, they’d be supported by developers who don’t like the prospect of a higher approvals bar.

A big year ahead

Samuel noted “governments should avoid the temptation to cherry pick from a highly interconnected suite of recommendations”. But this is exactly what the Morrison government is doing.

I hope the Senate will force the government to work through the full detail of the recommendations with stakeholders, as Ley says she’d like to.

But at this stage there’s little sign the government plans to embrace the reforms in full, or indeed that it has any vision for Australia’s environment.

All this plays out against still-raw memories of last summer’s bushfires, and expected pressure from the United States, under President Joe Biden, for developed economies such as Australia to lift their climate game.

With the United Nations climate change conference in Glasgow in November, it seems certain the environment will be high on Australia’s national agenda in 2021.

Peter Burnett, Honorary Associate Professor, ANU College of Law, Australian National University

Image by pen_ash from Pixabay