A tale of two climate bills

One is about meaningful reform, the other more about politics

By Peter Burnett

Last month, Zali Stegall released her long-anticipated climate change bill. This month, the Australian Greens released a climate bill of their own. They are quite different pieces of legislation. One is quite solid, I think, while the other is more about politics than meaningful outcomes.

Zali Stegall, of course, is the Independent MP for Warringah. She stood against Tony Abbott, one of Australia’s leading climate change deniers (and former PM), on a platform of introducing meaningful climate change policy; and she won. Her bill has been under development since her election in May 2019. Against the backdrop of Australia’s horror summer, and the resulting rocketing of the environment to the top of the political agenda, it could not have been better timed.

The Greens’ climate bill, on the other hand, looks to me like it might have been drafted in a hurry, for reasons I will explain below.

Given the contrasting approaches of the two bills and the possibility that a Parliamentary committee might end up looking at both, it’s instructive to consider what they contain.

The Stegall Bill

The full title of Stegall’s bill is Climate Change (National Framework for Adaptation and Mitigation) Bill 2020. As the title suggests, the bill establishes a framework for climate policy leaving it up to the government to develop climate mitigation programs that meet the targets set by the framework.

The bill would legislate a target of net zero emissions by 2050 and establish an independent Climate Change Commission, tasked with preparing a national National Climate Risk Assessment every five years. In response, the Government must prepare a national adaptation plan, together with five-year national emissions budgets and emissions reduction plans to meet those budgets.

Space doesn’t allow a more detailed examination, but you get the drift: the Bill sets the overarching target, while the independent Commission looks after the framework and keeps an eye on the Government. The Government’s job is to develop and implement detailed plans to meet the targets. If both parties do their job properly, national emissions follow a trajectory down to net zero 2050 while inflicting the least possible pain.

The Greens’ Bill

By contrast, the Greens’ bill has a much narrower focus. It’s full title is the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Amendment (Climate Trigger) Bill 2020, and it seeks to amend parts of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act) to introduce a climate ‘trigger’ for ‘emissions-intensive actions’; specifically land clearing, drilling exploration and mining (with the capacity to add others later by regulation).

The EPBC Act has nine triggers, for example one for threatened species and one for large coal and gas projects affecting water resources. The basic idea is that if a trigger is, well, triggered, by a development proposal, the development can’t go ahead unless it has been the subject of an environmental impact assessment (EIA) and a decision by the environment minister as to whether the project can go ahead, and if so, on what conditions.

In short, the Greens’ bill extends existing environmental regulation to land clearing and mining projects in order to reduce their climate impacts.

Two bills compared

Stegall’s bill is impressive. Although she was able to draw heavily on overseas precedents, the bill is well drafted and specific to Australian law and circumstances. It is complete to every last detail, including administrative matters like pay-and-leave entitlements for the Commission’s CEO.

I know Stegall is a lawyer and probably had lots of free expert advice. Nevertheless, she’s a first term Independent MP, with no party colleagues or resources to draw on. Yet she has produced a bill that is just as good as one that might have been produced by the Government with the full resources of the public service.

The Greens bill on the other hand is disappointing. The Greens have been around for a long time and have a much greater depth of resources available to them. Yet the bill is narrow, doing little more than bringing two major categories of development into an existing regulatory net, one which leaves it almost entirely to the environment minister to decide what, if any, emissions-reducing conditions to impose.

Even within this narrow scope, the bill doesn’t seem to have been well thought through.

A mining or land clearing project will only trigger an EIA if its emissions would likely have a ‘significant impact’ on the environment. Under the EPBC act, the environment is defined in wide terms. And ‘significant impact’ is not defined. Greenhouse gas emissions do not have a direct impact on living things; they have an indirect impact in that they change the climate and it is the changed climate which has an adverse impact on the animals and plants.

Finally, the Act doesn’t regulate cumulative emissions, which means that a decision about whether a project triggers the Act only considers the project in isolation.

When you take these factors together, it means that the emissions from a single project, such as a proposed mine, may not be ‘significant’ under the act unless they are so great as to change the climate, by themselves, something that would only occur with an enormous project.

As a result, I think there is a good argument that the Greens’ climate trigger would never operate.

The politics and the process from here

It’s important to emphasise that Stegall’s bill has not been introduced in parliament. Rather, Ms Stegall has simply released it by public announcement. A key reason for doing this is that the government controls the numbers in the House of Representatives, where Ms Stegall is a member. It is very unlikely that the Government will ever allow her to introduce the bill formally, because this would cause the government to lose control of the climate change debate (more than it already has).

Significantly, the bill is supported by Rebecca Sharkey of the Centre Alliance Party, which also has members in the Senate. One scenario is that, once it becomes clear that the Government will not allow the Stegall bill to be introduced in the House of Representatives, Centre Alliance may introduce it in the Senate, which the Government does not control.

Once introduced, a bill can be referred to committee, which provides a good platform for public hearings and a committee report to keep public debate on the boil.

This may be where the Greens bill comes in. Rather than have a first-time Independent MP steal their thunder, perhaps the Greens foresaw this scenario and want to have their own bill that can be referred to committee as well. This way they would not be left dancing to someone else’s tune.

Outside Parliament, the temperatures will be dropping as we head towards winter. Inside, it’s likely that the Stegall bill will warm up the Winter Sittings one way or another, whether under my scenario or another. If that’s the case, let’s hope the deliberations produce some light as well as heat.

Image by enriquelopezgarre from Pixabay

Have we bitten off more than we can chew?

Joining the dots on Sustainability Bites

By David Salt

“A real engagement with sustainability has bite.” That was our contention when we (Peter and I) began this blog. Well, have we demonstrated that in our efforts so far? And have our reflections generated any useful insights, is the whole greater than the sum of its parts? With 33 ‘bites’ now under our belt, I thought I’d take a look over what we’ve discussed so far and see if any themes are emerging.

If you read our blog’s ‘about’ page (which we haven’t touched since we began) you’ll see we had our own ideas on what ‘Sustainability Bites’ means. We said: “There are no absolute rights or wrongs in this debate on sustainability, but there are serious trade-offs and important consequences resulting from the decisions we make, and the way we make them.”

Those consequences are, if you like, the ‘bites’ of which we speak.

Governments will always sell their policy formulations as ‘win-win’ propositions but this is simply politically expedient fiction. There will always be ‘losers’ in any policy change and when it comes to sustainability those with most to lose are often big and influential ‘actors’ with considerable power in government decision making. Their vested interest in sustaining the status quo means the interests of future generations are forgotten. The present trumps the future.

33 bites, 5 emerging themes

The other meaning of the title of our blog is that we aim to serve up short, bite-sized stories on sustainability; stories based on emerging news and/or our research on various elements of the policy and science of sustainable development. So far we’ve produced 33 bites, roughly one per week since the beginning of 2019. I’ve listed these stories at the end of this blog in the order they appeared (Appendix 1) with links to each piece if you see something that catches your interest that you may have missed first time round (or maybe you only started following us recently).

Going through that list I see five themes constantly emerging:
1. The challenge of change (and the importance of crisis);
2. The culture of science (and its failure to influence policy);
3. The burden of politics and ideology (frustrating the development of good policy);
4. The value of good policy; and
5. The importance of history.

Of course, these themes arise from our interests in the sustainability sector. Peter comes from a policy background whereas I have been communicating conservation science for many years. However, I feel we have discussed enough examples to provide compelling evidence that these emerging themes are important (we would contend central) to any engagement with sustainability.

I have indicated in appendix 1 where a ‘bite’ is predominantly aimed at one of these themes should you want to read further. Many bites, of course, cross several themes.

And here are a few comments on each.

1. The challenge of change (and the importance of crisis)

Achieving enduring change is hard. Often it’s politically impossible. Vested interests, competing ideologies and weak governance frequently conspire to defeat our best intentions.

The more we (Peter and I) have pondered this point the more it seems the only way enduring change is achieved is through crisis. The status quo needs some form of disturbance to weaken its hold to enable a change in rules to occur.

Of course, there are many things you can do in the absence of a crisis and several of these we discuss. Importantly, when a crisis does occur, make sure there are effective policy solutions available to be deployed. ‘Never let a good crisis go to waste.’

2. The culture of science (and its failure to influence policy)

Scientists gather evidence to better understand the world and inform our choices. Politicians gather evidence to maximize their electoral return (power). Often this involves the politician selling an ideology or plan which usually leads to presenting evidence to justify a specific idea or refutes a competing ideology. In other words, science and politics are antithetical in their process (something that both sides rarely acknowledge).

But it’s not just that politicians fail to act on what science is telling us; they simultaneously use science as an excuse for not acting on the clear and growing threat of global change. They hold up the promise and power of technology as something that will save us when things get too bad, thereby enabling them to ignore the risk (and implement appropriate policy) today.

It’s really quite perverse. Our leaders often ignore the science that undermines their (political) position but then hide behind the promise of science in defending the consequences of that position.

3. The burden of politics and ideology

The biggest obstacle to meaningful policy reform for sustainability is the inertia of the status quo, and this inertia is based on the politics of self-interest and short termism. It might be that the politics is driven by ideology or it might be that ideology is used as a weapon of power to shore up the politics. In many ways it doesn’t matter which, as both situations add up to today’s vested interests stopping the consideration of the future.

I would note that Peter and I both used our first blog in this series to talk about Conservative ideology. Peter spoke about sustainability actually being a central tenet of mainstream Conservative philosophy (the notion of the good steward). And I discussed how climate denialism was consistent with a Libertarian hatred of big government and constraints on personal freedoms.

4. The value of good policy

There are many policy tools available to government to tackle issues relating to sustainability. For example, Peter devoted several blogs to exploring environmental accounts and environmental impact studies. He also discussed the role and value of the Productivity Commission and the Sustainability Development Goals (and several other policy institutions as well).

In all cases, these processes and institutions developed valuable ideas and assessments that ultimately failed to deliver real advances in sustainable development, not because they were flawed in themselves but because they weren’t implemented properly or integrated with other policy sectors.

A good policy poorly implemented can, in some ways, be worse than no policy at all because it gives the impression that a problem is being dealt with when it’s not, while the underlying problem just gets worse.

5. The importance of history

To understand why a good policy is not implemented in an appropriate way, or why ideology so often trumps rationality, it’s important to understand the historical context and development of an idea or process. Many of the stories we have examined have long histories, and to understand why something works as it does it’s necessary to see from where it came and how it has changed.

Sustainable development is a complex and dynamic field, hardly surprising given we live in a complex and dynamic world. Many of our reflections have looked back in time to see where something has come from and how it has changed over time. Does this throw any light on the past, present and future of the sustainability project? We think so, and in support of this claim I give you a timeline of what we have discussed so far (Appendix 2).

Of course, this is hardly a comprehensive treatise on the development of sustainability. It’s more a patchwork of ideas, a palimpsest of policy intent. But it’s not a bad start.

And we hope to fill in this patchy tapestry of ideas with greater detail as we chew on more bites in the future.

Image by vegasita from Pixabay

Appendix 1: 33 Bites [in order of appearance with main themes in brackets]

1. Environmental Sustainability: a thoroughly Conservative notion – [Ideology; history]
2. Sustainability, ‘big government’ and climate denialism [Ideology, science]
3. Why Can’t We Agree on Fixing the Environment? Tribalism & short termism[Politics, crisis]
4. Wishing for a ‘Goldilocks’ crisis’A crack in the Greenland Ice Sheet [Change, crisis, history]
5. How are we going Australia’s OECD decadal Environmental Report Card [Good policy]

6. Throwing pebbles to make change:is it aim or timing?[Crisis and change]
7. The BIG fixWhy is it so hard [Crisis, politics]
8. Duelling scientists: Science, politics and fish kills [science culture, politics]
9. Making a difference without rocking the boat The FDR Gambit [Crisis, good policy, politics]
10. Throwing pebbles and making waves: Lake Pedder and the Franklin Dam[Crisis, history]

11. Ending duplication in Environmental Impact Assessments [Policy, history]
12. Is science the answer? Technology is not the solution[Science, ideology]
13. Environmental Impact Assessment and info bureacracy [Policy, politics]
14. Confessions of a cheerleader for science: delaying action because science will save us[Science, ideology]
15. Caldwell and NEPA: the birth of Environmental Impact Assessment[History, policy]

16. This febrile environment: elections, cynicism and crisis[Politics, crisis]
17. 20 Year review of the EPBC – Australia’s national environment law [Policy, politics, history]
18. Saving the world’s biodiversity: the failure of the CBD and the need for transformative change[Policy, history, politics]
19. The value of Environmental Impact Assessment [Policy, history]
20. Retreat from reason – nihilism fundamentalism and activism [Ideology, crisis, politics]

21. Too late for no regrets pathway: a pathway to real sustainability[Politics, policy, history]
22. A short history of sustainability: how sustainable development developed[History, policy, crisis]
23. Kenneth Boulding and the spaceman economy: view from Spaceship Earth[History, policy]
24. A real climate change debate: science vs denialism[Science, politics, ideology]
25. Craik Review on green tape: environmental regulation impact on farmers[Policy, politics]

26. Trinity and the dawn of the Anthropocene [History, science]
27. An environmental accounting primer [Policy, history]
28. Displacement activity – it’s what you do when you don’t have a real environmental policy [Politics, policy]
29. The Productivity Commission and environmental regulation [Policy, politics]
30. Framing climate change: is it a moral or an economic issue [Politics, ideology]

31. The Sustainable Development Goals: game changer or rehash [Policy, history]
32. The Great Barrier Reef: best managed reef in the world down the drain [Science, policy, politics]
33. Doing the Tesla Stretch electric cars to our economic rescue [Policy, politics]

Appendix 2: The potted timeline of Sustainability Bites

500 BC: Plato comments on the denuded hills of Attica. Five hundred years later Columella argues the need for the ‘everlasting youth’ of Earth. Also in this blog, are discussions on John Locke, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Margie Thatcher.
Environmental Sustainability: a thoroughly Conservative notion

1940s till now: Following the ‘reboot’ of WW2, the international community has made many concerted steps to develop a workable strategy for sustainable development.
A short history of sustainability: how sustainable development developed.

1941: Reflecting on how President Roosevelt prepared for war prior to the crisis of Pearl Harbour.
Making a difference without rocking the boat The FDR Gambit

1945: Monday, 16 July, the world’s first atomic bomb is tested, and the Anthropocene begins (the world will never be the same).
Trinity and the dawn of the Anthropocene

1966: New ways of perceiving the environment came to the fore in the 1960s, Boulding’s evocation of a Spaceship Earth was one of the important ones.
Kenneth Boulding and the spaceman economy: view from Spaceship Earth

1969 (and the 1960s): The US drafts its National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), marking the birth of modern environmental policy (ending a decade in which environmental decline was finally triggering legislative responses)
Caldwell and NEPA: the birth of Environmental Impact Assessment

1970s & 80s: The rise of environmental politics in Australia. It really began with the flooding of a beautiful Tasmanian mountain lake.
Throwing pebbles and making waves: Lake Pedder and the Franklin Dam

1972: Anthony Downs publishes on the ‘issues-attention cycle’
The BIG fixWhy is it so hard [Crisis, politics]

1972/73: The world confronts resource scarcity while simultaneously reflecting on measures of economic welfare. These were the antecedents of the environmental accounts.
An environmental accounting primer

1990s till today: A short history of attempts to reform Environmental Impact Assessment in Australia
Ending duplication in Environmental Impact Assessments

1998: Australia established the Productivity Commission to enhance the government’s efforts improving our economy, society and environment (and probably in that order).
The Productivity Commission and environmental regulation

1999: Australia’s premier national environmental law – the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act – is passed. Twenty years on, it’s in need of a major overhaul.
20 Year review of the EPBC – Australia’s national environment law

2000: The book ‘The Tipping Point’ is released
Throwing pebbles to make change:is it aim or timing?

2005-2009: The United Kingdom shifts from a bland incremental climate policy to an ambitious goal, enshrined in law. That goal is to cut emissions by 80% by 2050.
Too late for no regrets pathway: a pathway to real sustainability

2015: The Sustainable Development Goals are adopted by the UN (following on from Agenda 21 in 1992 and the Millennium Development Goals in 2000).
The Sustainable Development Goals: game changer or rehash

2016/17: The Great Barrier Reef experiences mass bleaching under climate change
Wishing for a ‘Goldilocks’ crisis’A crack in the Greenland Ice Sheet

2017: Ex-Prime Minister Abbott denies climate change to an international forum
Sustainability, ‘big government’ and climate denialism

2017: At the same time that Abbott was denying the existence of climate change, the head of his Church, Pope Francis was saying: “Human-induced climate change is a scientific reality, and its decisive mitigation is a moral and religious imperative for humanity.”
Framing climate change: is it a moral or an economic issue

2019: OECD delivers Australia an environmental report card (this is a process that more could be made of)
How are we going Australia’s OECD decadal Environmental Report Card

2019: Mass fish kills signal the latest impact of severe weather events (exacerbated by climate change)
Duelling scientists: Science, politics and fish kills

2019: Geoengineering is being promoted as a silver bullet for climate change
Is science the answer? Technology is not the solution

2019: UN reports unprecedented losses in biodiversity (bit like similar reports in 2015, 2010, 2005; each worse than the one before)
Saving the world’s biodiversity: the failure of the CBD and the need for transformative change

2019: Australia votes and the Conservatives get back in, a repudiation of the growing calls for environmental policy reform.
Retreat from reason – nihilism fundamentalism and activism

2019: Latest outlook reports show the Great Barrier Reef is dying and government efforts to fix water quality are failing.
The Great Barrier Reef: best managed reef in the world down the drain

Making better sense of Australia’s Environmental Impact Assessment

Surely we can put an end to overlap and duplication

By Peter Burnett

Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is a cornerstone of our system for protecting environmental values in Australia. A long standing problem with the EIA process has been the need to do them to meet both state and federal requirements.

You wouldn’t think that eliminating duplication and overlap between federal and state EIA processes (without compromising environmental outcomes) would be that hard. And yet so it has proven to be.

To date, there have been four attempts to address this issue, on each occasion by creating a mechanism under which the Commonwealth could accredit state EIA processes. Success has been limited and, with an election coming on, some are returning to this rather muddy policy watering hole. The Minerals Council of Australia, a major industry stakeholder, has renewed its call for more progress in this area, while Labor on the other hand recently ruled accreditation out, though it remains in favour of efficient regulation.

Surely there’s a solution here? To appreciate how difficult the issue is, consider what has gone before.

A short history of the fight to end duplication

Prime Minister Hawke was the first to put this topic on the agenda. He raised it as part of his 1990 ‘New Federalism’ push. The overarching theme was efficiency, and removing duplication in EIA was one way to achieve it.

The main result was an accreditation mechanism in the Intergovernmental Agreement on the Environment (IGAE, 1992). Unfortunately, attempts by several states to gain accreditation came to nought. This can be put down in part to the fact that Hawke had been replaced as Prime Minister by Paul Keating, and Keating wasn’t a great fan of cooperative federalism.

Next up it was Robert Hill, Environment Minister in the first Howard Government. He went one step further than the IGAE and included provision for accreditation in Australia’s new national environmental law, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act).

There were two types of statutory agreement, one for accreditation of environmental impact assessment processes (‘assessment bilaterals’) and another for accreditation of state final decisions on development proposals (‘approval bilaterals’). With an assessment bilateral, there is only one EIA but still two decision-makers, one federal and one state. Only an approvals bilateral gets it down to a single process and a single (state) decision-maker. Despite the availability of a statutory process, agreement proved difficult and although some assessment bilaterals were negotiated in the early 2000s, approvals bilaterals proved a bridge too far.

The Gillard government was the next to take on the challenge, this time under the title of a ‘Seamless National Economy’ program. However, Prime Minister Gillard pulled the plug on negotiations, on the basis that the result of accrediting different state systems would be to ‘create the regulatory equivalent of a Dalmatian dog’.

Finally, the Abbott Government pursued a ‘one-stop-shop’ initiative to accredit the states. It managed to negotiate assessment bilaterals with every state, a modest achievement, but the holy grail of approvals bilaterals fell by the wayside when the Government discovered that it needed some minor tweaks to the EPBC Act to make accreditation work smoothly. Environment groups were successful in persuading several cross-benchers about the risks of environmental standards slipping, and the Government allowed its amendment Bill to lapse with the 2016 election, without calling on a final vote.

Is it worth another try?

Why is doing this so hard?

The first problem is partly that environment is a shared federal and state responsibility. Even though land management is primarily a state responsibility, the feds were actually on the scene first, with the Whitlam Government passing Australia’s first EIA law in 1974. The feds have been there ever since and I can’t see them vacating the field in favour of the states.

Nor can I see a solution in amending the Constitution. The Hawke Government looked at this in 1989 but, in contrast to some non-environmental Constitutional proposals it had taken to referendum, abandoned the idea without taking it to the people. Giving all the power to one level of government seems to be going too far, yet this is cake that resists the cutting knife.

The second problem is that decisions to approve (or not) development proposals like mines are discretionary. While an approvals bilateral under the EPBC Act could protect against egregious decisions (eg a development likely to cause an extinction), it’s much harder to write an agreement that would stop a pro-development state minister from simply ‘going easy’ on a developer by imposing weak conditions. Standards might be maintained on paper, but accreditation might exacerbate the existing weakness of EIA, the so-called ‘death of a thousand cuts’, by making each of those cuts a little larger.

This leaves the option of going around the problem. If we can’t solve it by accreditation, what about a completely different approach? If there are two objectives, reducing duplication while protecting the environment to a high standard, I think there are only two approaches that can work.

Environmental planning

The first is environmental planning, which involves getting ahead of the game and working out, comprehensively, where development can and can’t occur and under what conditions. If environmental planning is done well, approving particular developments can become quite straightforward. Trouble is, it’s expensive and may also be politically unpalatable because it can bring on all your development disputes at once, as the planners start consulting society about various possibilities, some of which may otherwise never have arisen.

The second is a very detailed set of rules, for example a rule prohibiting development in areas of critical habitat for threatened species. A major problem with this approach is that you either have to identify sensitivities such as critical habitat in advance (which starts to look like environmental planning) or identify them during assessment, which could weigh individual assessments down with some expensive and time consuming extra work, thus failing the test of efficiency.

The solution? If there were an easy option, governments would have taken it long ago. My own view is that we have to bite the bullet and do environmental planning. It would cost, but if done well (which has to include doing the consultation well) I think the investment would pay long term dividends, both environmental and economic. Trouble is, modern governments are very focused on the short-term and tend to give short shrift to long term propositions. The solution is there, but don’t hold your breath.

[Image by Sumanley xulx from Pixabay]

The FDR Gambit

Making a difference (through environmental policy) without rocking the boat

By Peter Burnett

Our environment is in serious decline and our policy response is seriously inadequate. We need to act but, short of a serious crisis, it’s difficult to see what might cause our leaders to take action proportionate to the problem. The major parties are reluctant to move ahead of public opinion and even if there were a crisis and public opinion shifted quickly, would we be prepared to respond?

The efforts of US President Franklin D Roosevelt (FDR) to prepare his country for World War II, a ‘foreign’ or ‘European’ war of which most Americans wanted no part (before Pearl Harbour), suggest there is much that governments could do, even when determined not to rock the political boat.

One researcher, Andrew Macintosh, has noted that governments seem to be willing to deal with certain environmental problems (such as pollution or over-consumption of natural resources), but not others (such as climate change or biodiversity conservation). As a result, Macintosh has proposed some useful rules of thumb about the political limitations on what governments will or won’t tackle in our current policy climate.

First up, most governments only adopt environmental policy that offers some clear short term benefits, such as better health and amenity from reduced air pollution, or keeping a fishery going. These short-term benefits make it politically worthwhile to accept some limited costs.

Beyond these cases, Macintosh argues that governments are only prepared to take real action on environmental problems within boundaries defined by three rules of thumb: avoid significant budgetary costs, avoid significant impacts on economic growth and avoid significant conflict with vested interests.

The policy straight-jacket

That’s a useful heuristic to keep in mind for anyone proposing policy action on the environment.

First, does the policy have a significant impact on the budget? Increasing the environment budget to any noticeable degree will either require savings, and the attendant political pain, in other budget areas, or increasing the size of the budget overall, which will often be seen as putting a drag on the economy.

Second, does the policy slow economic growth? Economic growth has been the mantra of all western governments pretty much since the end of the World War II, when they first pursued growth as a way of giving everyone a job as the world returned to peace. This will often rule out measures such as environmental taxes and pricing (even though economic theory shows that proper environmental pricing will grow the economic pie in the long run, by reducing ‘spillovers’ from the economy onto the environment).

And third, does the policy cause significant conflict with vested interests? If it does, those interests may change their votes or influence others to do so. The 2010 campaign by the mining industry against the proposed mining tax in Australia is an example par excellence of how effective some interests can be when they feel threatened.

Presidential nous

Despite the policy straight-jacket these rules create, I’d like to argue that there is still some scope for significant policy action, without courting defeat at the next election. FDR took some very effective policy action as World War II loomed over his country, despite very strong isolationist sentiment among the public.

FDR acknowledged this sentiment by making and maintaining a pledge that ‘your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.’ At the same time, he managed to provide considerable support to America’s soon-to-be allies, while also preparing America itself for war. He worked with the British to plan for war. He persuaded the Congress to pass a law that enabled America to become the ‘arsenal of democracy’, on the argument that giving him the discretion to make foreign military sales would help to keep the US out of the war! He also moved to expand and re-equip America’s own armed forces.

Admittedly FDR’s strategy involved some secrecy and deception, something I am not advocating here. Yet his efforts show just how much can be achieved within major policy constraints.

Getting on with the job

Taking a lesson from FDR, a government determined to address environmental degradation as far as possible might, without breaking Macintosh’s rules of thumb:

Engage in ongoing social dialogue to build broad support for stronger action. The Climate Commission, created under the Gillard Government’s 2011 Clean Energy Future package, to provide authoritative information to the community on climate change, including at ‘town hall’ style meetings, provides an example of how this might be done.
Review existing policy comprehensively, redirecting resources as necessary. This exercise might involve two stages. The first would be to adopt an overarching goal for environmental policy, eg to maintain ecological function. The second would be to redirect existing environment spending to the programs most likely to advance that goal. For example, this might result in resources being redirected into research on ecosystem restoration.
Establish a comprehensive and coherent environmental information policy optimised to support policy-relevant decision-making, for example by establishing environmental accounts based on the UN System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA), prioritising the population of accounts for key ecological functions and processes.
Increase environmental diplomacy, to promote international agreement and build capacity for quick action when attitudes change.
Establish or reform institutions such as an Environmental Protection Agency, to enhance expertise, transparency, continuity and accountability in environmental decision-making.
Renegotiate federal–state cooperation under a new Intergovernmental Agreement on the Environment to improve the efficiency of overlapping responsibilities.
Negotiate reforms with business to exchange improved efficiency for improved environmental outcomes – for example, business might accept a stricter environmental offsets policy in return for decisions that are quicker and more predicable.

Let’s get on with it

While such measures might seem incremental, their combined effect could be considerable, as present policies often lack clear goal clarity and consistency. If a government thought such an approach a little too mild, it could always take a further leaf from FDR’s book and push the boundaries a little further!

Hopefully, it won’t take a Pearl Harbour moment (an environmental disaster) because, with better environmental information and communication, public opinion will change as evidence mounts that the risks arising from environment degradation are ever-increasing.

But, either way, we can still do a lot better in the meantime without rocking the political boat.