The most important task when it comes to the EPBC Act is to fix it so that we get effective environmental and heritage protection. Why? Because quite clearly we don’t have that now. After eight years, three terms, of this government we have a failed environmental protection system which is leading to animal extinctions. It’s leading to coral bleaching. It’s leading to marine heatwaves. It’s leading to the destruction of ecosystems around this country.
Read more...Minister, in your speech to the Press Club, you accused your opponents, which presumably includes all Australians who rightly want to see proper protection of our environment, of being too focused on activism rather than outcomes. Isn’t it the outcomes that are the problem? Isn’t that why people are moved to activism? Minister, when are you, as the Minister for the Environment, going to exercise that responsibility rather than being an apologist for a government that has presided over serious and steepening environmental decline?
Read more...World Oceans Day is an opportunity to remember that the oceans are the lungs of our planet and they sustain biodiversity that is essential to life on earth.
Read more...All of us who get to argue in this place for environmental and heritage protection know that we do so on the foundation that is laid through community activism—local people, traditional owners, action groups, preservation societies, history buffs, bushwalkers, artists and amateur naturalists, one and all. It is local people who make the case for protecting the things we will share.
Read more...Evidence obtained in this week’s Senate Estimates again shows the Grand Canyon that exists between announcement and delivery with the Morrison Government, this time with a new instalment of inaction when it comes to tackling Australia’s plastic waste crisis.
Read more...Following the explosion of the caves in Juukan Gorge, no one can seriously argue the current system is working. Our whole approach needs to improve. If we don’t do better when it comes to protecting our heritage places, they will continue to be at risk of being damaged or lost, especially in the case of First Nations cultural sites and material.
Read more...The Morrison Government’s marine park budget announcement falls grotesquely short of reversing the damage the Liberals and Nationals have done to marine protected areas, after they cut 40 million hectares from Labor’s 2012 plan, leaving Australia’s under threat marine environments exposed.
Read more...Australians understand the literally vital importance of healthy oceans for us and for our fellow human beings around the planet. Our oceans produce the oxygen we breathe, they regulate our climate, they provide seafood that can be sustainably fished, and they sustain an incredible range of biodiversity that we have a duty to maintain and to protect. This government has weakened ocean protection, failed to improve the position of endangered marine species, squibbed the opportunity to reform the EPBC Act, refused to take climate change seriously, and been complacent about the waste crisis that sees tonnes of plastic going into our waterways and, ultimately, the sea.
Read more...Now since 2018, we’ve had a Prime Minister who loves marketing, he loves packaging, there’s been a push to use waste and recycling as a conveyor belt of shiny ‘announceables’ that give the appearance of environmental action, which in turn gives some Liberal members something they can cling on to in the otherwise scorched earth landscape of the coalition’s environmental performance.
Read more...The Coalition’s much-vaunted 2019 election commitment to help tackle plastic pollution in the Pacific has gone nowhere.
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