![]() ![]() The environment minister, Sussan Ley, signed off on the decision shortly before the election was called. That streak was finally broken this week after fire regimes that cause wildlife decline was officially listed as a key threat to Australia’s environment, 14 years after it was first proposed. It argues an overhaul of Australia’s threat abatement system is necessary after years of neglect, evidenced by overdue and outdated species recovery plans and the near decade-long failure by the Coalition to formally list major threats. “You’re not going to see results in one term of government.”Ī new report highlights 100 animals and plants – including the orange-bellied parrot – at imminent risk of extinction. But because it’s a long term, insidious problem and there are so many threats coalescing and interacting … it’s hard to get your head around. “They pay attention to individual crises, like the fires. “They’re obviously making a judgment that it’s not going to turn the election for them,” she says. That the climate and nature crises are intertwined is acknowledged globally.īut the conversation about either of these issues in the campaign so far has been characterised by commentary on power bills, based on unsourced modelling, and a $220m pledge by the prime minister, Scott Morrison, for native forestry in Tasmania.īefore the election was called, the Morrison government also promised $50m for a single species, the koala, which had its conservation status upgraded in February from vulnerable to endangered.Ĭarol Booth, the principal policy analyst at the Invasive Species Council, says the silence from the major parties on what the next government will do to change the trajectory reveals a lot. The Australian Capital Territory’s faunal emblem, the gang-gang cockatoo, entered the list as endangered, with the expert scientific committee highlighting the climate crisis as the major driver of reductions to populations of the bird.Īnd a week before the election was called, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change again sounded the alarm that the world was rapidly running out of time to limit warming to 1.5C. The rate of land-clearing in states such as Queensland and New South Wales has been increasing and the addition of new species to Australia’s national list of threatened wildlife was accelerated by the country’s worst bushfire disaster. That report could have been tabled by the Morrison government before the campaign began but has been withheld. In the past term alone, three official reports, two from the Australian National Audit Office plus the independent review of Australia’s environmental laws by the former competition watchdog head Graeme Samuel, highlighted a litany of environmental failures.Ī fourth, the five-yearly State of the Environment report, is also expected to highlight the ongoing decline. ![]() That Australia is not doing enough to protect its environment is well known. The South Australian independent senator Rex Patrick this week called for a change in the way the environment is treated in the next parliament, including requiring the prime minister to make an annual extinction statement, listing the species newly declared as either extinct or critically endangered. He says while he was proud of some of the things that were achieved under Hunt, he felt restricted due to climate denialism within the Coalition and the refusal to deal with habitat degradation. “The trouble is the Greens are the only party that says that, and it is seen as a fringe or extremist position.”Īndrews spent three years as threatened species commissioner. “If we’re serious about what it means to be Australian … we are a rich enough country with enough habitat and enough cleared area to dedicate the remaining land to protection,” he says. Given so much of Australia’s landscape had already been cleared, he believes the time has come for a conversation about sharing what remains with the country’s unique, and increasingly struggling, wildlife. We can’t keep defining ourselves by our wildlife when we’re losing it to extinction.” We’ve got them on our money, our sports teams, our coat of arms, the tail of Qantas. “That makes me really sad because Australians define ourselves through our wildlife. “Biodiversity and nature have been completely absent from this campaign so far,” he says. But, as far as the first two weeks of the election campaign are concerned, the environment may as well not exist. ![]() After a political term marked by consecutive summer disasters and multiple official reports highlighting government failure, he sees it as a major issue. ![]()
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