Is it time to shuffle Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett off the Rudd front bench to make way for a dynamic new talent to preside over one of the country’s key portfolios?
As Toby Zeigler used to say in “The West Wing’’, he isn’t cutting through. By splitting off climate change and water – the biggest, environmental issues facing Australia – Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has left Garrett in charge of a grab-bag of loose change in an environmental-lite portfolio.
But he does have responsibility for a vitally important issue – the need to overhaul the Federal Environment Protection and Biodiversity Act. Earlier this year, West Australian Greens Senator Rachel Siewert doggedly pursued the need for the Act to be reformed, and a Senate inquiry into the effectiveness of the Act is running at the moment. The majority of submissions point out it’s being used to rubber-stamp development proposals – anything that triggers the Act is referred to the Department of Environment, Water and Environment for assessment and subsequent Ministerial approval. There are few refusals.
Australia does not have a proud record of biodiversity conservation. In 1845, Polish explorer and geologist Paul Strezlecki raised concerns about the impacts of large-scale land clearing. Around the same time, French geographer Edmund Marin la Meslee described dead, ring-barked forests he encountered in the Murray Darling Basin as resembling “ a part of Dante’s Inferno.’’
We have the worst mammal extinction record in the world, with 22 mammals becoming extinct since European settlement some 200 years ago. Currently, more than 1500 of our mammals, birds, reptiles, frogs and plants are listed under state and federal laws as threatened with extinction, and 3000 ecosystems are on the danger list. Faced with those figures, we can’t afford complacency or political procrastination. We are trashing the place.
Now, we have a situation where one of Australia’s rarest birds, the swift parrot, is under threat from logging for export woodchips in Tasmania’s southern eucalypt forests. These birds are rarer than China’s giant pandas or Africa’s mountain gorillas. If our politicians are not prepared to take urgent and extraordinary action to protect their nesting habitat during the spring breeding season, then we deserve a tongue-lashing from the World Conservation Union when they release their updated Red List of the world’s threatened species next week.
Birds Australia – our biggest science-based conservation organisation - has called for Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, Garrett and Tasmanian Premier David Bartlett to agree to halt logging in the Wielangta forest where hundreds of swift parrots have recently arrived from the mainland . There are less than 1000 pairs of swifties left in the wild, and a bumper blooming of nectar-rich eucalypts in Wielangta is pointing to the best breeding season in the past four years. Just the ticket to boost numbers. But the areas where the birds are nesting will be logged within weeks, and nesting hollows, eggs and parrot chicks will be destroyed.
This is a conservation emergency, but there has been no swift (pardon such an irresistible pun) action from the Rudd Government to acknowledge the seriousness of the situation or move to respond. Birds Australia wants a five-year ban on logging in Wielangta and funding for research to monitor parrot conservation. That the government hasn’t responded publicly to acknowledge concerns expressed by the country’s blue-chip conservation organisation sends a worrying signal that they’re under-estimating the clout of an organisation that attracts 30,000 supporters across the world. Yes minister, you can ignore press releases from the Wildos and the Woofers, but Birds Australia is a conservation heavyweight. They matter.
Garrett argues he’s powerless to act on Wielangta, and the issue is the responsibility of Federal Forestry minister Tony Burke. But neither minister has, as yet, issued any statement acknowledging the urgency of the situation, despite the swift parrot being listed as endangered by the World Conservation Union.
Birding blogs across the country are questioning Garrett’s lack of action. A recent posting on the Australian Birding List suggests taking court action “to require Peter Garrett to carry out his duties’’ to protect the parrots. It points out that Clause 60 of the EPBC Act appears to give the minister power to suspend the Regional Forest Agreement that’s pertinent to Wielangta. The relevant clause states if a “significant impact is occurring or imminent’’, the Minister may “suspend the effect of the agreement or specified provisions.’’ Clause 38 can also be interpreted as conferring the power for the Minister to insist the intention of the Regional Forestry Agreement be upheld with respect to protection of endangered species.
Last November, the appeal bench of the Federal Court over-ruled a previous decision by Justice Shane Marshall that logging in the Wielangta forest was illegal because of its impact on the habitat of three endangered species – the swift parrot, Tasmania wedge-tailed eagles and Wielangta stag beetle. Justice Marshall’s decision was hailed by scientists and environmentalists as a watershed decision upholding protection of Australia’s forests. The Federal and Tasmanian governments successfully appealed the decision, with the appeal bench upholding Justice Marshall’s finding that logging had “a significant and unacceptable impact’’ on the Wielangta endangered species, but finding – on a technicality - that logging was exempt from the Federal environment protection laws. It’s a conservation catch-22 that needs fixing if we’re serious about tackling Australia’s biodiversity crisis.
The appeal bench also ruled that once a forestry agreement is signed by state and federal governments, it can only continue if both signatories agree to allow it. If the Rudd Government were serious about saving endangered species, they’d call for the Wielangta agreement to be suspended and renegotiated. Otherwise, like the classic John Cleese sketch, we’re looking at an ex-parrot “whose metabolic processes are now 'istory’’
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