- Thinking About It by Zee Feed
- Posts
- TRIGGERED!
Fixing the laws that protect the Australian environment has been on Labor’s agenda for a long time. It was a promise they took to the 2022 election, but held off on taking any action for a few years. In the past 12 months they have finally started making some changes…
I regret to inform you, the changes are not good.
The laws in question come from the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC Act). If a new fossil fuel project will impact any of the set criteria in the EPBC Act, it gets referred to the Environment Minister for evaluation and approval or rejection. So it’s like a checkpoint for what can go ahead and what can’t.
As Varsha Yajman wrote for us in this excellent piece during the election campaign: “The reforms were supposed to make sure that the climate impacts of new fossil fuel projects be considered explicitly in the approval process; these changes are now 25 years overdue and were recommended by two independent inquiries.”
Just to make that point very, very clear: as the laws stand now, when the Environment Minister is asked to consider approvals for fossil fuel projects they do not have to consider greenhouse gas emissions.
That’s why we see things like Environment Minister Murray Watt approving a 40-year extension to Woodside’s gas extraction project off the coast of north-west WA.
Labor has been working away on drafting an amendment to the EPBC Act. A lot of people hoped – or even expected — that the amendment would introduce a “climate trigger” to the Act (which would require the Minister to consider climate impacts as part of the evaluation process). After all, this is a government that pitches itself as progressive and ready to tackle the climate crisis head on.
Anthony Albanese first proposed a climate trigger 20 years ago, via a private member’s bill in 2005. He said at the time: “We know that the Howard government has been considering and procrastinating on a climate change trigger since 1999 … “It is time to act.”
Now, Albanese leads a government that has almost* total control. And it has been confirmed this week that the Labor government will not include a climate trigger in their EPBC reforms.
[IF YOU NEED TO SCREAM INTO A PILLOW DO IT NOW]
The amendments will be introduced into parliament in the sitting fortnight that starts Monday. What will be included? It’s still very unclear, but the details that have been reported so far include:
Fines for companies that breach environmental laws, including that companies would have to hand over any profits they made from breaking the laws;
Finally creating a new federal Environment Protection Authority (the existing EPAs are state-level only) that can force companies to stop work if they are causing harm;
Any high-emissions projects must disclose the amount of emissions expected and their plans to reduce them in line with net-zero by 2050 targets.
Some of these items are fine. In my view, it still leaves too much wiggle room for companies to say one thing, do another, and for the Minister to simply say “Hmmm, looks okay to me.” Both Labor and Liberal parties have been captured by mining companies, neither has the track record for us to trust their judgement.
Which way will Labor swing?
*I wrote above that the Labor government has almost total control. It totally dominates the House of Representatives and can pass whatever bills it wants there.
But in the Senate it does not have total control. Coalition and Greens Senators are the only real opposition to this government, which means that for the rest of this parliamentary term all the action will happen in the upper house. That’s where we need to be watching, because Labor will generally not be able to pass bills without the support of other parties in the Senate.
If the chamber is full with all 76 Senators present, a bill requires 39 votes to pass.
Labor has 29 Senators, so would need the support of at least 10 others. Here are the options:
23 Liberals
10 Greens
4 Nationals
4 One Nation
6 independents (some of these are the single representative of their party, for example Ralph Babet for UAP, for ease I’ve just listed them as independents)
If Labor works with the Liberals/Coalition on a bill, it can pass some very conservative policies. Not to mention the nightmare blunt rotation when you factor in the hard-right Libs and Nationals, One Nation and Babet…
If Labor works with the Greens on a bill, it can pass some very progressive policies.
The EPBC Act will be a litmus test. In its current form, the Greens don’t support it and neither does the Coalition – both for pretty different reasons, as you could imagine. Both parties will ask for changes or trade-offs to earn their support. Which side will Labor work with to get it passed? We’ll find out in the next two weeks.
Right after the May election we were all wondering whether Labor would use its untouchable super-majority to bring in the progressive reforms Australia needs, or whether it would completely transform into a Liberal-lite party.
The answer is neither. This will be a shape-shifting government, one that contorts itself from moment to moment, policy to policy. There are no clear boundaries or set values that you can define this Labor government by — and it’s up to you whether you think that’s a good thing or not.
Smart stuff on the Internet 💭
All the stuff I found on the web that made me think, smile, or have an ‘aha!’ moment. Spend your Sunday reading them – you'll be better off for it:
My Time as a Prisoner of Israel on Current Affairs Magazine
“After about an hour of kneeling in silence, I heard faint footsteps approaching … Dare I look up? I dared. It was Itamar Ben-Gvir—the far-right Ziofascist politician and member of Netanyahu’s coalition government—surrounded by young, male groupies, here to humiliate us on camera. But they failed. Almost immediately and spontaneously, several hundred of us started chanting “free Palestine!” and addressing him as a war criminal and genocidaire. I was close enough to see his smile melt into a frown, his frown melt into shock, and finally, shock into rage. I was close enough to see what happens when trophy kills refuse to submit.”
The Goon Squad on Harper’s Magazine
This is willlllld lol. Just a warning if you don’t already know what a “gooner” is, the topic and this article is NSFW. “For one thing, and crucially: most gooners do not regularly masturbate for eight to twelve hours at a stretch, as I’d initially been led to believe. They tend to do that only a few times a month, the rest of the time masturbating for—and I really did try to calculate this—an average of two or three hours a day. In other words, the goonstate, so central to the subculture’s branding and self-conception, is only rarely attained.”
The Fraser Manifesto: A former prime minister's plan to replace the Liberal party on Cut Through podcast and YouTube
Me on the pod! Recording this episode really got me thinking about whether we’ve overstated the role of independents in this government… “We are currently witnessing the death throes of the Liberal Party. Ten years ago former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser predicted this moment would come, and he spent his final years working on the answer: a new political party, built on traditional liberal values but without the now-toxic name … [It] takes a surprisingly progressive stance on issues like immigration, our relationship with the US, intergenerational equity and a post-carbon economy.”
Colonialism’s new Gold Rush: how 80 per cent of Australia’s critical mineral mines exploit Aboriginal land without true consent on Overland
This week Albanese and Trump announced a $13billion deal for the US to have access to Australia’s critical mineral mines. But 4 out of 5 of these mines are owned by First Nations peoples, under Native Title claims. “The phrase “green colonialism” has begun to circulate among activists and scholars. It refers to the way climate-friendly industries can replicate old injustices if they ignore Indigenous rights. In Australia, the overlaps are striking: clean energy