Original story by Bob Brown, ABC Environment
Voters uninspired by a choice between Labor and Liberal have a third option, writes Bob Brown.
AS AUSTRALIA’S PRESIDENTAL-STYLE election unfolds, the environment is being squeezed off the agenda. Neither Tony Abbott nor Kevin Rudd has an environmental bone in his body. Far from the environment being a non-issue, it is being undermined on a wide front by both party leaders.
Who cares about these guys? Only the Greens, says Bob Brown.
Both are committed to winding back the climate change laws which Christine Milne, Adam Bandt and I negotiated with Julia Gillard and her ministers. Both will allow mining in Tasmania’s Tarkine rainforest. Both will let Japan send its whaling fleet back to Antarctica next summer. Both back thousands of coal seam gas wells in the nation’s farmlands regardless of what the farmers think.
A vote for Labor or the Coalition is a vote for the continued loss of the habitat of rare and endangered wildlife like the swift parrot, koala, Tasmanian devil and Victoria’s state emblem, Leadbeaters possum.
Older voters will remember Gough Whitlam signing the World Heritage convention in the wake of the bloody-minded destruction of Tasmania’s Lake Pedder National Park by Tasmanian Labor Premier ‘Electric Eric’ Reece. That led directly to the Great Barrier Reef’s protective listing. Malcolm Fraser stopped whaling and protected Fraser Island. Famously Bob Hawke saved the Franklin River thirty years ago and then the the Daintree Rainforest and Kakadu.
However, under mounting pressure from resource extractors such as miners and loggers, along with the greenwash industry, this process of protecting the nation’s natural heritage with real teeth has slowed dramatically.
In the meagre Howard years, although the Prime Minister declared himself to be “greenish”, no new world heritage nominations were made without the prior agreement of the state involved. Even so, after his celebrated 2004 stoush with Labor leader Mark Latham over Tasmania’s forests, Howard protected the nation’s largest temperate rainforest, the Tarkine, from imminent logging.
In 2013, Labor’s environment minister, Tony Burke, goaded by NSW right power broker Paul Howes, dumped the National Heritage Council’s advice to protect the same Tarkine from mining. Burke gave the go-ahead for the bulldozers to invade vital habitat for the Tasmanian devil and Tasmania’s giant wedgetail eagle. Burke’s successor, Mark Butler, moved quickly this month to agree to more mining even though it was subject to objection by environmentalists in the courts. Butler turned down requests from Save the Tarkine (I am the group’s patron) to visit the Tarkine rainforest.
A vote for Rudd is a vote for Tarkine mining. Tony Abbott ditto. What can environmentally-alert voters do?
Not voting is not an option. Voting Green is. It is also the obvious alternative for major party supporters disgusted by that other potent vote-turner, the inhumane treatment of asylum seekers coming to this wealthy nation by boat.
If the Coalition wins the election as the polls suggest, the Senate becomes doubly important for the environment. The Coalition will be hoping it can win control of the Senate to convert it from the people’s backstop to Abbott’s rubber stamp.
While the Rudd-Abbott contest will produce no environmental dividend, it may well produce its own brand of greenwash. Watch for policy announcements with pictures of young people planting trees while, out of shot, Victoria’s great forests continue to fall and Leadbeaters possum follows the Tasmanian tiger down that needless path to deliberated extinction.
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