In this interview, Saxon Davidson appeared on ADH to discuss the IPA’s research on the Nature Positive Plan.
All media appearances posted onto the IPA website are directly related to the promotion and dissemination of IPA research.
Below is a transcript of the interview.
Lyle Shelton:
Saxon, thanks so much for your time. The red and green tape involved in getting development off the ground before any new EPA comes into existence is already insane. What’s the government’s rationale for this new mega environment department?
Saxon Davidson:
Well, thank you for having me. As you said, red tape and green tape is already at record levels. It’s already at a record high in the country right now, and this is just adding more layers of environmental bureaucracy onto it. The government have justified this through the Samuel Review, which was completed around 2020. However, the Samuel Review never advocated for an EPA to be introduced into the federal legislation, the EPBC Act. The government have just followed the greeny ideals of an EPA into the EPBC Act, and this EPA is going to be wide-ranging, it’s going to be mammoth, it’s going to be become the sixth-most resourced agency in the country according to new research released by the IPA, and will become the fifth-most staffed agency in the country. This agency will be mammoth, wide-ranging, and will simply add more layers of bureaucracy and more layers of red and green tape onto our already burdened agricultural and mining sectors.
Lyle Shelton:
Yeah, absolutely. I want to get into these specific numbers in a moment, Saxon, but you’ve said in the material that the IPA has put out that this is part of a nature positive agenda by the Albanese government. Now, we all want to be nature positive, whatever that means, and we all want to protect the environment, but this sounds like a form of pantheism, some sort of religious cult of nature worship. What do they mean by nature positive?
Saxon Davidson:
Well, nature positive is just a euphemism. Nature positive is actually just Australia negative. It is a plan put forward basically to stifle all industry that the government dislikes and that the Greenies dislike. This will stifle major mining resource projects, it will stifle agriculture, and even people in Labour. People in the Labour left understand that this could potentially be a problem. Roger Cook, the premier of Western Australia, just yesterday came out and said that, “We want more detail on this,” because this will stifle the backbone of our economy, Western Australia, Queensland, resources in the Northern Territory. They understand and people in those areas understand that this is going to cancel jobs, it’s going to cancel economic development, and it’s going to stifle the livelihoods of the people living in those regions.
Lyle Shelton:
Well, let’s just get a sense of the sheer scale and size of this new environmental protection Australia bureaucracy. You mentioned it’s going to be the sixth-biggest Commonwealth agency. What sort of staffing levels are we talking about? What sort of funding, what sort of budget will this have?
Saxon Davidson:
We costed that once this agency is up and running and fully operational, it’s going to cost $1.8 billion per year to run, it will have a staffing cost of 694 million, so over a third of all costs will just be in staffing, and this will service around 4,700 staff in this agency alone. This will increase the staffing of the climate change portfolio by 80% on current levels. It’s going to be widely expansive in regulatory staffing in the climate change energy and water portfolio. It’s going to be a mammoth expansion of what we currently have already. You know, the climate change portfolio is responsible for a large proportion of the increase in regulatory staffing, which reached 100,000 for the first time this year. It’s going to be a mammoth expansion.
Lyle Shelton:
It’s quite frightening if you’re a farmer, if you’re a miner. You’ve got this well-resourced squadron, legion of bureaucrats that are policing your activities. One of the disturbing things I noticed in the material that the IPA has put out is you’re saying that a key component of this nature positive plan is to transfer power which is currently exercised by the Minister for Climate Change, Energy, and Environment, and Water, and that this power from the minister, the elected person, is to go to an unelected and unaccountable CEO of Environmental Protection Australia. What’s all that about?
Saxon Davidson:
Well, it’s just the continued democratic backsliding that we’ve seen under this government. This government has continually tried to disrupt the democratic norms in our country. We saw that at the bigger scale with the Voice to Parliament, but this is just a continuation of this trend in this.
What’s actually more alarming about this, about environmental policy becoming more unaccountable, is that there are actually provisions within the EPA bill to make those decisions secret. There is a provision in the bill that would allow for the secrecy of decisions if it put into danger the international relations of the nation. Now a big unaccountable body which is regulating and burdening our most important industries, which we export and which earn the royalty revenue that we all benefit from, is, of course, going to put under stress the international relations of our country. We saw this with the introduction of the Safeguard Mechanism, where Japanese investors were concerned about projects that they had heavily invested in and asked whether this could be exempt from the Safeguard Mechanism. Now, that obviously puts under stress the international relations if our own regulation is putting our exports and our trade with our international partners at risk.
Lyle Shelton:
So you’re talking about sovereign risk here-
Saxon Davidson:
So there’s a high chance the decisions made will be highly secret.
Lyle Shelton:
Yeah. So you’re talking about sovereign risk associated with this sort of legislation?
Saxon Davidson:
Absolutely, yes.
Lyle Shelton:
If you’re a miner or a farmer, what can you do about this?
Saxon Davidson:
Well, our miners and our farmers are very concerned, rightfully as well, but those concerns could only actually increase. The government will obviously have to do a deal with the Teals and the Greens in order to put this legislation, this already disastrous legislation, through the parliament, and the Greens have stated that a climate trigger in the EPBC Act is a non-negotiable starting point. Now, a climate trigger would essentially put carbon emissions above a 100,000. Any project with carbon emissions above a 100,000 per year is done, it’s over, it’s cancelled immediately, and anything between 25,000 and a 100,000 will have to be put into the trigger for approval, which will now be done if it gets put through by this unaccountable, secretive, and undemocratic EPA.
Lyle Shelton:
So how does the climate-
Saxon Davidson:
Now, this is going to put over 227…
Lyle Shelton:
How does the climate trigger work, Saxon? I mean, if you’re setting up a new mine like the, say, let’s take the Adani coal mine in Queensland, which already took years to turn a sod under the existing environmental legislation, the EPBC Act, under this new EPA with its climate trigger, you’d never get another coal mine or a gas mine developed in Australia, would you?
Saxon Davidson:
You’re exactly right. It would put hundreds of billions of dollars of investment at risk of immediate cancellation and just being buried under paperwork, regulatory requirements, and approvals at a worse degree than it currently is now, 111 billion in WA alone, 227 billion in the nation. This would absolutely put under stress the most effective and most efficient sectors of our economy under immediate risk. This is simply unacceptable, but it’s a very real concern for the people in regional Australia and our miners and agricultural workers that this might happen, because the government has shown no concern whatsoever for our farmers, for our miners, and for our Australians in the resources sector so far, so there’s nothing to suggest that they will have a change of heart now.
Lyle Shelton:
Yeah. Look, as I said earlier, it’s already too hard for farmers and miners. We all want sensible environmental regulation, but the EPBC has always been a roadblock of red tape and green tape for a long time. You mentioned you’ve even got Labour premiers like Roger Cook in Western Australia expressing concern. Where’s the federal opposition on this? Presumably it’s got the support of the Greens and the Teals, the crossbench, but where’s the opposition on this? Are they putting up a fight?
Saxon Davidson:
The opposition is putting up a decent fight on this, and as they should. This is a disastrous policy that has real economic concerns for the nation. And we know that if this is followed through, we know that the net-zero path isn’t working. We saw recently Twiggy Forrest and his green hydrogen has more or less fallen through, and this is also accompanying the Future Made in Australia plan, which is going to allegedly bring back our manufacturing base with intermittent and expensive renewables. But I mean, if the green dream, if the economic advantages or the economic advantages of the green dream aren’t there for one of the richest people in the nation, why should they be there for the average taxpayer who’s going to be forced to subsidise this economically disastrous plan alongside economically disastrous energy? It’s just the economics is simply not there.
Lyle Shelton:
Yeah, you’re exactly right, and it’s very alarming because everything this government is doing from energy to now environmental regulation is crawling the wealth-generating sectors of our economy. You’ve been at the IPA for a while, Saxon. Have you ever seen a government that is into economic vandalism as much as this Albanese government?
Saxon Davidson:
This government is the most economically, is the most radical government since Gough Whitlam, and in some ways is even more radical than the Whitlam government. Everything from energy policy, to industrial relations, to the Voice to Parliament is just incredibly extreme and out there and that it’s being goaded along and even made more extreme by the radical people on the crossbench and the Greens that we have at the moment. It’s simply the country is not going in a good direction at the moment.
Lyle Shelton:
Yeah. No, I couldn’t agree with you more, and it’s terrific that the IPA is able to shine a light on this. I just hope the voters, many of whom are busy raising their families and running their businesses and perhaps aren’t attuned to all this, but they’re feeling it with their electricity bills and higher taxes to pay for all this nonsense.
Saxon, I really appreciate your time today. We’ll keep an eye on this issue, but thanks very much for joining us.
Saxon Davidson:
Thank you for having me.
This transcript with Saxon Davidson talking on ADH from 25 July 2024 has been edited for clarity.
