Australia’s economy—not our environment—is endangered and urgently needs tape-cutting reform, write IPA Research Fellow Lachlan Clark and IPA Senior Fellow Kevin You.
The Nature Positive Plan (NPP), published in December 2022, is the Federal Government’s proposed reform of the main piece of Federal environmental legislation, the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act). Although on the face of it Nature Positive may sound noble and virtuous, the real purpose of the plan is far more sinister. It is to create a larger, stronger, and more burdensome bureaucratic State, that will have an increasingly interventionist role in the Australian economy.
Prior to the establishment of the EPBC Act, environmental regulation was mostly undertaken at the State level. The introduction of the EPBC Act at the start of the new millennium established the legal framework which has enabled the Commonwealth Government to encroach into what previously was State jurisdiction.
The NPP came about as a response to former competition watchdog head Professor Graeme Samuel’s review of the EPBC Act in 2020, a review originally intended to focus primarily on the operational and administrative elements of the Act. The Samuel Review concluded that the EPBC Act was ineffective and did not enable the Commonwealth to effectively protect the environment. This conclusion was predicated on the notion that Australia’s natural environment is in a state of desperate decline. This was not an original finding of the Samuel Review; rather, it was a conclusion adopted uncritically from the State of the Environment report, written by environmentalists and Indigenous activists.
Its conclusion of extensive environmental decline contradicts independent evidence that Australia’s environment is, in fact, not in a state of desperate decline and that existing laws are not inadequate to protect the environment. Strong evidence points to a decline in Australia’s economic competitiveness rather than environmental conditions. The contestability of the key factual assertions, featured in the Samuel Review, regarding Australia’s environment, did not stop the government from exploiting the opportunity that the report proffered to launch a full-scale attack on the Australian economy and its critical industries in the name of environmental protection.
The NPP outlines how the government seeks to do this in three stages. The first—completed in December 2023—involved establishing an artificial and highly complex ‘nature repair’ market and expanding the water trigger to add to the environmental red tape already strangling the resources sector, particularly large coal mines and coal seam gas projects. The second stage involves establishing Environment Protection Australia (EPA) and Environment Information Australia. Notably, Professor Samuel recommended against expanding the water trigger and the establishment of a national environmental protection agency. The third stage—which has now been pushed back because of public backlash—involves rewriting the EPBC Act and implementing the remaining reforms outlined in the government’s NPP.
THE EMERGENCY IS ECONOMIC
Despite the assertion made by the NPP and Samuel Review that Australia’s natural environment is in a state of decline, by international standards and rankings the state of Australia’s natural environment has barely changed since the start of the millennium. Indeed, our environment may have slightly improved since the enactment of the EPBC Act.
The Environmental Performance Index (EPI) is a method to quantify and compare the environmental performance of 180 countries around the world. The index value is a wholistic summary of the state of a nation’s environment, based on 40 performance indicators, which assess factors such as emissions intensity, environmental health, and ecosystem vitality.
In the year 2000, Australia’s EPI was 56 out of 100, and Australia was ranked 30th in the world with respect to overall environmental performance. In 2024, Australia’s EPI has improved to 63 out of 100, and is now ranked 23rd best in the world. These results suggest Australia’s environmental performance is better than in the year 2000, and Australia has achieved a greater improvement in its environmental performance relative to other nations.
Australia’s economic performance since the early 2000s, on the other hand, has worsened considerably.
The reform most needed is to cut the red and green tape.
The International Institute for Management and Development’s (IMD) World Competitiveness Ranking is a comparative assessment of 64 of the world’s major economies, which analyses each country’s overall competitiveness ranking based on 336 criteria, which are in turn derived from statistical measures and surveys of experts. According to IMD rankings, since the early 2000s, Australia’s economic competitiveness has sharply declined in a number of critical domains.
In 2004, Australia ranked first for the most resilient economy in the world, whereas in 2023 it ranked 20th. Then it ranked third for ‘legal and regulatory framework encouraging the competitiveness of enterprises’, whereas in 2023 it ranked 19th. It ranked fourth for overall economic competitiveness, whereas in 2023 it ranked 19th. With Australia’s economic competitiveness now in freefall, future policies and legislation must be aimed at cutting red and green tape, and addressing the administrative burdens of the critical industries which have been the very source of Australia’s economic prosperity—agriculture, mining and manufacturing—as these are the industries most severely affected by restrictive environmental regulation.
THE GREEN-TAPE ARMY
The proposed changes under the NPP will require the mobilisation of a significant number of new Federal environmental bureaucrats. As it stands, the Commonwealth environmental bureaucracy is already bloated. Research published by the IPA, Australia’s Green Tape Army – An Analysis Of The Growth Of The Environmental Bureaucracy And Agricultural Sector, found that the total number of staff employed by environmental departments nationwide was close to 35,000 people. By contrast, Australia’s regular army is roughly 29,000 strong. This means more green-tape bureaucrats are assaulting our farmers, miners, and manufacturers than there are full-time soldiers trained and equipped to resist our enemies abroad.
The research also found that the environmental bureaucracy of the Commonwealth has been growing at a rapid pace. Since 2000, spending on and staffing at the Commonwealth’s environmental bureaucracy has increased by 470 per cent and more than 250 per cent respectively.
Under Nature Positive, the recent growth in the green tape army is expected to continue well into the foreseeable future. IPA research estimates that the new Federal EPA could require more than 4,700 staff once it is fully operational, costing taxpayers close to $700 million more per year. The EPA will be given broad powers and responsibilities, which go far beyond ensuring compliance with, and the enforcement of, matters strictly relating to environmental protection.
The EPA will be given explicit authority to deny the progress of critical resource projects. It will be responsible for setting approval conditions, as well as issuing and revoking permits and licenses. This will mean that decisions on critical projects will be made by unelected and unrepresentative bureaucrats who, by design, will have only a narrow focus on environmental outcomes. As it currently stands, decisions on projects which require Commonwealth approval are made by the Federal environment minister. Ministers are not only democratically accountable to the public but are also well-positioned to consider a range of variables including the potential economic and social benefits of new projects. They are also subject to parliamentary oversight.
In his review of the EPBC Act, Professor Samuel said:
It is entirely appropriate that elected representatives (and their delegates) make decisions that require competing values to be weighed and competing national objectives to be balanced. It is important that the law is clear and that core regulatory functions are carried out effectively, rather than decision-making being ‘independent’.
This clear statement notwithstanding, the Federal Government has decided to delegate decision-making powers to the new EPA, which will greatly diminish the role of our elected representatives and result in more of the Australian economy being controlled by environmental bureaucrats and activists.
CENTRALISED PLANNING
The new Federal EPA is symbolic of Australia’s move towards greater government intervention in the economy. Most Australians will soon be governed by two layers of environmental commissariats: first at the State level, and second, at the Federal level. The Samuel Review warned against duplicating Federal and State environmental responsibilities, and legislative responses that are aimed at achieving the same outcome. This warning was ignored in favour of further bloating the bureaucracy. The government-mandated ‘nature repair’ market, which came into effect in December 2023, promises to replicate the failures of the artificial carbon market, which was deemed a ‘sham’ by Professor Andrew Macintosh, the former head of the Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee, and which has been discredited by a peer-reviewed study published on 26 March 2024 in the journal Communications Earth and Environment. The operation of the carbon market was founded on anti-scientific dogma, not the scientific method. The same can be said of the more complicated and more speculative, but essentially comparable, ‘nature repair’ market.
The NPP could put up to 1.6 million jobs at risk.
Another manifestation of the shift away from the scientific method, and towards bureaucratisation, is the explicit “incorporation of First Nations people’s values, aspirations, knowledge and science” in decision making under Nature Positive. The NPP’s elevation of the supposed values and knowledge of just one racial group was a response to the Samuel Review’s conclusion that ‘Western science’ was too heavily prioritised in the existing laws. This amounts to the imposition of elements of the Voice to Parliament through the backdoor.
IPA Research Fellow Saxon Davidson wrote that:
There is a phenomenon in political science called ‘democratic backsliding’, an academic description for how lawful and democratic means can be used by politicians and bureaucrats to undermine democratic norms.
An act to disregard the outcome of a referendum, whereby 60 per cent of Australians rejected the Voice to Parliament, is a clear illustration of democratic backsliding. Nature Positive seeks to undermine Australia’s market-based liberal democracy in favour of heavy government intervention and centralised planning.
REGIONS WILL SUFFER THE MOST
The NPP will comprise a significant re-regulation of Australian land resources. An analysis of ABS industry data shows that there are up to 1.6 million jobs in industries dependent on the utilisation of land, such as agriculture, mining and heavy construction. These jobs would be placed at risk if the full suite of measures in the NPP are implemented. This is equivalent to roughly 11 per cent of all jobs in Australia. The regions will bear the brunt of the economic fallout. The industries which are to be most affected by the onslaught of environmental red tape have been the cornerstone of Australia’s economic prosperity. Australia’s commitment to the NPP explicitly requires the conservation of 30 per cent of Australia’s land and oceans by 2030. Locking up 30 per cent of Australia’s land and seas by 2030 is another example of the anti-scientific, management-by-slogan manner in which Nature Positive is being rolled out. Much like net zero by 2050, the 30×30 plan is a global initiative, imported to Australia from overseas, which involves arbitrarily set targets with uncompromising timeframes and no scientific basis.
As it currently stands, 22 per cent of Australia’s landmass is already protected through the national reserves system. Nature Positive seeks to increase the size of protected areas by 600,000 sq km (60 million ha). This is a vast area of land, larger than France.
The NPP makes no reference to how the government intends to achieve its conservation target. What is clear is that the regions will be disproportionately affected through the loss of agricultural land, declining population growth, and thwarted potential for economic development. The assault on agricultural land and regional development, brought on by Nature Positive, exacerbates the threat that regional communities already face from the encroachment of solar and wind factories—and their supporting infrastructure—across Australia’s pristine wilderness and prime agricultural land. IPA research has found that an area equivalent to one-third of Australia’s agricultural land will be put at risk by the solar and wind factories essential to the government’s ambition to turn Australia into a renewable energy superpower—an agenda of which Nature Positive is a critical element.
Regional communities are the most disenfranchised.
This finding is consistent with a study by Net Zero Australia, a consortium of Australian and American academics, which suggests the equivalent to five solar factories, each as big as Tasmania—in addition to wind factories—will need to blanket Australian land in pursuit of the government’s renewable energy transition. The Australian Energy Market Operator added that by 2050, up to 26,000km worth of new transmission corridors will have to criss-cross what will remain of Australia’s agricultural land.
The Victorian government’s Offshore Wind Policy Directions Paper published in March 2022 provided an even starker picture of the reality facing Victorian and Australian farming communities, stating that meeting net zero targets using onshore renewables could require up to 70 per cent of Victoria’s agricultural land to host wind and solar farms.
The 30×30 land-grab by the army of green bureaucrats will further threaten the regions. At the same time, regional communities are the most disenfranchised in terms of policy and decision making because they are the most isolated from the loci of power in Sydney, Melbourne, and Canberra.
THERE IS A BETTER WAY
The decision to delay the final tranche of Operation Nature Positive should be welcomed, but does not go far enough. The government has been at pains to communicate that it understands the hardship Australian families are going through in the midst of the current cost-of-living, housing, and energy crises. It has sought to empathise with rural communities living in fear of an invading army of green bureaucrats, transmission lines, and renewable infrastructure.
But truly listening and responding to the concerns of Australians—especially those in rural, regional, and outer suburban communities—necessitates ditching the Nature Positive Plan. Anything less is merely a public relations exercise.
Any reform to the EPBC Act should be grounded on the need to cut red and green tape. It should address the unfair, reverse burden of proof imposed on proponents of critical development projects. It should be up to the opponents of a project to prove it carries unreasonable risks of environmental harm, rather than its proponent/s having to prove it does not.
Genuine tape-cutting reform will unleash the economic potential of our regions. And, in recognition of the detrimental effect renewable energy projects have had on the natural environment and energy market, there should be a moratorium on all large renewable energy projects until appropriate regulatory frameworks are created around their development and operation. Upon the lifting of the moratorium, major renewable projects should all be subject to the provisions of the EPBC Act.
This article from the Winter 2024 edition of the IPA Review is written by IPA Research Fellow Lachlan Clark and IPA Senior Fellow Kevin You.
