Fairer Australia Campaign Public Meeting

John Asquith

Chair, Central Coast Community Environment Network and Secretary, NSW Nature Conservation Council

The environment is a big part of my life these days, and I trust it is with everyone else. The impact of the environment on the quality of life, and maybe the world we will leave our children, and also in the simple thing such as the jobs people have got, how they are able to make a living continuing to do what they do, and where that might go in the future.

The first thing I want to touch on is what powers does the Federal Government have and where does it influence the environment? It is one of the most powerful levels of Government when you look at the big issues. The reason for this is that it is the one with the big dollars, it collects income tax and the GST, and doles them out to the states, community and business organisations in various forms. So that the first big influence the feds have is the purse strings.

The second one they have is the power they have to make treaties, through the Constitution, on things like whales, birds and offshore fishing. Through the Constitution they also have a power over exports. We have seen things like the saving of Fraser Island was achieved through Malcolm Fraser refusing to issue an export license for sand mining. So the Federal Government can be incredibly powerful.

Another federal power, one we have seen on the coast - it affects fishing, sand mining, drilling for gas and oil - is the power the Commonwealth has over the offshore areas, they have the economic zone that goes out to the edge of the continental shelf, roughly 200 miles off shore. From 3 miles to 200 miles offshore, it is commonwealth jurisdiction.

And the finally the other big power they have is through the Tax Act. That might be exercised through exemptions for donations to worthy causes, through to capital gains tax and other tax measures the Government might bring in to promote various activities, in particular, things that might have a beneficial impact on the environment.

So they are a pretty powerful and big player, even though at the end of the day, river and land management and planning powers rest with the State Governments, the Commonwealth has some incredibly strong powers through broad things like Environmental Protection (Biodiversity conservation) Act, which targets things like threatened species, but it has to relate back to the constitutional powers they have.

I put down six main areas of Federal environment issues that I might talk about. The first one is energy, the next one is estuaries and waterways, then water in our rivers and streams, next is old growth forests, next is Greenhouse Gases, and finally biodiversity and coastal developments.

Energy

The Federal Government recently released an Energy Statement. You might have seen it come out and that there was a lot of criticism from environment groups. The reason being we saw it as a policy supporting the continued operation and strong growth of the coal industry. The sensitivity of the coal industry is that it is very important in regional Australia. I was recently in Central Queensland, a little town I've been going through for years, Miles, north of Goondiwindi, and it is going through a real growth spurt. I asked one of the locals what is going on and it's a coal mine opening up 30 kilometres down the road. Other than cattle grazing there's not much going in around Miles anytime. And you find that all up through Central Queensland and a lot of areas of regional New South Wales.

So coal is very important regionally, but the reality is we are facing this horrible thing of climate change and the Enhanced Greenhouse Effect. It is causing us a lot of worry. So what is a good way to address those issues? Should it be business as usual, or should we be working toward a more sustainable future?

The great disappointment with the Energy Statement was that it did so little towards increasing the use of renewables and allowing them to build up. How can that be done? There are things called Mandatory Energy Certificates which require power generators and others producing a lot of carbon dioxide to buy these certificates. They have to have a quota of them and they can trade them. By building that up it forces a gradual increase in use of renewable energy and creates an economic driver for renewable energy. The huge disappointment for environment groups was that the MEC wasn't increased by 1 per cent per year for the next 10 years. That would make a huge difference to the renewable energy market because they are about 50 per cent dearer than coal-fired electricity, but by putting the MEC in place and gradually increasing it over time, we would see a significant increase in those areas.

Another one that's developing in the area, which has some people factors in it, is coal bed methane. You may have seen newspaper reports of drilling for that at Stratford and Gloucester, not too far from here, Laurieton, Singleton, and off the coast. Now coal bed methane is a way to get methane out of coal seams, which when they are mined, might be released into the atmosphere. But these drill holes have a life expectancy of about 20 years. So sure, it helps, and it is slightly better than coal in the short term, but in 20 years time it is going to run out, and what are we going to do then? Are we going to go back to coal, or by then will we have built up renewable energy sources so that they can take that load. Our society is one that uses huge amounts of energy, we have lights on here, we all came here by trains and motor cars. We need a lot of energy and we need to get that energy through a more renewable form.

You can be fairly pessimistic the way energy is going at the moment, because it is very much based on hydrocarbons of one form or another. In terms of equity and Australia's global responsibility as a relatively rich country, I think the islands of the South Pacific have a very gloomy future. When the US and Australia refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol, it doesn't leave a lot of hope for those generally poor nations.

Estuaries

Here in Port Stephens it is such a beautiful pace, it is hard to believe that there are estuary problems. But the coast is seeing a great population increase spreading north from Sydney, from the inland to retirement on the coast. As the freeway system gets better, the band of growth is spreading and people come to Port Stephens thinking it is almost commuting distance from Sydney. In terms of estuaries and coastline there is a fairly ad hoc approach. While the Commonwealth has pretty limited powers in this area, at the end of the day it has the things that matter for the health of estuaries, and that is the dollars that are needed to repair them. The two that stand out on the coast are Lake Illawarra and Tuggerah Lakes, which are both very shallow with sandy estuaries, with very narrow entrances to the sea, but with lots of people living around them with run-off and dog doo and all the other things that find their way into the lake. The reality is that no one else has got the money and resources to turn those things around.

The other issue with estuaries, a bit north of here, is the acid sulphate soil problem. A lot of work has been identified as needed there, but it does need a lot of dollars. In general, governments encouraged farmers to drain their land for agricultural production and ten or twenty years later realised that it created this horrible acid sulphate soil problem with lots of fish kills in all our major rivers, particularly along the coast.

Water

You can break the water issue into two categories, rural and urban. Traditionally access to water has been looked at as a right. That is apparent firstly in urban communities where for most areas there are water restrictions at the moment. Many people feel it is their right to wash their car with a hose and get really cranky about it. I am amazed that we've lost that connection between what we do and the resources we've got. One time you went out the back and gave the tank a tap as you walked past to figure out how much water you had. Now we look at it as an infinite supply. In Sydney and the Central Coast, where there are water restrictions we have found that water consumption is going up in spite of the restrictions. It's gone up at roughly double the rate of population growth. What seems to be happening is that people are saying, 'oh, there's water restrictions on, I can only water between 10 and 11 every second day, I'd better get out there and go for it.

The big federal move is the National Water Initiative which has privatised water licenses, again done with the State Governments. The theory is that a free market will determine the best usage of water. The disappointing thing is that the environment is going to have to wait a long time to get adequate water into the streams. But the privatisation of water licenses, based on the current value of water on the water market, is estimated in NSW at $8 billion. That is $8 billion in Government assets now transferred out into the private sector. One innovative business man bought up lots of water licenses in NSW and it is estimated that he gets about half of that, water worth roughly $4 billion. When you look at the needs of our society, unemployment and inequity, it is hard to see how that is justified. There is a strong equity issue there, but I do think that's one where governments do need to take the lead and get the message across - it is one thing to understand that there is a drought on, but it is another thing to behave like there is a drought on. We are not seeing that behaviour to reflect the reality.

Old Growth Forests

Old growth forests are an icon issue for the environment movement. I know Tasmania well, I used to go there when I was a kid and I go back fairly regularly to see what is going on with the clear felling of the beautiful forests, particularly on the West coast and the Central Highlands. It is just awful. It really puzzles me, when we spend so much money with volunteer groups - and they operate in this area - planting trees, fencing bits of bush and all that, to see what goes on in Tassie. The clear felling is followed by 1080 poisoning, because the native animals come back and eat the small trees because they are starving, because there's nothing else to eat. This is a terrible way to treat nature. That is an issue I hope we will hear more of. We certainly heard about it last week when Peter King announced his candidacy in Vaucluse, saying he believed in old growth forests. That was fantastic, he did much for the cause.

Climate Change

Climate change is definitely the most serious problem the world faces. Still some people say, 'oh, I don't believe in climate change, it's not true'. All I can say to them is,' go and have a look at NewScientist, where it is well documented. But the thing that struck me was photos of the North Pole. I never thought as a child that I would live to see the day when the North Pole might disappear. But the North Pole, a floating ice shelf, is disappearing at 10 per cent per decade. We've got the photos because the satellites have been up there taking photos of the world from outer space. They can very accurately measure the temperature at the pole and how fast it is disappearing. It is getting to be a smaller and smaller area of ice. If that doesn't get the message across to us, then nothing will.

Biodiversity and Coastal Development

The loss of threatened species, particularly in these coastal areas, is a major issue. Usually it is trying to achieve a balancing act. Loss of threatened species is associated with clearing of habitat. Clearing of habitat is associated with economic and population growth. So how do we get a balance? You have to take a strategic approach, find out where your threatened species are located, and rally aim to protect those areas with land banks and trusts, and develop around them.
We are losing too much at the moment. I spend a lot of time putting in submissions, it is a futile effort at the moment.

There has never been a development knocked back in NSW because of a threatened species. The Threatened Species Act hasn't stopped one development. We see that there is a need for good science and good information when we try to deal with the equity issues of the environment. No one is advocating that our society goes back to living in caves, but we need that balance a lot better tuned than we have at the moment. Too many of our decisions are short-term. Threatened species is a long-term issue, versus let's say the economy or employment - typical of the battle going on - that's all short-term thinking.

A great problem we have is this short versus long term view.

Thanks very much.