ABC News Breakfast interview with Minister for the Environment and Water Tanya Plibersek

SUBJECTS: State of the Environment report, EPBC Act, climate change legislation

LISA MILLAR, HOST: Back to that grim report on the state of the environment being released today. Joining us now from Parliament House is the Environment Minister, Tanya Plibersek. Good morning to you, Minister. Welcome to News Breakfast. 

TANYA PLIBERSEK, MINISTER FOR THE ENVIRONMENT AND WATER: Good morning. 

MILLAR: It honestly was so depressing reading through the statistics in this report. Can you paint for our audience the significance of what has been lost? 

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, this report is, indeed, very disturbing reading. It says that our environment is in a poor state and it’s getting worse and that if we don’t change the laws and the systems that we have to protect it, that decline will continue. 
Some of the really disturbing stuff in here goes to species loss. You know, we’re the worst continent on the planet for mammal extinctions. If you look at, you know, fish numbers, native fish species in the Murray Darling Basin system have declined by 90 per cent in the last 150 years. Non-native plants now outnumber native plants in Australia, and you think, “Oh, well, why does that matter?” Well, the agricultural industry spends about $8.3 billion a year on weed control. That’s just one example of the sort of human costs of this environmental destruction. 
We’ve lost rainforest; we’ve lot significant amounts of bush due to land clearing but also due to those catastrophic bushfires we’ve seen. Plastics are polluting our oceans. We’ve got coral bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef. We’re seeing the huge, beautiful kelp forests in our southern oceans affected also by the warming of our oceans. That’s terrible for the environment and biodiversity. It’s also really bad for the lobster and abalone industries that depend on those giant kelp forests. 
So, I guess the overall story here is that the environment is in a bad state and it’s declining. And if we don’t do something to change what we’re doing now we’ll continue to see that decline. 

MILLAR: What are the things that you can work on more quickly, I guess? 

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, one of the most important things we can do is be part of the global effort to tackle climate change. And that’s why it’s so important that one of the first acts of the Albanese Labor government when parliament resumes will be to legislate that higher ambition on climate action. But we also need to change our laws and change our systems. And we’ve had some great suggestions, including from Professor Graeme Samuel. When he reviewed the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, he suggested a number of ways that we could improve it to give stronger projections and also, incidentally, faster decisions about major projects. At the moment our environmental laws are not protecting our environment but they’re also not meeting the needs of business. 

MILLAR: On the climate change legislation, do you read this report and accept that maybe the crossbench has a point and Labor needs to be more ambitious with where it’s heading? 

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, I’m really proud of the fact that we are more ambitious than the previous government, that we want to legislate higher carbon pollution reduction targets. And I very much respect the fact that people on the crossbench were elected to deliver action on climate change, and our government wants to work with them to do just that. That’s why one of the very first acts of the new government will be to legislate that higher ambition. 

MILLAR: Yeah, they want more than the 43 per cent that Labor’s offering, though. 

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, I think it’s important for people on the crossbench to consider whether they want to see progress or whether they’re going to hold out for perfection and see this opportunity slip from our grasp again. We’ve seen over, you know, I think it’s fair to say two decades of toing and froing about climate legislation, and in the end, we’ve got nothing. We had during the term of the previous government a decade where we saw 22 separate energy policies – not one of them landed. So, you know, we’re in the same position a decade on as we were at the beginning of the decade. When Labor was last in government, we did legislate action on climate change, on pollution reduction. And, you know, when the Abbott government came in, they overturned that. We saw emissions go up again. I think the crossbench – I hope they will work with us for progress. 

MILLAR: On the money front, Katy Gallagher again last night on 7.30 was saying that, you know, the budget is in strife and we’re just not going to spend more as part of the key of trying to bring it in. You’re faced with this report and the recommendations are money does need to be spent. So, are you going to try and argue that there needs to be money put in here? 

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, we’ve already made a number of really significant funding commitments, including, for example, $1.2 billion to continue the work on restoring and repairing the Great Barrier Reef, about a quarter of a billion dollars for threatened species. There’s a number of other financial commitments we’ve made. But the task of restoring our environment actually is too big for government alone. So, it is important to make sure that we have systems in place that support the work of philanthropists and industry to partner with communities to make sure that we’re protecting and restoring some of the most precious parts of Australia. 

MILLAR: Yeah, just finally, this report had been in the hands of the previous government and hadn’t been released. Would you commit to always releasing it as quickly as it lands on your desk? 

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: I absolutely commit to releasing the next State of the Environment Report when it should be released. This – as you say, the previous minister, Sussan Ley received this report in December last year and it sat on her desk for six months. And she didn’t want to release it,the government didn’t want to release it. And when you read the report, you’ll understand why. It’s a shocking story. 

MILLAR: All right. Tanya Plibersek, thank you for joining us. And, actually, just before you go, I do want to make note of something that you had put out there and I do think it’s important – that there were more than a dozen First Nations people involved with this report, and I think it’s so important to make sure the wider community knows that. 

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, we’ve got 65,000 years of environmental stewardship here in Australia. And we’re making a mistake if we don’t listen to and incorporate those environmental management practices in the broader systems of environmental management practices. 

MILLAR: On that note, thank you. Have a good day. 

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Thank you.