Until they are stopped, the Greens will use regulatory stealth to stymie growth and throttle industries they want to see brought down. The Illegal Logging Prohibition Act is one of their nastiest and handiest tools, so why hasn’t the Coalition done away with it?
While there has probably never been a stronger sentiment in the Liberal National Party (LNP) government that environmental policy is off the rails, little has been done in its two years in office to repeal or amend the raft of legal constraints which now purport to protect the environment. Reversal of excessive restrictions on agricultural chemicals levels is about all the LNP Government has achieved.
On the policy front, provisions to promote renewable energy were introduced and justified as a less costly way – than imposition of a carbon tax – to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. There was no international legal obligation to do this. Restrictions imposed by Labor on access to water in the Murray Darling basin, where agricultural production has shrunk, also remain unaddressed.
Following LNP backbench agitation, a parliamentary enquiry into tax exemption privileges of environmental groups is underway. While backers think it will help curb green rorts (why should Greenpeace have that privilege when part of its modus operandi is to damage property and assets?) it does not strike at the heart of the problem. The activists have a far more formidable strategy. That has to be tackled.
They and the Greens have perceived something which parliamentarians in the mainstream parties disregard, some wilfully, but most by default. The formal duty of parliamentarians is to legislate. Under the Constitution the Senate is supposed to be a house of review. In practice it isn’t. Regulations are rarely scrutinized. It’s a Greens hunting ground.
As well, wily politicians can and do slip new laws into Parliament and delay the tabling of regulations. Sometimes regulations are never produced. Both sides of politics have done this. The regulations are all-important. They define how laws are to be interpreted. The Greens know this.
They love regulation. It can be used to create legal hurdles to delay and increase the costs of projects to which they object. They also understand the most powerful environmental tool is to arm a regulator with the widest discretion to rule compliance. It sits alongside vague law. The looser its terms, the wider is the scope for the regulator to rule.
They work relentlessly to put this broad scope into law where they can. The Federal Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act, for example, gives the Environment Minister very wide discretion. This is little understood. Policies can be rejected if the Minister considers there is a “risk” for which no criteria are set. No wonder WWF rate it the best environmental regulation in the world.
Yet even that looks half reasonable when set against what is possibly the most ridiculous piece of supposedly environmental legislation ever adopted by Parliament. This is the Illegal Logging Prohibition Act. It makes it an offence to import a timber product unless the importer has records demonstrating laborious and costly efforts to ascertain in the country of origin if the product is not or does not contain illegally logged timber. Yet there is no record illegal timber has ever entered Australia.
