AUSTRALIAN CONSERVATION FOUNDATION Submission to the Productivity Commission on Implementation of ESD Written (in parts) by: Chris Mardon, Tim Fisher, Peter Kinrade, Michael Krockenberger, NSW EDO and other contributors. Edited (as far as it goes) by: Michael Krockenberger Contents: 1. Introduction 2. The Role of the Commonwealth in Ecologically Sustainable Development 3. An historical overview of the ESD process in Australia 4. Some musings on ESD (and Australia’s failings) 5. Cost of Implementation 6. Incorporating ESD Principles into Government Decision Making 7. Mechanisms for Incorporating ESD Principles 8. Mechanisms for monitoring, evaluating and reporting ESD outcomes 9. Increasing the focus on outcomes and outputs 10. Conclusion 11. Appendix 1 – Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Bill 1998 12. Appendix 2 – Valuing Natural Resources 13. Appendix 3 – Lots of Lovely Subsidies 14. Appendix 4 – Natural Heritage Trust 15. Appendix 5 – Securing Our Environment 16. Appendix 6 – Ecological Tax Reform 17. Appendix 7 – Biodiversity and Natural Resource Management Issues 18. Appendix 8 – ESD Principles Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts upon the unthinking. J.M. Keynes Introduction The Australian Conservation Foundation contends that ESD has never been seriously implemented in Australia. Indeed the prerequisites for its effective implementation are absent. These prerequisites include legislation, taxation and other economic policies, information and accounting frameworks, institutions, departmental structures and functions and natural resource management policies and practices. This submission examines these issues from various angles through the main argument and various appendices. 1 The Role of the Commonwealth in Ecologically Sustainable Development ACF contends that the Commonwealth Government must take a leadership role in the pursuit of ESD, both in a policy sense, and in terms of progress in implementation. If the Commonwealth fails to take this leadership role, it is difficult to imagine much in the way of progress towards ESD, either in the public sector or the private sector. The case for the Commonwealth taking a lead role in this respect can be summarised as follows: • the Commonwealth plays a key (albeit changing) role in the sourcing, allocation and distribution of environment and natural resource management funds (plus related R&D funding) • the Commonwealth is accountable (esp. via international agreements and treaties) for determining Australia’s agenda, and role, in environmental issues of international significance • the Commonwealth’s powers - which cover things like non-coastal fisheries; Commonwealth lands and territories, export licensing, specific environmental and heritage legislation & processes; foreign affairs and trade; corporations; and defence issues - embrace numerous environmental issues • through inter-governmental forums (such as COAG, ANZECC, ARMCANZ and the Murray Darling Basin Commission), the Commonwealth has an acknowledged leadership role both in – advancing environmental and natural resource management issues onto the national agenda; and – facilitating consensus-based approaches to environmental issues and standards • Commonwealth activities in a much broader range of areas - eg. taxation policy; education and training funding and curricula; Commonwealth budget initiatives across numerous portfolios; industry policy; science and technology policy; tourism policy; Bureau of Statistics; the environmental management programs of Commonwealth agencies; administration of National Competition Policy - impact to varying extents on the environment. • As many environmental values are recognised as having national (or indeed international) significance, it is to be expected that the Commonwealth Government will take an active role in the ways in which these values are managed • The Commonwealth (and the Commonwealth alone) is in a unique position to overview the state of the environment nationally, and to overview the environmental issues, problems and priorities from a national perspective. ACF is gravely concerned that the Commonwealth is actively seeking to divest itself of many of its environmental responsibilities via the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Bill 1998. The Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Bill 1998 is regressive in many regards in terms of ESD. In particular it does this by setting up a framework for devolving environmental powers to the states, and even possibly to corporations and individuals, through bilateral agreements, conservation agreements and other mechanisms, without specifying standards and other than the broadest benchmarks and principles. It directly contradicts ESD by requiring the Environment Minister to take all social and economic factors into account in regards to decisions on environmental impact, but limits environmental factors to a narrow range of defined issues. This uses the guise of integration, but makes a mockery of it. (See Appendix 1 for more detail). ACF believes that an ESD agenda in Australia cannot proceed without an appropriate level of commitment from the Commonwealth Government. 2 An historical overview of the ESD process in Australia Right from the beginning of the ESD process, the Working Groups were dominated by vested interests who saw the ESD process as a threat and were determined to derail it or subvert it. Moreover, the ESD goal of welfare and well-being was interpreted by most business and government representatives as the promotion of economic growth1, and once the ESD working group process was finished, economic growth was explicitly included in the revised set of ‘guiding principles and goals’ in the National Strategy for ESD. The creation of the working groups based on industry sectors meant that intersectoral issues apart from greenhouse were either treated superficially or farmed out to bodies outside the ESD working group process. Despite some enthusiastic public participation, the mechanism for incorporating the conclusions and recommendations of these public meetings into the working group deliberations and reports was inadequate. Following the publication of the ESD working group final reports in December 1991 and the ESD chairpersons’ Greenhouse Report and Intersectoral Report in January 1992, the government handed the 500 or so ESD recommendations over to 37 committees of state and federal bureaucrats coordinated by an intergovernmental ESD Steering Committee. Most of the NGO members of the former working groups felt these committees should produce an action plan and timetable for implementation of the recommendations. But what they actually did was to produce a National Strategy for Ecologically Sustainable Development (NSESD)i and a National Greenhouse Response Strategy (NGRS)ii which contained greatly watered down versions of the original ESD recommendations. Comparison of key consensus recommendations of the ESD working groups, first with the revised versions which appeared in the NSESD, and then with the actual status of subsequent implementation, shows that very little has been implemented apart from more studies, inquiries (such as this one) and reviews. The lack of specific targets and time frames in the National Strategy, or even a budget allocation for its implementation, cast doubt on the government’s commitment to the ESD process. The final strategy accepted the traditional frameworks of business activity, the priority of economic goals over environmental goals, and the primacy of existing social or political structures, institutions and goals. In the National Strategy, the ESD principles and goals themselves were revised, also without any community consultation or even consultation with the former non-government members of the working groups. As mentioned above, the revised principles and goals contain an explicit commitment to economic growth. They are also governed by the statement that ‘No objective or principle should predominate over the others’. But, since some principles would have to be applied as constraints on others in order to be effective (e.g. conservation of biodiversity and precautionary principle as constraints on the types of development permitted or encouraged), this governing statement could be interpreted as producing a very weak form of ESD. NGRS contained the further constraint on action that ‘first phase measures will meet equity objectives by causing minimal disruption to the wider community, any single industry sector, or any particular geographical region’ (Ref.2, pp. 12—13). Some commentators see the invocation of equity principles as being inappropriate for justifying the protection of existing polluting industries, notably the coal industry, and for ensuring that ESD cannot be achieved. They argue that ESD in the area of greenhouse response must involve shifts away from fossil fuels and that equity requirements could be met by means of government incentives to establish the new sustainable energy industries in former coal mining areas and through programs to retrain workers. Implementation of the National Strategies was entrusted to government bodies which either identify 1 Economic growth can of course be interpreted in different ways. Environmentalists generally do not oppose economic growth if throughput and energy use are reduced or stabilised while increasing economic activity, ie where resource use is decoupled from GDP. This decoupling has been achieved in a number of advanced