Greg Hunt’s performance appraisal - by Graham Parton

H

ow would Greg Hunt’s performance appraisal go?

Government Ministers are not normally subject to the sort of performance appraisal that many ordinary workers have to endure, but if they were, how would the Minister for the Environment fare?

Performance interviews usually start with the positives, so let’s look at the ways our Federal Environment Minister has improved the environment.

Two things come to mind. First: threatened species. Minister Hunt has inherited a pretty poor legacy, with Australians being world-beaters at wiping out species. Our performance in relation to our native mammals, birds and reptiles is not good, but the blame does not lie with the current Minister. He has addressed the problem by appointing a Threatened Species Commissioner to “bring a new national focus and effort to secure our threatened flora and fauna.” By February the new Commissioner had only been in the job for six months so it’s probably a bit early to say how well that is going, but good effort for getting it started.

Secondly, the Green Army. This was a key promise in the 2010 and 2013 campaigns, and it involves 17-24 year olds getting paid an allowance to do up to 30 hours per week of environmental project work. The Green Army appears to be the most visible component of the Governments “Direct Action Plan.

Critics of the scheme challenge it on a number of grounds but perhaps the main one is the lack of overall planning or strategic approach. If a community group wants a section of riverbank “improved” and can make a case for it, the project is funded and it happens, but there is no clear overview that would ask “why this segment of river? What sort of river should it be?” The system is “bottom up” driven, meaning local groups decide what projects to apply for, as opposed to actions focused on national issues. Areas where there are no young people looking for work are presumably not getting addressed.

The system also suffers from a dual purpose with the implicit assumption that sending teenagers out to build boardwalks and pulling weeds will make them more employable, raising questions about whether the scheme is for job creation or environmental improvement. So while there are some good local results, the Green Army is far from an outstanding success.



Minister for the Environment, Greg Hunt.

From there though, Minister Hunt’s performance goes downhill. Let’s look at the Great Barrier Reef.

The Minister is responsible for protecting the reef from damage. There are two main threats to the reef, climate change and using it to transport large amounts of coal. Unfortunately Minister Hunt is unconvincing in his actions on climate change (more on that later) and positively enthusiastic about transporting coal.

When challenged by evidence from his own scientists that the reef is already in trouble and therefore fragile, the Minister prefers to argue that the reef is in excellent condition and has strenuously lobbied against the United Nations
World Heritage Committee suggestion that the reef is in danger. He contradicts reef experts by arguing that it is “the “best managed marine ecosystem in the world”.

As a side issue, The Minister has form in relation to ignoring of advice from Government scientists. When in 2013 the head of the UNs Climate Change negotiations Christiana Figueres suggested that Australia was already experiencing bushfires with increasing intensity and frequency as evidence of climate change the Ministers response was curious.

First he split hairs by arguing that the fires that at the time were occurring in NSW could not be directly attributed to climate change, despite them occurring in October, long before the normal bushfire season. More extraordinarily though, he bypassed his department full of experts who could advise him on this and looked up bushfires on Wikipedia, after which he declared that bushfires in Australia were frequent events that had occurred in hotter months since before European settlement. Like the Prime Minister who dismissed Christiana Figueres as “talking through her hat” by linking climate change and bushfires, Minister Hunt refused to see any link between the two.

Graham Parton.

But back to the reef and coal - In order the transport the coal it is necessary to dredge large amounts of material from the ocean floor. The Minister first tried to claim that this would have minimal impact, but an enormous public campaign and two legal challenges eventually persuaded the Government to do drop that proposal. Rather than recognise this as a complete policy reversal, Mr Hunt made it into a positive describing it as “ending the centuries old practice of dumping in the Marine Park.”

Instead Mr Hunt suggested that the dredging spill be dumped on the land. Not exactly the land, but in the high conservation value internationally listed Caley Valley Wetland. The Queensland Government’s own documents had concluded that the wetland was the worst possible environmental outcome but it was the option preferred by both Federal and State Governments at the time. The new Queensland Government now requires the dredging spill to be dumped in the port area, not exactly a good outcome but possibly the least worst.

The approval process for dumping dredge spoil on land was rushed and inadequate and did not include the full Environmental Impact Statement that would normally accompany this sort of development. The public was given ten days to respond to a 2,370 report, the absolute minimum required. Despite this the public still managed to make 80,000 submissions on the project.

Somewhat belatedly, now that he knows he can’t dump the dredge spill on the reef, Mr Hunt has now released details of a new ban on dumping sediment within the entire 345,000 sq km Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. “When I’m on the rocking chair in 40 years’ time, I hope I will look back at this and think that in the course of my professional life there may be nothing more important. It’s a satisfying moment. I know other countries are astonished at what Australia has achieved over the past year.” No mention that back in 2013 he was keen to dump about 5 million tonnes of sediment into the Marine Park. Other countries might well be “astonished” at Australia’s spectacular about face.

The coal mining operations in the Galilee Basin will destroy much of the habitat of the endangered black-throated finch, so much so that around 170,000 hectares of prime habitat for these birds will have to be found to offset the development. The finch is already extinct in NSW and its territory in Queensland is thought to have reduced by 80% in the last thirty years. Quite possibly the last major remnant of Black Throated finch is at a place called Moray Downs, soon to be the site of the Carmichael coal mine. This will be two pits, each 8 km wide, one 14 km long the other 21 km long taking up a total area of around 350 square kilometres. This may be the largest coalmine in the world that will destroy 16,500 hectares of finch habitat. It seems likely that the Minister will undo much of the good work on threatened species as his lack of strenuous opposition to the mining activities could lead to yet another bird species extinction.

The Minister is currently facing a legal challenge from the NSW Environmental Defenders Office where it is alleged that in approving the mine he failed to consider the impact of the greenhouse gasses released from burning the coal would have on the Great Barrier Reef. The EDO further argues that the Minister failed to consider the appalling environmental record of the proponent of the mine Adani. The Indian Government has twice reviewed the operations of a power plant in Gujarat and in 2012 the Gujarat high court found that some construction work by the company had occurred without environmental approval.

Another World Heritage area that the Minister is responsible for are our forests. While the Minister has made no obvious moves to conserve our forests he did champion a campaign to reopen 74,000 hectares of Tasmanian forests to logging. This involved an approach to the UNESCO World Heritage Committee to argue that as the forests had previously been logged they had no real conservation value and should be delisted. Once again this was despite scientific evidence that only a small portion of the area had been logged and these bits had all but recovered. The World Heritage Committee took less than ten minutes to reject Australia’s application, describing it as “feeble”. As with coal mining and the Great Barrier Reef the Minister appears on the wrong side of the debate, and once again he appears to be losing it.

Then there’s renewable energy. For the first time in 2014 the world did not increase its output of greenhouse gasses, despite increasing population and production. This is due in no small part to the increasing use of renewable energy, and until recently Australia had a booming renewable sector. Once again you’d think that the Minister’s job is to advocate for an ever-increasing renewables sector and should be thumping the cabinet table to get it.

Instead he has presided over a spectacular lack of confidence that has all but dried up investment in renewables, now down to around 10% of what it was before the last Federal election.

Despite numerous promised before the election that the Coalition was a great supporter of renewable energy they have acted as if they oppose it. A $500 million “1 Million Solar Roofs” Program that had been promised before the 2010 election has disappeared without a trace and instead the Minister as focused on what he sees as poor performance from rooftop solar panels.

In February 2013 when still in opposition, Greg Hunt said “We will be keeping the renewable energy target. We’ve made that commitment. We have no plans or proposals to change it… We have no plans or intention for change and we’ve offered bipartisan support to that.”

Shortly after the election the Government attempted to abolish the Australian Renewable Energy Agency but was thwarted by the new senate. Instead they just withdrew about $800 million of its funding.

Still Mr Hunt claims to be a champion of large-scale renewable energy, at one stage announcing that he wanted to double renewable energy production. However even this generous claim does not stand close scrutiny. Current large-scale renewable energy production is around 16,000GWh and the Coalition wants this to be 31,000 by 2020. Not exactly double but close. What Mr Hunt didn’t mention is that the current target is 41,000GWh so Mr Hunt is actually proposing a reduction in the target. His proposed “doubling” of the amount of renewable energy is really a 41% reduction on the current plans.

He further clouds the water by introducing the concept of a “carbon tax penalty” and argues that the current Renewable Energy Target is “broken”. On Sky News in December 2014 Greg Hunt said, “It’s simply not possible to build what is required between now and 2020. And if you don’t do that, you hit what is an effective carbon tax penalty of $93 a tonne.”

This statement contains a number of assumptions that simply don’t add up.

For one thing most (if not all) of the players in renewable energy disagree that the target can’t be met. Once again the Minister is out of step with the experts.

 Secondly it assumes that if the target cannot be met, energy retailers will pay a fine of $92.50 for each megawatt of renewable energy they failed to create. Mr Hunt describes this, somewhat misleadingly, as a “carbon tax penalty”. Renewable energy developers are arguing that at that price it would be cheaper to build the large-scale renewable projects  – so why wouldn’t they?

 Dwarfing all these examples of poor performance, ignoring experts and somehow ending up on the wrong side of every issue though is the subject that appears to be the elephant in the room for the current government – climate change.

On this issue the Minister stands firmly in the shadow of his Prime Minister who is widely known to have real doubts about how much our climate is changing. However it was not always thus. In his younger day, long before he was Minister for the Environment Greg Hunt wrote a Masters thesis called “A Tax to Make the Polluter Pay” in which he advocated that the cost of cleaning up pollution should be borne by the polluter.  He was one of the early exponents of the fundamental principle behind a carbon tax. How is it then that two decades later the removal of a price on carbon became one of the Government’s proudest boasts?



Graham Parton - enjoying the environment
 entrusted to Greg Hunt, who hasn't passed
his 'performance appraisal'.

When challenged on this on the ABC Q&A  Mr Hunt argued that the principle was only supposed to be applied to trade waste, not CO2 emissions. When asked if CO2 was a pollutant he avoided answering directly but said “well I believe it has an impact on our atmosphere, if you call it a pollutant, if you call it a source of impact it’s a source of climate change and climate change is a problem.” In this non-answer Mr Hunt doesn’t even seem too comfortable agreeing that CO2 is a pollutant but concedes that it is “a source of climate change.” This is reminiscent of his pedantic distinction between climate change being a cause of bushfires in general, but not necessarily the fires in NSW in October 2013.

He then went on to argue that in Europe and the US taxes on emissions “haven’t done the job”, a highly contentious assertion that few would agree with. His view now seems to be that you can and should apply market-based mechanisms to reduce some pollution, but not when that pollution is CO2.



Long after he has left the job, when he is “on the rocking chair in 40 years’ time” Greg Hunt is most likely to be remembered as the Environment Minister when Australia became the first country in the world to remove a price on emissions. To many people this is the most spectacular own goal that an Environment Minister could score, particularly so when the replacement mechanism does not appear to be up to the task. Australia’s emissions had briefly reduced as the carbon tax was starting to bite but since the removal of the tax the emissions are on the rise again.



It wasn’t just the carbon tax that was axed either. Within the first week of being elected one of the first actions of the new Government was to abolish the Climate Commission that had been set up to communicate “reliable and authoritative information” about climate change, and the Government has further stated its intention to abolish it’s source of independent advice on climate, the Climate Change Authority.

 

Chairman of the Business
 Advisory Council,
 Mr Maurice Newman.

The government ignored the Climate Change Authority when it wanted advice on renewable energy, preferring instead to seek the advice of a former Chairman of the ABC and Chairman of the Prime Minister's Business Advisory Council Maurice Newman. Newman’s opposition to renewable energy and his scepticism about climate change (he recently announced that the world was cooling) make him particularly unsuitable for the role. He once argued that “electromagnetic electricity” could be transferred from windfarms through the air and the ground, possibly causing failures of farm machinery and the danger of electric shocks from farm bores.  These views are bordering on loony, but once again Greg Hunt has been silent on this.

Which leaves us to wonder if the Minister is genuinely committed to any of the major aspects of his portfolio. While his application to the cause of threatened species is worthwhile (leaving aside his soon to be felt impact on the black-throated finch) his effectiveness in protecting the barrier reef, his promotion of coal over renewable energy and his advocacy of a scheme that has so far failed to reduce greenhouse emissions leave his performance sadly wanting.

The recently released Intergenerational Report was a serious statement about Australia over the next forty years. One of the most glaring criticisms of it is that it takes little account of the impacts of our changing climate. The report touches on climate change, noting that there is "no one-size-fits all" approach to reduce emissions, but its summary of world responses ignores countries that have moved toward carbon pricing or begun proposing tough post-2020 targets.

Climate Institute chief executive John Connor notes "When it comes to climate change, this Intergenerational Report barely addresses challenges for this generation let alone the next. While we welcome that the report acknowledges the internationally agreed goal of avoiding 2 degrees Celsius warming above pre-industrial levels, we think that it is reckless that the report fails to acknowledge the economic challenges and opportunities for Australia in doing its fair share to help achieve that goal."

The Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF)was more scathing, saying that the report "pays lip service to the environment but it paints a future where Australia remains stuck with a fossil fuel-driven economy".

Minister Greg Hunt said the report clearly identified climate change as a major challenge and outlined the government's policies to mitigate global warming, including $2 billion for the Great Barrier Reef and completing the $12 billion Murray Darling Basin plan.  .

His main problem now though is that nobody believes him anymore.

by Graham Parton