State Budget fails to prioritise achievement of climate change and renewable energy targets

Mark Wakeham.

Today’s State Budget delivers significant investment in modernising the Environment Protection Authority and protecting biodiversity, but fails to demonstrate how Victoria will achieve its climate change and renewable energy targets, said Environment Victoria.

Environment Victoria’s CEO Mark Wakeham said today: “The Andrews government has previously announced welcome targets to boost renewable energy and cut the state’s greenhouse pollution by 15-20 percent by 2020. Given this is just three years away we expected to see significant investments in renewable energy, energy efficiency and cutting pollution across the economy in this budget.

“Unfortunately expenditure on climate change and clean energy programs in the budget is dwarfed by over $1 billion funding for new freeways that are likely to increase the state’s greenhouse pollution.

“It’s really disappointing that in a budget with a $1.2 billion surplus we haven’t found adequate funding to match Victoria’s leadership aspirations on climate change and renewable energy.

“This is the third of four budgets that will be delivered by the Andrews government in this term, and none of them have treated climate change as the grave threat that it is to our safety, prosperity and quality of life, despite positive policies and commitments by the Premier between budgets.

“New funding for energy efficiency, renewable energy and energy storage programs is welcome but not at the scale necessary to drive the state’s transition to a renewable energy-powered economy.”

Mr Wakeham said there were more positive results for Victorian’s natural environment with a comprehensive funding package of $162m to modernise the Environment Protection Authority which delivers on the ALP’s pre-election promise.

“The EPA will now have the resources and mandate to protect Victoria’s environment in the 21st century, though it will also need clearer powers to regulate greenhouse pollution.

“We were also pleased with the $86m announced to implement the new biodiversity plan and the two-year boost in funding for extra park rangers in the State’s National Parks.

“The $20m investment in Greener Government Buildings is a welcome rebuilding of a program that was slashed by the previous government.”

Environment Victoria closely examined expenditure from environmental levies including the Sustainability Fund and the Environmental Contribution Levy paid on water bills – an area where successive governments have failed to fully spend levies that are raised for environmental programs.

Mr Wakeham said: “On this score there was real progress in this budget with at least $175m expenditure from the Sustainability Fund, and nearly all the annual contributions from the Environment Contribution Levy being spent this year, though we are concerned that a couple of the programs funded are not primarily concerned with delivering environmental benefits.”

Finally, there was no funding in the budget clearly earmarked for protection of the Leadbeater’s possum habitat and establishment of the Great Forest National Park.

“Creating the Great Forest National Park is an urgent priority for conservation in Victoria, and we’re running out of time to protect a critically endangered species.”

“Overall, there are some strong commitments in the budget for our environment, but we are not yet taking adequate action on climate change which threatens to irreparably damage Victoria’s natural environment, communities and industry.”

Major items of environmental spending in the 2017-18 State Budget:

$86.3m to implement the State’s Biodiversity Plan

$162.5m to strengthen the Environment Protection Authority and Environment Protection Act;

]$25.4m on climate change programs to meet the state’s emissions reductions target;

$88.8m on renewable energy, energy storage and energy efficiency programs;

$30.4m to reduce electronic waste and landfill;

$20m to re-establish the Greener Government Buildings program for energy and water efficiency;

$7.2m for management of coastal and marine environments in the face of climate change impacts;

$9.5m to power Melbourne’s tram network with solar power;

$4.4m to extend the Resource Smart Schools program;

Around $26m to promote sustainable water use, contribute to the Murray Darling Basin Plan, and protect Ramsar wetlands and the Yarra River corridor;

Around $50m for the next wave of sustainable regional water strategies to plan water allocation frameworks and policy across the state.

Environment Victoria’s budget submission is available here.

Dystopian films and books a sign of our climate fatigue: Mark Wakeham

Illustration in The Age by Andrew Dyson.

When we think about the word pollution, it conjures up images of black smoke belching from factories or old cars. But for this election it's a different kind of pollution in the spotlight again – the invisible greenhouse pollution driving global warming.

I suspect climate change both terrifies and dulls Australians. We watch with horror and despair as the coral gardens of the Great Barrier Reef bleach and die. We can't quite believe the loss of a favourite beach town in an early summer bushfire. And while we look forward to summers, there's also fear we'll be hit by another heatwave more ferocious than anything we experienced growing up.

Scratch the surface of Australian attitudes about the future, and deep inside we worry that our kids won't have it as good as we do. They absorb this bleak prognosis, which perhaps partly explains the resurgence in dystopian films and books for teens.

But we brush these fears aside or bury them within, and collectively devote more of our civic energies and political focus to more local or easily comprehensible issues: public transport, job security, house prices and retirement incomes.

Read the piece by the CEO of Environment Victoria, Mark Wakeham in today’s Melbourne Age - “Climate fatigue is the biggest threat to our future.”

(Climate fatigue, as Mark Wakeham describes it, is patently obvious as any useful response to it is simply too hard; demands too much of individuals; puts them under pressure to change their way of living from work through to leisure; insists on a restructuring of world governance and the economy; mandates a change in human relationships ending the strident individualism of capitalism and bringing on cooperation and collaboration between people and nations; yes, viewed through existing prisms it is simply too hard.

Each of us has defined pool of worries, brought on mostly by the individualistic and capitalistic ways of modernity and so to concern ourselves with climate change simply cause that “pool” to overflow and so while climate change, particularly for those unaware of the realities and implications and complications of what is happening, becomes an issue too far, too complex, beyond the concerns of our “instant” world and so we simply can’t be bothered anymore and fatigue sets in – Robert McLean.)