<
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/25/dr-ken-henry-environment-land-clearing-logging>
"Australia’s natural environment is in crisis and protecting it must become the
top priority in government policy and legislation if it is to have a chance, a
former Treasury chief says.
Dr Ken Henry, who led federal Treasury for a decade until 2011 and is now chair
of the Australian Climate and Biodiversity Foundation, said governments
continued to not give enough attention to the causes of environmental
destruction and how policy and management could be changed to turn things
around.
He made the comments after leading a scathing review of the New South Wales
Biodiversity Conservation Act, which said the laws were failing and were likely
to never succeed unless they were overhauled to give nature protection primacy
over development, logging, mining and urban expansion.
Henry told the ABC’s
RN Breakfast that “every indicator” on the environment
was “going in the wrong direction”.
“The first and most important thing is that, if the environment is going to
have a chance, then environmental considerations have to have primacy in policy
thinking,” he said.
“It’s not going to be any good in the future to say, well, the environment is a
nice-to-have but really we’ve got to focus on investment here, or a residential
development there, or a mining project here, or continuing to log native forest
over there – that those things are more important than the environment.”
Henry said the written objectives of the NSW biodiversity legislation, and
other environmental legislation across the country, looked ambitious but they
were being undercut by other laws.
“Legislation that deals with rural lands and rural land-clearing, in
particular, [but also] legislation that deals with planning, with forestry,
with mining – you name it, all of those other acts have primacy over the
biodiversity and conservation act, and they are undermining its effectiveness,”
he said. “That’s the biggest problem.”
Henry said the 58 recommendations of his review proposed a new standard of “net
gain” or “nature positive” that must underpin decisions that affected the
environment in NSW. “It’s a massive change, but it’s no more than what’s
required,” he said."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
