Hitting the sweet spot between nature and development
Tom Allen appeals to Tasmania’s new Environment and Parks Minister, Peter Gutwein
DEAR Peter, congratulations on becoming Tasmania’s Minister for the Environment, Parks and Heritage. As the first Treasurer to hold these portfolios simultaneously, you will need to reconcile a treasurer’s development-atall-costs impulse with the environment minister’s objective of protecting natural life upon which we all depend.
If you recognise that any economy can now no longer just exploit natural resources, flog the by-product and dump the often toxic residues (the “externalities”) back into the environment (where we all live), it’s possible there could be no contradiction between you being Minister for the Environment and Treasurer.
After all, the economy and the environment are different sides of the same coin. The future of Tasmania (and everywhere else) depends on hitting the sweet spot between genuine sustainable development and thriving natural ecosystems. Both are possible but both are spectacularly not happening, in Tassie or beyond.
The global mass extinction crisis is here. Climate change is the free market’s greatest ever failure. Australia’s economy is in the doldrums because economic Luddites refuse to see it needs re-oxygenating with new sustainable foundations. Refusing to embrace renewables in favour of fossil fuels is a good example. There is no longer any excuse not to better protect the environment.
As Environment Minister and Treasurer, you will know it is Tasmania’s still largely unspoilt environment, and the Wilderness World Heritage Area as the jewel in the crown, that brings prosperity. But our reinvestment into our best asset is woefully inadequate.
You are the one person in the state with the ability to fix our environment. Will your message be simply to keep shopping or will your policies be a light on the hill?
A marine protected area is like a fish battery: it generates fish that can be caught beyond its boundaries (and whose numbers would decline if the protected area wasn’t there), while keeping fish-generating marine ecosystems intact. Win-win for fishers and nature.
The drastic reduction in Sustainable Timber Tasmania’s quota is why Tasmania can now claim to be, in carbon-accounting lingo, carbon neutral. What is the economic dividend to Brand Tasmania of our carbonneutral status?
Next is for Sustainable Timber Tasmania to finally end logging high-conservation value forests, which its clients deceptively on-sell as sustainable wood. You know STT continues to lose the state money and that continuing to subsidise its loss-making can’t go on. Will you privatise or sell off STT and instead use the wasted precious millions for a much better investment in schools, health or housing?
“Unlocking” already publicly owned and accessible public parks is impossible. They’re already open. Unless you mean offering up prime public land to private developers at the exclusion of its owners, the people. That’s the tourism EOI process in a nutshell.
Mona didn’t need an EOI
process to get up. Nor did Saffire or the wukalina walk. Time to end the EOI process and simply let people develop their own projects without government market interference. We can all responsibly experience wilderness while enhancing its values, not degrading them. If the EOI process continues, it risks torpedoing our brand.
On your first day in office as Environment Minister you said you were committed to a “broader, proactive approach to protecting our unique wildlife”. Great. Now prove it.
Will you call for new environment protection laws that work? A national environment act? A national environment protection agency? An end to the exemption of forestry from the EPBC Act? How will you respond to the new listing of black gum as critically endangered?
Being an optimist and therefore encouraged by your federal counterpart environment Minister Sussan Ley MP’s listing of multiple threatened species, I believe it could be possible that you both won’t be ministers against the environment and genuinely for it instead.
Tasmania could be a world leader for any number of sustainable and carbon neutral outcomes. Organic food. Native foods. Regenerative tourism. Forest restoration. Dam remediation. There are countless ways we could enhance our competitive advantages instead of trying to cash in on them, make Tasmania like everywhere else and erode our competitive advantage in the process.
The best way to protect Tasmania’s natural heritage is to remove the cause of its decline instead of just funding breeding programs in isolation, welcome though they are. Any treasurer who leaves the state’s environment in a poorer condition than they found it is a treasurer who has failed in their job. Any minister who does so while also being environment minister would be a double failure. In three years, will a fair pub test show you have left Tasmania’s environment stronger or weaker? The Wilderness Society is prepared to help. When I offered to meet with your predecessor, I didn’t get a reply. Perhaps I will from you.