NEXT Thursday, Australians will be presented with a report card on how
they are treating their environment. It is likely to make disturbing reading.
Leaks from the 600-page report over the past few weeks hint at the horrors in
store. Introduced plants, the report will say, now constitute 15 per cent of
Australian flora, threatening native species and altering natural ecosystems.
The picture is no brighter for native fauna. More mammals have become extinct
over the past two centuries in Australia than in any other country.
Never again will we see the stick-nest rat nor the plains rat kangaroo that
used to inhabit the fringes of the Lake Eyre basin. And only tiny populations of
animals like the Western quoll, numbat and the rabbit-sized bilby—whose
dwindling numbers have made it a national symbol of vanishing Australian
The document, with the unpretentious title of State of the Environment
Report, will be released by environment minister Robert Hill. It is likely
to supply the new coalition government with just what it wants to attack the
Labor opposition along with the Democrats and the Greens, who have said they
will oppose in the Senate any move by the government to carve up Telstra,
Australia’s telecommunications company. The coalition wants to sell one-third of
Telstra and use the $1 billion this will raise to spend on the
environment. Without the sale, expenditure on the environment is likely to
But the fate of the report must not start and end with its value as a
political football. Too much is at stake. Too much hard work has been done by
the hundred or more scientists and other experts who contributed to the 10
chapters contained in the report (see p 54-55 for an interview with Ian Lowe,
the chairman of the advisory council that produced the report).
When Labor set up the State of Environment Advisory Council after the 1992
Earth Summit in Rio, it said that the council should do more than produce just
one report. Rather, it intended the first report to be a yardstick against which
future reports, published every four years, would chart changes, both good and
bad. Moreover, it said that the council should draw up a set of national
environmental indicators much like the Consumer Price Index or interest
This remains a sensible suggestion. We need a system that will allow the
health of the environment to be constantly monitored and updated.
The coalition has yet to indicate whether it wants the council to continue,
let alone whether it will compile regular reports or establish a set of
indicators. On Thursday, when the first report will be released, Hill should use
the opportunity to announce that the government wants all these things to
Sooner or later it will also have to address another fundamental issue. The
environment languishes in part because of the structure of Australia’s
government. The Commonwealth, the states and territories, and local government
all have their own power bases, and all too often their interests overlap. This
is not good for the overall management of rivers, water quality, weeds, feral
pests, soil erosion and the myriad other problems which, of course, take no heed
of arbitrary lines of demarcation. Studies on the effect of irrigation projects,
for example, often stop at state boundaries. The structural impediments to good
environmental management urgently need to be addressed.