It was possible to feel sorry for Jeremy Rockliff last week as he sought to bat away an insistent Greens leader, Rosalie Woodruff, wanting to know if he had “actually read” Tasmania’s 2024 State of the Environment (SoE) report.
“There is significant information to absorb,” he told Woodruff – well over 600 pages of it. And absorb it he must.
Fifteen years have passed since the previous SoE report – three times what it would have been had the government and the responsible agency, the Tasmanian Planning Commission, adhered to the 1993 legislated mandate of a report every five years.
The report’s foreword notes “the complex challenge of communicating environmental information” so as to shape policy and influence outcomes “amidst changing national and global contexts and growing environmental pressures”.
The pain of its birth is testament to that. In 2002 then-planning minister Michael Ferguson, persuaded to act on the 13-year absence of an SoE report, gave the commission less than two years to produce it.
And the commission delivered, producing a document that’s a cut above any of its three predecessors in 1997, 2003 and 2009. This is an admirable blueprint for dealing with challenges which, as the report makes clear, are daunting.
“The mutual dependency between Tasmania’s economic prosperity and the health of the natural environment cannot be over-emphasised,” said the report.Tasmania’s “defining challenge” is to meet the sometimes-conflicting objectives of ensuring the environment is properly cared for while social and economic needs are met.
We’re starting from a low base. The report lists numerous issues demanding urgent attention including degraded marine habitats from warming waters and invasive species, rapidly declining numbers of migratory shorebirds, fragmented native vegetation cover and other threats to native species, declining river health, and poor progress on reducing greenhouse emissions.
The SoE report calls for better monitored and protected marine habitats and coastlines. Faced with a growing list of endangered species, we need better mapping of native plant communities, measures to stop illegal land clearing, coordinated culling and other measures to control deer, cats and other feral animals. We need an expanded and well-funded system of reserves and a permanent statewide soil monitoring program.
The condition of waterways including inland rivers, lakes, wetlands, and estuarine waters has been degraded by discharge of farm nutrients to waterways, the demands of a growing irrigation network and urban water issues. The SoE calls for an ongoing statewide water monitoring and analysis program.
Environmental issues have been creating political martyrs ever since my old Mercury colleague Hugh Dell lost his ministerial adviser job over the flooding of Lake Pedder 50 years ago. Labor minister Andrew Lohrey was sacked for being too outspoken on the Gordon-below-Franklin hydro scheme, which also saw the end of Doug Lowe’s premiership. Early this century the forest wars dogged the career of Labor premier Paul Lennon and saw off the Labor-Green government under Lara Giddings in 2014.
All through these times the Greens under Bob Brown, Christine Milne, Peg Putt, Nick McKim, Cassy O’Connor and now Rosalie Woodruff, have been working away, sometimes within government but mostly outside it, to “keep the bastards honest”. Now, a bevy of independents in both houses pursue the same aims.
In 2022, at the start of this SoE process, a request for extra resources to meet the tight deadline drew a blank. But somehow the commission and the scientific and technical experts employed for the 2024 SoE got the job done.
While relying on voluntary citizen science out in the field, these people were paid for their work, but their level of remuneration would not count as pocket money in another project of state significance, the proposed AFL stadium in Hobart – a project for which both major parties have declared their undying support.
Serious action on the far more critical SoE recommendations seems a remote prospect, but it shouldn’t. Given that it was Ray Groom’s Liberal government that set the SoE process in motion 30 years ago, it ought not to be a stretch for Jeremy Rockliff and his 2024 Liberal team to commit to implementing SoE recommendations in full.
Written in the plain, honest style of all good science, this is a document for our time. Its authors – many home-grown, many from elsewhere – have one thing in common: a deep love of their island home. In particular, they care for the natural values that are our island’s signature, the things that set Tasmania apart from everywhere else in the world.
These special values are what the State of the Environment report is asking Tasmanians to protect. It demands to be taken seriously, because not to do so is not to care about our island home, and for a government that is unforgivable.