![]() ![]() The Australian Capital Territory’s faunal emblem, the gang-gang cockatoo, entered the list as endangered, with the expert scientific committee highlighting the climate crisis as the major driver of reductions to populations of the bird.Īnd a week before the election was called, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change again sounded the alarm that the world was rapidly running out of time to limit warming to 1.5C. The rate of land-clearing in states such as Queensland and New South Wales has been increasing and the addition of new species to Australia’s national list of threatened wildlife was accelerated by the country’s worst bushfire disaster. That report could have been tabled by the Morrison government before the campaign began but has been withheld. In the past term alone, three official reports, two from the Australian National Audit Office plus the independent review of Australia’s environmental laws by the former competition watchdog head Graeme Samuel, highlighted a litany of environmental failures.Ī fourth, the five-yearly State of the Environment report, is also expected to highlight the ongoing decline. That Australia is not doing enough to protect its environment is well known. The South Australian independent senator Rex Patrick this week called for a change in the way the environment is treated in the next parliament, including requiring the prime minister to make an annual extinction statement, listing the species newly declared as either extinct or critically endangered. He says while he was proud of some of the things that were achieved under Hunt, he felt restricted due to climate denialism within the Coalition and the refusal to deal with habitat degradation. “The trouble is the Greens are the only party that says that, and it is seen as a fringe or extremist position.”Īndrews spent three years as threatened species commissioner. “If we’re serious about what it means to be Australian … we are a rich enough country with enough habitat and enough cleared area to dedicate the remaining land to protection,” he says. Given so much of Australia’s landscape had already been cleared, he believes the time has come for a conversation about sharing what remains with the country’s unique, and increasingly struggling, wildlife. We can’t keep defining ourselves by our wildlife when we’re losing it to extinction.” We’ve got them on our money, our sports teams, our coat of arms, the tail of Qantas. ![]() ![]() “That makes me really sad because Australians define ourselves through our wildlife. “Biodiversity and nature have been completely absent from this campaign so far,” he says. But, as far as the first two weeks of the election campaign are concerned, the environment may as well not exist. After a political term marked by consecutive summer disasters and multiple official reports highlighting government failure, he sees it as a major issue. ![]()
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