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ANGE:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ange McCormack, this is 7am.

The Albanese government was elected on a sense of optimism for the climate movement.

But nearly two years later, there’s a growing sense of unease between the environment movement as well as traditional owners and the government in Canberra.

So, what’s going on? How has this distrust emerged? And will it practically change how we all live with the consequences of climate change?

Today, contributor to The Saturday Paper Royce Kurmelovs, on the bad blood brewing between the government and environmentalists.

It’s Monday, April 8.

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ANGE:

Royce, I think something everyone kind of struggles to pin down is exactly what this government's record is on climate change. As someone who's covered this area extensively, what sense do you get on how the government's performing?

ROYCE:

Yeah, it's a good question and I think it actually requires taking a step back to understand some context around this. I mean particularly since this story really begins, kind of, with the ten years of government by the Coalition previously.

Audio Excerpt - Tony Abbott:

“Look, climate change is real, as I've often said, and we should take strong action against it. But these fires are certainly not a function of climate change. They're just a function of life in Australia.”

ROYCE:

Which was either involved in undermining climate action in some way or, in some sense, walking back reforms in this area. Since the election of a Labour government that has shifted, there has been action on climate change.

Audio Excerpt - Anthony Albanese:

“On May 21st, Australians voted for action on climate change. They voted for the Australian Labor government's plan, which is for 43% emissions reduction by 2030, for the national energy market to be 82% renewables by 2030…”

ROYCE:

They have been attempting to run policies that actually address the material circumstances of climate change and they've been going through these series of consultation processes with various stakeholders in these groups to, kind of, hash out how this is going to work. And this has also, incidentally, earned them a lot of criticism from certain sections of society.

Audio Excerpt - Sky News:

“Guys last week Ben Fordham and 2GB broke this story about the climate hypocrisy of Anthony Albanese and Chris Bowen. I've got to show that. Now the two jets, two jets, 20 minutes apart, both going from Canberra to Scone in the Hunter Valley.”

ROYCE:

If you crack open the Australian you will find cartoons of, you know, Chris Bowen, Minister for Climate Change and Energy, every week wearing a dunce cap, doing something silly as a way to lampoon him and his efforts. So you can imagine why the government would be quite tetchy about criticism over its environmental and climate policies. On the other hand, the government, in that vein, has been pursuing a series of very questionable decisions that run counter to the stated goals of addressing climate change.

Audio Excerpt - ABC News:

“The environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, has given a provisional go ahead to a metallurgical coal mine in Queensland's Bowen Basin.”

ROYCE:

And this is particularly around the area of fossil fuel production and a reluctance to, kind of, commit clearly to, say, a managed phase out of fossil fuel production in Australia.

Audio Excerpt - ABC News:

“I think people who voted for climate would have a right to feel that they've been betrayed by these decisions, given how the world's turning. We did have hope that this new environment minister would, you know, do things differently.”

ROYCE:

And when I talk to the people who, kind of, work in this area there is a feeling like the gas industry, the car manufacturers, these industry groups, get special access to things and tend to have their interests reflected in the reforms that are being put forward. Just this week, one of the stories I was reporting on was a growing sense of frustration amongst environmental groups, including the Northern Territory's Environment Centre, which summed up the attitude of the government as being poor form, in terms of transparency and public decision making. At the same time, the Australian Conservation Foundation's Gavin McFadzean told me that a lot of this, which is coming to a head, saying that, you know, after the Easter break the federal government's going to be getting a substantial interaction, not just from ACF but from the climate movement more broadly.

ANGE:

Can we drill down into that sentiment a bit more? I'm wondering, why is it that these groups feel like they're, you know, being left out of the loop?

ROYCE:

Fundamental to this is a feeling of cynicism amongst environmental, climate and First Nations groups. These are groups that experienced the previous government, previous Coalition government, and they're concerned that it's going to happen again.

The other week, just before the Easter long weekend, a decision was published online that the government had given approval for Australian oil company Santos to, you know, build a pipeline from its Barossa gas project. Now, the timing of this is important because not only did this appear right before a long weekend when the media couldn't scrutinise it because everyone was wrapping up for the week, but it also came at a time when these environmental and climate groups were focussed on another reform the government was proposing, to change the way offshore gas approvals work as far as it goes to environmental concerns. And then, this was made worse when people checked the actual documents to find that the document had actually been signed on 15th of March, so two full weeks before this material was published online. These notices are supposed to be published a week after the decision was made. So for many of these groups who had been travelling to Canberra in that, you know, intervening two weeks, they had been meeting with the minister, meeting with the minister's office, they had been talking about the Barossa gas project publicly. And then when they found out that this key approval had been made and they had no idea about it, they basically felt like they'd been left out of the loop.

ANGE:

I'm keen to know more about the pipeline that we're talking about here, Royce. Why is it a proposal that's concerning and angering environmental groups so strongly?

ROYCE:

This particular project, the Barossa Gas Project, is being built by Santos. It lies off the coast of northern Australia, you know, off the Tiwi islands. It's an incredibly remote location. But crucially, the gas that's contained beneath the sea here is contaminated by CO2, the average is about 18% across the field. In order to use this gas, something needs to be done with the CO2.

Audio Excerpt - Santos spokesperson:

“Natural gas is part of our everyday lives. From clothes, heating and cooling in our homes, medicines to all forms of transport including cars, bikes and even the shoes we walk in.”

ROYCE:

Critics have labelled the Barossa gas project as a carbon bomb, as a carbon factory, as one of the most polluting gas projects in the country, because of the CO2 it will produce.

Audio Excerpt - Santos spokesperson:

“Santos proposes to take natural gas from under the sea of Barossa, and process it into fuels that are essential to Australia and to the world."

ROYCE:

Now, under their original proposal for this project, Santos's idea was to simply vent the CO2 into the atmosphere and buy carbon offsets to neutralise the harm caused by doing so. However, over time, the company has since proposed that it would also do what's called carbon capture and storage to, kind of, skim off the CO2 from this gas and then inject it into the air underneath the ocean in the Timor Sea in the now empty Bayu-Undan gas field. This has caused all kinds of controversy, particularly amongst First Nations groups, in this case the Tiwi Islanders, and the pipelines they want to build runs through the sea country that they have traditional custodianship over.

If you were to ask the government about the Barossa gas project, they will tell you that it has been, you know, carefully vetted, carefully assessed, it has gone through all the approvals process. And if I were to ask them about what happened with this decision notice, as I did, you know, the government will say that they didn't intentionally try to mislead anyone. It was just an honest mistake.

ANGE:

After the break, will this distrust mean that climate policy suffers?

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ANGE:

Royce, the government has been criticised by environment groups and traditional owners for leaving them in the dark about approvals around this big Santos gas project. The government denies doing anything wrong, but I'm just wondering if there are any other examples of this? Is this a broader problem?

ROYCE:

The clearest example of this recently has been the proposal by the government to change the law around offshore gas approvals. So as the first act of Parliament, the government proposed changing these laws in a bill that was ostensibly about workers health and safety. Buried within this bill were provisions, giving them incredible discretion to basically decide how environmental regulations work, which is a very, very substantial shift in power. But the key thing was, no one knew this was coming until they actually read the text of the bill and was like, hey, what's this? Why don't we know about this? And that caused immediate upset amongst these groups who felt like they had been ambushed. To the extent that even some organisations within Labor, internal environmental pressure groups within Labor, also picked this up and went back to the party and said hey, this is a really bad idea. Can we talk about this? All this comes, you know, meanwhile as these environmental groups have watched the government approve new coal mines, new gas projects, at the same time as the government is consulting these groups over major reforms to the environment laws. And then, the other critical thing is that this sense of something happening that they're not being included in is taking place right as Australian oil, gas and coal producers are organising to push back against environment groups using what's called SLAPP lawsuits. These are Strategic Litigations Against Public Participation, to push these groups to defend themselves in court through litigation so that they can no longer participate in these sorts of projects through public relations, through marketing, through these strong campaigns. So down below, you have this kind of clash going on between environment groups and environmental NGOs. Meanwhile, you have a government that is not keeping people in the loop, is making these rather substantial changes without being as clear or direct about it as they should be, and there's this tension growing between them.

ANGE:

And Royce, in terms of environment groups feeling that the government has left them in the dark over certain decisions, why does that seem to be happening repeatedly, and what does the government have to say about it?

ROYCE:

There's no suggestion that any of this is a deliberate strategy to keep environmental groups in the dark. And if you talk to the government or members of the bureaucracy, there is a sense of almost confusion about why people are so quick to get worked up over this, about the level of cynicism that might be out there and level of distrust. And this goes back to, kind of, the lived experience of dealing with the previous Coalition government, and the way some of these decisions have been handled. When I asked the Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek’s office, about what happened with the notice of the Santos project and why that wasn't published in a timely fashion, as is required under environmental law, her office told me last week that environment groups, business and others are regularly invited to give detailed feedback on government priorities, and we respectfully consider a broad range of views. On environmental law reform, this has included hundreds of hours of conversation with dozens of groups and over 2000 individuals through webinars. And so this is clearly a minister trying to emphasise the complexity and the scale of everything that they're dealing with. But also if you speak to the environmental groups themselves, they don't necessarily believe that the government is acting in bad faith, it's just that they're facing this pressure campaign from business and industry, and they see what they perceive as the level of access that these groups have to the government, and they see themselves as being slowly outflanked, even though the legal and regulatory environment is supposed to treat all stakeholders equally. So what they see is a power dynamic that still makes Canberra friendlier to our big polluters than it does to groups trying to, you know, deal with and avert the climate crisis. And I think Kirsty Howie, co-director of the NT Environment Centre, put it quite clearly when she said to me that a gas company wouldn’t have been treated this way.

ANGE:

And so Royce, at the end of the day, we're left with a situation where key stakeholders in climate change feel like they're not included in the process as much as they should be. Ultimately, what impact is that going to have on this government and the consequences of climate policy that we're all going to have to live with?

ROYCE:

At this point in time, you know, we have lived through the black summer bushfires, the northern rivers floods, where people died. The science is saying that this is a critical decade. The data being recorded now shows temperature records being shattered across the board, both in our oceans and across continents. And if we accept that we are in a moment that calls for action, it requires ambitious, direct, concrete policy to deal with this situation.

And so, when it comes to a failure to take seriously the concerns of these groups and to include them, to talk to them, to manage those relationships, it compromises the ability to create the policy, to create the approaches, to create the response to these situations that we need, and that those of us who are alive now are going to have to live with, for the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years.

ANGE:

Royce, thanks so much for speaking with me today.

ROYCE:

You're welcome. Thank you for having me.

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ANGE:

Also in the news today...

Australia has asked Israel to give a special advisor access to the investigation into the killing of Zomi Frankcom and six other aid workers.

The Australian-appointed advisor will report back to the government on the appropriateness of the investigation.

An initial military inquiry resulted in two Israeli officers being dismissed, but foreign minister Penny Wong said over the weekend that Australia believed a broader systemic investigation was needed and that, quote: “the gravity of the death of seven humanitarian workers is yet to be appreciated by the Israeli government."

And,

A group of 15 asylum seekers have reportedly landed In the far north of Western Australia.

The group, reportedly made up of Chinese nationals, are understood to have triggered a search by the Australian Border Force and WA police.

I’m Ange McCormack, this is 7am. We’ll be back again tomorrow.

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