Ecologically Sustainable Development in a ‘Quarry’ Economy: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

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Geographical Research

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June 2006

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44(2):183–203

doi: 10.1111/j.1745-5871.2006.00376.x

Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Original Acticle

David Mercer and Peter Marden: Ecologically Sustainable Development in a ‘Quarry’ Economy

Ecologically Sustainable Development in a ‘Quarry’ Economy: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

DAVID MERCER* and PETER MARDEN

School of Global Studies, Social Science and Planning, RMIT University, Swanston Street, Melbourne, Vic 3001, Australia. *Corresponding author Email: [email protected]

Received 23 August 2005; Revised 17 November 2005; Accepted 6 December 2005

Abstract

An overview is presented of recent work on the environmental changes impactingon Australia and the policy responses of the State and Commonwealth govern-ments, especially over the last ten years. This period has seen a remarkably stablephase of conservative government administration in Canberra and consistentresistance to a strong environmental policy agenda, both domestically and inter-nationally. Attention is focused particularly on rural and regional Australia, ratherthan on urban areas. The paper discusses the role of environmental issues in recentelections and also details the results of relevant opinion polls charting changesin environmental attitudes. The problems posed by the federal system of admin-istration are outlined as are recent analyses and counter-analyses of the state of theAustralian environment. A more fundamental problem with liberal democracyand environmental values is also addressed.

KEY WORDS

Australian environment

;

climate change

;

environmental policy

;

federalism

;

environmental attitudes

;

sustainable development

;

mining industry

,

neoliberalism

ACRONYMSACF Australian Conservation FoundationCSIRO Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research OrganisationENSO El Niño – Southern OscillationG8 Group of Eight (nations)IGAE Inter-governmental Agreement on the EnvironmentIPCC Inter-governmental Panel on Climate ChangeMDB Murray-Darling BasinMRET Mandatory Renewable Energy TargetNFF National Farmers FederationNLWA National Land and Water Resources AuditNSESD National Strategy for Ecologically Sustainable DevelopmentNWI National Water InitiativeOECD Organisation for Economic Cooperation and DevelopmentSoE State of the EnvironmentTBL Triple Bottom LineUNCED United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (Rio)WTO World Trade OrganisationWWF World Wildlife Fund

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© 2006 Institute of Australian Geographers

Introduction

My worry is that in political terms, no-onehas yet accepted publicly the scale of theproblem … the analogy I’ve sometimes usedis that we know that the walls of the houseare being eaten by termites, and that there’s areal risk of structural collapse. But instead oftreating the termites, we’re giving the wall acoat of paint, so that it looks good (Ian Lowe,‘The farmer and the damage done’,

Back-ground Briefing

, ABC Radio National, 22August, 2004).

In his most recent book,

Collapse

, Jared Diamond(2005) argues the controversial proposition thatin terms of their relationship to the natural envi-ronment, societies have always exercised

choice

about whether they failed or survived. History,he reminds us – in his reformulation of Catton’s(1980) classic text – is littered with examples ofsocieties and nations that have ‘chosen’ to disin-tegrate because they have irreversibly ‘overshot’the basic capacity of their ecosystems to providefundamental life support. The degradation ofEaster Island, and the experience of the Mayan,Mesopotamian and Roman Empires are com-monly cited in this context as, in the twentiethcentury, are those of the island of Nauru and theCanadian coastal communities that were totallydependent upon the now effectively extinctNorth Atlantic cod fishery.

Diamond has had a long association withAustralia and – sidestepping for a moment thefundamental questions of: what is the

scale

ofanalysis? precisely who makes the decisions, andin whose interests? whether it is dysfunctional

societies

that create dysfunctional

ecosystems

,or

vice versa

? and how ‘externally’ enhancedclimate change fits into this schema – his emphasison

choice

prompts us to reflect on some of thefar-reaching environmental decisions that havebeen made over the last two centuries on this driestinhabited continent. Historically, these decisionshave included choosing to invest heavily in‘nation-building’, land-clearing, drainage, hydro-electricity and irrigation schemes; to introducesheep, cattle, rabbits,

pinus radiata

, cane toadsand ill-suited European farming practices; andto destroy old-growth forests on a large scale forthe high volume/low value, export woodchipindustry.

The issue of species’ extinction is also of majorconcern. According to the World ConservationUnion’s (IUCN)

Red List of Threatened Species

(IUCN Species Survival Commission, 2004),

the world’s most authoritative status list ofthreatened plants and animals, Australia has thehighest number of threatened amphibians andreptiles, and the second highest annual ranking ofthreatened animal species. Of the 12 259 speciesnow threatened with extinction across theworld, 1324 are Australian (World WildlifeFund [WWF – Australia, wwf.org.au], 2003,1). To add further woes to an appalling record,the Federal Government’s

Terrestrial Biodiver-sity Audit

, released in April 2003, stated thatone-third of the world’s extinct mammals wereAustralian (National Land and Water ResourcesAudit, 2002). Dr Ray Nias, WWF AustraliaConservation Director said, ‘These figures areextremely alarming particularly given themassive increase of species listed as vulnerable.This is a clear indication that a wave of extinc-tion is sweeping through the Australian fauna’.A major contributing factor to species extinctionis the destruction of physical habitat throughinappropriate practices. As Nias further pointsout, ‘a large number of animal species are mov-ing into the threatened category for the firsttime, primarily as a result of land clearing, theimpact of weeds and pests and the loss of wet-land habitat’ (World Wildlife Fund [WWF –Australia, wwf.org.au], 2003, 1). We willaddress the nature of these problems later in thepaper, though for the moment we need to reiter-ate the fragility of this dry continent.

Scope

Because of space limitations the present paperdoes not engage with issues relating to thecoastal and marine environments and concen-trates largely on environmental issues and policyresponses in

non-metropolitan

Australia, particu-larly water, drought and climate change, andagri-environmental policy. However, it is fullyrecognised that the ‘rural’/‘urban’ dichotomy is,in many ways, a false one, for it is of course theseemingly insatiable demands that are placed onrural land and water by metropolitan popula-tions, both in Australia and overseas, that are thecause of many of the pressing environmentalproblems we now face. To take two clear exam-ples, recent research has confirmed the signifi-cance of the peri-urban regions of Australia’smajor metropolitan centres for agricultural pro-duction. They account for around a quarter ofthe nation’s gross value production though onless than 3% of the agricultural land base(Houston, 2005). Yet the vast majority of new,outer suburban housing developments in Australia

David Mercer and Peter Marden:

Ecologically Sustainable Development in a ‘Quarry’ Economy

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are consuming much of this valuable arable land.For Melbourne’s growth corridors this totalledaround 1500 hectares for 2003–2004 alone. Thereis also now intensifying competition betweenurban and agricultural water demands at the urbanfringe of such cities as Adelaide, Melbourne andSydney, and a recent Productivity Commissioninquiry recommended much stronger integrationof the urban and rural water reform agendas(Productivity Commission, 2005a).

1

For recentdiscussions of the urban context readers arereferred, in particular, to Low

et al.

(2005) andMcManus (2005).

For convenience, the discussion focuses mainlyon environmental change and policy responses(and non-responses) in the period since 1992.That, of course, was the year of

1. the landmark UN Conference on Environ-ment and Development (UNCED), held inRio de Janeiro;

2. the publication of

Agenda 21

, the 100-program‘blueprint’ for the implementation of UNCED’srecommendations (Grubb

et al

., 1993), and3. the release of the Australian government’s

National Strategy for Ecologically SustainableDevelopment

(Commonwealth of Australia,1992).

1992 also saw the signing of the Intergovern-mental Agreement on the Environment (IGAE)which sought to clarify the roles of the differentlevels of government; a fundamental redefinitionof drought for policy purposes (Botterill, 2003);the handing down of the High Court’s long-awaited landmark decision on native title rightsin the

Mabo

case, and the publication of PeterDaniels’ paper, ‘Barriers to sustainable develop-ment in natural resource-based economies:Australia as a case study’.

It is opportune to examine what, if anything,has changed in the interim to break down thebarriers that Daniels identified. At the time ofUNCED, and in the early phases of the formu-lation of a framework for ecologically sustain-able development in Australia, there was a Laboradministration in Canberra; but the conservativeLiberal-National coalition has held office con-tinually since 1996. Thus there has been a strongpolicy continuity for almost a decade at theCommonwealth government level. However,given that for at least 20 years both the majorpolitical parties have subscribed to a strong neo-liberal orthodoxy, it is certainly a moot pointwhether we would have seen a markedly differentsuite of environmental or trade policies under a

Commonwealth Labor government during thisperiod (Marsh and Yencken, 2004; O’Neill andArgent, 2005).

Throughout, reference will made to the per-meability of the boundary between the State andprivate enterprise in Australia and the frequentcoalescence of interests. Most of what is discussedin this paper focuses on the role of government.But it is important to point out that private cor-porations and peak industry groups can also takea lead role in advancing the sustainability agenda.A recent study (Lyons

et al

., 2004) has com-pared the performance of supermarket chainsand agribusiness corporations in Australia, NewZealand, the UK and Europe in terms of revolu-tionising the environmental aspects of the entirefood production and distribution system. Theconclusion is that, operating in a weak regula-tory framework, local companies are strong on‘greenwash’ but light on substantial reform bycomparison with their UK counterparts. Theysuggest that part of the reason for this may bethat Australia and New Zealand have not beensubjected to devastating ‘food scares’ such ashave been experienced in the UK. The Lyons

et al

. (2004) study focused on major corporations,but there is also now growing academic andpolicy interest in the cumulative environmentalimpacts of the myriad of little-studied, small- tomedium-sized enterprises (Watson, 2005).

Australia’s geography – the fundamentals

As the world’s sixth largest country, Australia isa vast (7.7 million km

2

), flat, dry continent. Overtwo-thirds of the geologically ancient land areais classified as arid or semi-arid. It is also one ofthe most fire-prone countries on earth, and thenative vegetation and fauna have evolved andconstantly adapted to changing fire regimes.Further, these regimes were directly associatedwith human use of the land for some 2800 gen-erations prior to European settlement. The pre-cise extent of human impact over this period iscurrently the subject of intense debate betweensome researchers who postulate that humansdecimated the Australian megafauna over arelatively short period of only 5000 years follow-ing their arrival on this continent, some 55 000years ago, and those archaeologists who aresceptical of continent-wide generalisations andproduce counter-evidence of a minimum, 15 000year period of co-existence between humans andthe megafauna. The deliberate use of fire by thenew arrivals is seen as the main trigger for the‘mass extinction’ theory (Dayton, 2005).

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Australia is also one of the world’s most bio-diverse nations, with a high degree of species’endemism, and the only ‘mega-diverse’ repre-sentative among the OECD countries. As a con-sequence of the historical pattern of Europeansettlement, native vegetation in Victoria andNew South Wales has been extensively clearedby comparison with the situation in WesternAustralia, the Northern Territory and Queens-land. Nevertheless, clearance rates in the latterState, in particular, have been of epic propor-tions in recent times, increasing from an averageof 297 500 hectares per year in the decade, 1980to 1990, to 378 000 hectares per year currently.The Queensland State government is committedto the phasing out of broadacre land-clearing by2007 but satellite imagery points to as much as500 000 hectares of land having been clearedillegally since the start of this century (Roberts,2005). State agencies have always participatedactively in this clearance frenzy through thegranting of permits. The 2001

State of the Envi-ronment

report calculated that the total areagranted for permits in 1999 alone exceeded 1million hectares (State of the EnvironmentAdvisory Council, 2001). In all the States muchof the land is held under leasehold title, with theState government being the custodian. Two-thirds of Queensland, for example, consists ofleasehold land. In theory this arrangement grantsthe States considerable power to curtail land-clearing activity, a lever that, certainly since the1930s, they have been reluctant to use on thegrounds that this would impede ‘development’.That decade represented a significant ideologicalturning-point in government attitudes towardsland stewardship. Prior to that time there wasconsiderable emphasis on the broader societal

obligations

of rural landholders, but thereafterthere was a marked shift towards the Americanmodel of giving precedence to the

rights

of indi-vidual landowners (Bradsen, 2000).

As noted, Australia’s ancient soils are gener-ally infertile. Some 77 million hectares of landin the non-arid zone are potentially available forcropping without irrigation, but all but 20 mil-lion hectares of that have already been taken up.Much of it is seriously degraded and wouldrequire enormous investment in rehabilitationwork to reverse the damage. In 2000 – in anunprecedented collaboration – the nation’s peakenvironmental and agricultural organisations(the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF)and the National Farmers Federation (NFF)) cametogether to produce a landmark assessment of

the state of Australia’s land degradation problem.The bleak conclusion was that agriculture-relatedland degradation was costing the country overA$2 billion a year in lost production and thatthis figure could easily treble within 20 years(Madden

et al

., 2000). At that time, the Com-monwealth and State governments were eachspending less than A$200 million a year onenvironmental repair by comparison with theACF/NFF calculation that on-going annual ex-penditure of A$6 billion was necessary.

In other words, Australia is either close to, orhas already overextended, its biophysical resourcelimits for agriculture and we can anticipate a steadycontraction in the area devoted to agricultureand pastoralism in the future (Millington andKalma, 1982; Conacher and Conacher, 1995).Already, in the 20-year period leading up to2002/2003 there has been a 9% decline in thearea devoted to agricultural production (Produc-tivity Commission, 2005b). However, notwith-standing three prolonged drought episodes andthe reality that ‘over 50% of Australian farmscurrently declare yearly losses’ (Wilson, 2004,465), the total volume of farm production hasmore than doubled since the 1960s, and thereare certain extensive areas such as the Murray-Darling Basin (MDB) that do contain highquality agricultural land, albeit with significantareas seriously degraded. This enormous region,equivalent in size to France and Spain, andencompassing one-seventh of the country,produces around one-third of Australia’s annualoutput of non-mineral primary products (Powell,1998). But increasingly, the basin is being tar-geted for mineral sands mining without any realunderstanding of the cumulative environmentalimpacts on surface and groundwater or agricul-tural activities.

Regions receiving in excess of 500 mm ofrain are restricted to a strip less than 500 kmwide around much of the coastline, and aroundtwo-thirds of the land area receives less than 500mm of rain on average each year. Average annualrainfall across the continent is around 420 mm,but there are large areal variations. Typically,annual totals of 3500 mm, for example, arerecorded for both Innisfail, in north Queenslandand western Tasmania. Further, high rates ofevaporation mean that only around 12% of rain-fall reaches rivers by comparison with rates of38% in Europe and North America. Of the totalrunoff, about two-thirds occurs in sub-tropicalnorthern Australia where less than 5% of thepopulation reside. It is not surprising, then, that



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long-distance water transfer infrastructure pro-posals have been commonplace in Australia forwell over a century.

The continent’s climate is subject to both rel-atively short, El Niño events, and longer-term,Pacific Oscillation phases (ENSO). The uncer-tainties surrounding these cycles make weatherand climate forecasting particularly problematic.Both long-term droughts and excessive rainfallcan result. Frequently in the past the agriculturaland pastoral frontiers have expanded duringtimes of high rainfall but have later been forcedto retreat. In 1883, for example, legislation toencourage the settlement of north-westernAustralia resulted in a rapid expansion of sheepnumbers, but a series of ENSO events at the turnof the century caused drought conditions thatdevastated over 60% of the animal population.Powell (1998) also reminds us that the DarlingRiver ceased flowing on 48 occasions between1885 and 1960 and that the major rivers in theMurray Darling Basin can exhibit discharge var-iations of between less than 10% of averageflow in some years to as high as 500%, or even900% in others. Such erratic regimes mark outAustralia as being significantly different fromBritain, the source of the country’s legislativeframework for water. This has prompted Stokesand Taylor (2005) to argue for a complete legalre-definition of rivers and watercourses inNew South Wales. Table 1 summarises the majordrought and productivity phases for Australiafrom the late eighteenth century onwards. Anongoing concern is the loss of topsoil from agri-cultural lands. With one mega-storm in 2002stripping off almost 5 million tonnes of soil and20 other serious dust storm events in that sameyear each carrying away a million tonnes, all the

indications are that Australia is experiencing itsthird – and possibly most serious – ‘dust age’since the two predecessors in the 1890s and the1940s (McTainsh

et al

., 2005).For approximately the last 13 000 years the

climate of Australia has been much wetter thanpreviously, and the sea level has also been muchhigher, but there is no certainty that this relativestability will prevail. The evidence from the pastis that there can be dramatic temperature varia-tions over geologically very short periods (Ker-shaw and Turney, 2004). More recently, therehas been robust debate about the current direc-tion of climate change and its possible impactupon Australia (Kellow, 2005). On the one hand‘greenhouse sceptics’, such as Kininmonth (2004),have downplayed the significance of anthropo-genic influences, have criticised the ‘deeply flawed’nature of our current ocean-atmosphere computermodels, and have argued that Australia’s climatehas always been subject to ‘natural’ – and some-times quite extreme – variations. On the otherhand, commentators like the prestigious Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)and Lowe (2005) highlight the dangers associ-ated with continued high levels of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions and point tothe likelihood of a global average temperatureincrease of between 1.4 and 5.8

°

C by 2100. ForAustralia, there is strong evidence that, averagedout nationally across hundreds of weather sta-tions, 2005 was the hottest year since climaterecords were first established in 1910. Whateverone may think of the practical, as opposed to thesymbolic significance, of the Kyoto Protocol –and Australia’s response – it is now impossibleto ignore the evidence and overstate the signifi-cance of global warming as an international

Table 1 Major droughts and productivity phases in Australia, 1842–2003

1842–1864 Generally good rainfall1864–1866 Drought in all States except Tasmania1870s Good seasons for pastoralism in eastern Australia1880s Droughts in southern and eastern States (especially 1884 and 1888)1890 to 1903 Long period of drought interspersed with rain in 1894 and 1899.

Huge stock losses and most serious drought since European settlement1911–1916 Another serious drought and high stock losses1918–20 Only parts of Western Australia drought-free1939–45 Drought and high stock losses1958–1967 Longest drought in arid central Australia1972–73 Drought in eastern Australia1982–83 Most serious drought in terms of the area affected1991–95 Serious long-term drought2002–05 Serious drought in Western Australia and the eastern States

Sources: Botterill and Fisher, 2003; Sherburd, 2004.

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concern. The Australian government has finallyaccepted the ‘reality’ of human-induced climatechange, and for Gilding (2005) the fact that itwas one of the two key items on the recent G8meeting agenda in Scotland was a ‘remarkableindication’ of the ‘mainstreaming’ of this issue.

Modelling by the CSIRO (2001) has high-lighted the following likely changes for Australia:

1. extreme rainfall and tropical cyclones couldbecome more intense;

2. tropical cyclones could become more com-mon further south;

3. some inland and eastern coastal areas mayhave wetter summers;

4. annual rainfall is likely to decrease in thesouth and east, and

5. by 2030 an average temperature rise of 0.4–2

°

C can be anticipated, followed by a rise of1–6

°

C by 2070. There will be higher evapo-ration, more hot days and droughts, and fewercold days (see Table 2).

The Allen Consulting Group (2005), too, hasproduced a major report on

Climate Change,Risk and Vulnerability

for the Australian govern-ment. The study reinforces the CSIRO findingsthat less rainfall and more extreme weather eventscan be anticipated and singles out three regionsof particularly high vulnerability – Cairns andthe Great Barrier Reef, the Murray-Darling Basin,and South-west Western Australia. All of thesepossible scenarios pose potentially enormousproblems for agriculture, health, coastal settlements,water supply and ecosystems such as wetlands,coral reefs and Alpine environments. Meanannual water flows into the Ramsar-listed

Macquarie Marshes in central west New SouthWales, for example, are projected to decline bybetween 11% and 32%, the Great Barrier Reefcould become subject to more frequent coralbleaching events and damage from cyclones,and the area covered by snow in the Alps inwinter could contract by as much as 66%.Already, in parts of the Murray-Darling basin,river red gum and black box assemblages havesuffered a 60% mortality rate following pro-longed drought and river regulation. Emergencypumping is now being used to try and save someof the most threatened sites but the problem isthat there is insufficient water in the river system.The projected decrease in rainfall has majorimplications for future fire risk at the urbanfringe as well as for rural and urban water con-sumption and related commercial enterprises.With an additional 1.5 million people antici-pated over the next 20 years, south-east Queens-land is one of the world’s most rapidly growingregions. Yet with water restrictions in place andthe existing dams at only 35% of their capacity,it has been estimated that, in order to copewith this growth,

per capita

water consumptionwill need to be at least halved. The link withagricultural production and trade is also clear.On January 1, 2005, the US-Australia Free TradeAgreement came into effect and allowed Aus-tralian dairy producers to expand their exportsof cheese, milk and cream into the lucrativeUnited States market by an additional 27 350tonnes. Dietary changes among the emergingChinese middle-class will also see an escalatingdemand for such products. But the dairy industryis also a heavy user of water so this points tosome looming problems in the decades ahead.

2

Overall, Australia’s population of some 20million is highly urbanised and concentrated inthe higher rainfall coastal regions, especiallyalong the south-eastern and eastern seaboard.This translates into less than 1% of the world’spopulation having stewardship over approximately20% of the global land mass. Despite constantpressuring, especially from the environmentalmovement, Australia does not have a coherentpopulation policy. Nevertheless, immigration andpotential population levels are constantly debated.Lobby groups such as the Australian PopulationInstitute and business associations consistentlypush for a much higher total population for thecountry, sometimes as high as 150 million peo-ple. Other organisations such as the AustralianConservation Foundation (ACF) and Australiansfor an Ecologically Sustainable Population

Table 2 Australia: Selected Indicators of Climate Change:Present and Projected

Summer Days with Maximum Temperature Above 35 degrees

Present 2030 2070

Brisbane 3 3–6 4–35Canberra 4 6–10 7–30Adelaide 10 11–16 13–28Perth 15 16–22 18–39

Winter Days with Sub-zero Minimum TemperaturesPresent 2030 2070

Canberra 44 31–42 6–38Orange (NSW) 38 18–32 1–27Wandering (WA) 14 5–11 0–9

Source: CSIRO, 2001.



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have argued for a ‘deep green’ evaluation of thisissue which, in some cases, has suggested a real-istic figure of no more than five million (Flannery,2003; Toyne, 2004). There is little doubt thatany consensus that may be reached concerningdesired population levels will disappoint protag-onists from both sides. Notwithstanding this,ongoing public debate is necessary because anynotion of ecologically sustainable developmentwithout due reference to the fundamental ques-tion of population is bereft of insight. It is anissue of such profound importance that it mustnever be regarded as an afterthought.

Australia’s enormous size, together with ahighly dispersed population, means that trans-portation costs – and sensitivity to crude oilprice rises – are a significant political issue.Since 2003, rising demand from China has seenthe price of diesel fuel increase by 28% and thishas had a marked impact on the rural sector. Asdetailed in footnote four, the country also hasconsiderable mineral and energy wealth, espe-cially abundant natural gas, as well as coal forthe production of cheap electricity. This hasbeen an important factor shaping the current,Howard government’s continual reluctance toratify the Kyoto Protocol (Lowe, 2004; Kellow,2005). The ongoing increase in the price ofcrude oil has an important economic flow-througheffect on numerous sources of consumption.Equity issues are not always brought to the fore-front in this discussion. However, we argue thatthese are necessary considerations within thecontext of engaging the social parameters ofsustainable futures. The rising costs of travel forbasic necessities and services are prohibitive forpeople on fixed small incomes and this needs tobe factored into any integrated transport policy.

Concerning minerals, mining and energy

More recently – at the start of what is alreadybeing labelled the ‘Asian century’ – deliberateenergy policy choices have been made to pro-vide ongoing support for the coal export indus-try and domestic thermal electricity productionby continuing to cap the Mandatory RenewableEnergy Target (MRET) at a low level, as well asdramatically expanding uranium production forthe burgeoning Asian (and possibly, Australian)nuclear power sector. With plans to expand elec-tricity production through nuclear power gener-ation by 40 gigawatts by 2020, China is seen asoffering huge market potential for Australianuranium. In the complex political environmentof Australian federalism, the latter is particularly

contentious for, while the Commonwealth gov-ernment is keen to capitalise on this opportunity,three States – Victoria, Western Australia andQueensland – presently ban uranium mining.However, in 2005 – following BHP-Billiton’stakeover of the world’s largest uranium depositat Olympic Dam in South Australia and the pas-sage of a new energy bill in the United States torevive the nuclear energy industry – both thePrime Minister and the then Premier of New SouthWales, as well as mining industry and businesscouncil leaders, echoed similar sentiments beingvoiced in Europe, and called for a ‘reneweddebate’ and reappraisal of the potential of nuclearenergy as one response to the country’s high percapita greenhouse gas emissions.

3

This call wasmade despite the fact that what one commen-tator has branded ‘the planet’s least ecologicallysustainable fuel source’ (Christoff, 2002, 21)involves massive inputs of energy from fossilfuels at all phases of the nuclear fuel cycle frommining and milling through to decommission-ing, and that the 1999

Environment ProtectionAct

(Cwth) currently prohibits nuclear powergeneration in Australia (Diesendorf, 2005).

This re-energised debate is illustrative of theway in which there is constant interactionbetween government and favoured private sectorinterests so that for much of the time they aremutually reinforcing. It also shows how divisiveenvironmental issues can re-emerge long aftermany would have considered that they had ‘dis-appeared’ from the political agenda. Other exam-ples this century almost certainly will include:renewed proposals for large pulp mills; calls forthe expansion of genetically modified croppingregimes; higher immigration levels; increasedmineral sands’ mining; and the construction ofnew dams, long-distance water pipelines and(possibly) nuclear powered-desalination plantsfor our increasingly thirsty cities.

Effectively, all of the decisions listed aboveinvolve the ‘mining’ of the country’s naturalcapital (water, soils, biodiversity and minerals) andserve to reinforce the perception and actuality thatAustralia is a ‘rocks and crops’, ‘quarry economy’for the world market (Birrell

et al

., 1982). Focusedstrongly around such products as beef and lettucefor the rapidly growing, Asian fast food sector,two-thirds of agricultural production is now forthe overseas market and, by value, almost 60%of the country’s exports are accounted for byagriculture, fuels and minerals, and forestry. Yet,together, these industries employ less than 6%of the labour force. This high level of natural

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resource-dependency – and associated vulnera-bility to global price and currency fluctuationsand climatic changes – make Australia’s econ-omy comparable with those of many developingcountries. At different times entire economicsectors and regions have found themselves una-ble to compete against overseas competition andhave sought ‘exit’ structural adjustment assistancefrom government. The timber, citrus and sugarindustries are recent cases in point, and theembattled horticultural sector may well follow.

In mid-2005 – and reminiscent of the headydays of the 1980s mineral boom – there wasjubilation in Canberra when lucrative neworders from Japanese and Chinese steel mills forAustralian iron ore and coal cut the trade deficitin half in the space of four weeks. However, the41% increase in the price paid for coal and the53% rise for iron ore did not alter the fact thatby that stage Australia had recorded its 43rdconsecutive trade deficit overall, arguably theworst performance in the country’s history. Forthe March quarter, 2005, the deficit of over 7%of GDP was comparable to those of such coun-tries as Bulgaria and Romania. The heightenedmineral orders coincided with the start of offi-cial negotiations between Australia and Chinaon a free trade agreement which, if finalised,will have enormous ramifications in terms ofresource extraction rates and environmental con-sequences in Australia.

4

Some months later, theminerals industry was further buoyed by thenews that China had decided to revalue its cur-rency, thereby increasing the purchasing powerof the yuan. China is the world’s largest con-sumer of steel, iron ore and copper, and 2005saw steel production surge 32% higher than thelevel of the previous year. Queensland, WesternAustralia and the Northern Territory will beparticularly affected by this latest ‘resourcesboom’, with the first two States already record-ing growth (measured by gross State product) of4.25% and 5.25% in 2004/2005, double the ratesof the less resource-intensive economies ofVictoria, New South Wales and South Australia.

Inevitably, these developments will reignitedebate around the distribution of federal financesbetween the States and environmental justiceissues and place added pressure on the histori-cally strained relations between Indigenous andnon-Indigenous Australians. Indeed, calls arealready being made from within the conserva-tive Liberal Party and the mining industry toamend the

Native Title Act

to make it more‘miner-friendly’. Again, this represents the latest

phase in the longstanding conflict betweenmining and Indigenous interests and acts as areminder of the tortuous political process lead-ing up to the passage of this vigorouslycontested piece of legislation. ‘Boom and bust’resources cycles have long been a feature of theAustralian economic landscape. A recent reporthas cautioned that the current ‘super-cycle’ ofsurging commodity prices is ultimately unsus-tainable and is only likely to last for about threeyears (BIS Shrapnel, 2005). Governments of allpersuasions, of course, have a vested interest inthe mining sector because of the substantial roy-alties generated in the short-term. Coal exportsalone currently generate A$20 billion a year, anA$7 billion rise in four years. But the ‘resource-curse’ thesis warns of the dangers associatedwith exaggerated claims of the long-term eco-nomic benefits flowing from the extraction ofnon-renewable minerals and a dismissal of thelong-term environmental legacy.

Alternative futures

Diamond (2005, 415–416) concludes his lengthychapter on Australia with the following rhetoricalquestion:

Australia illustrates in extreme form theexponentially accelerating horse race in whichthe world now finds itself … On the onehand, the development of environmentalproblems in Australia, as in the whole world,is accelerating exponentially. On the otherhand, the development of public environmen-tal concern, and of private and governmentalcountermeasures, is also accelerating expo-nentially. Which horse will win the race?

The two alternative ‘futures’ sketched out herereinforce the seriousness of the environmentaland economic ‘crossroads’ metaphor so stronglyinvoked in earlier texts by Yencken and Wilkin-son (2000), and others. The two futures also rep-resent the core scenarios that lie at the heart ofdebate in contemporary green political theory(Cocks, 1999). On the one hand there is thedominant view that the forces of globalisation,‘free trade’ and the might of transnationalcorporations and the World Trade Organisation(WTO) are now so overwhelmingly powerfulthat the nation State has only limited controlover its own internal affairs. On the other, thereare commentators like Eckersley (2004) whohold out some promise for serious recognitionof the value of ecosystem services in a demo-cratic and responsive ‘green State’.



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Given the recent sobering assessment of theglobal environment in the hard-hitting

MilleniumEcosystem Assessment Report

(United Nations,2005), and by other commentators, that ‘theworld has a span of just a single lifetime, 70 or80 years, to turn human behaviour around from

growth

to

sustainability

…’ (Low

et al

., 2005,14), the central argument of this paper is that, ifanything, Diamond’s overview underestimatesthe seriousness of environmental problems inAustralia, and that significant choices on thepart of both industry and Federal and State‘developmentalist’ governments in the directionof ‘failure’ rather than ‘survival’ continue to bemade. Needless to add, there are dissenting voicesproposing that his pessimism is misinformedand misplaced. Jennifer Marohasy (2005) is aparticularly outspoken critic.

To contextualise Diamond’s chapter on Aus-tralia, it is important to recall that his warning ismerely the most recent manifestation of publicconcern, about land degradation in particular,that can be traced back at least as far as the1860s. But, as the title of this paper suggests,periods of progressive environmental reformhave invariably been infrequent and short-lived.Yet even these epiphanies will become less pro-gressive in the future unless the core valuesattesting to market fundamentalism are seriouslyaddressed and robustly debated.

Suffice to say, the growing body of literatureon community resilience and adaptive manage-ment cautions against sweeping generalisationsabout the ‘vulnerability’ of societies and nations(see, for example, Thomas and Twyman, 2005).As in the earlier phases of European settlement,there are some signs that growing numbers ofindividuals and organisations are beginning to‘adapt’ and recognise the need for greater recog-nition of the appropriateness of Indigenous landmanagement practices or a reduction in waterand energy consumption, cattle-grazing on Alpineand arid-land leases, and land-clearing. But theconcern is that these progressive voices arebeing drowned out by far more powerful, pro-developmentalist, political constituencies, thatmany of the favoured market-based environmen-tal management ‘solutions’ will not achieve thenecessary outcomes, and that for much of Australiathe environmental damage already may well beirreversible. There are clear warning signs that itis ‘crunch time’ for many environmental prob-lems and that radical intervention is called for.To take one example, the West Australian andCommonwealth governments have recently allo-

cated A$316 million to the diversion of saltywater from the Collie River and Wellington Damin the State’s south-west into abandoned coal-mines. Built initially for irrigation purposes in1933, Wellington Dam water has been too saltyfor human use since 1989: just one more instanceof the ongoing systemic failure of environmentalmanagement policy failure over the longer term.

A key scientific advisor to the Commonwealthgovernment – Professor Peter Cullen – provokedoutrage from agricultural interests in 2005 whenhe suggested that up to 10% of land currentlyin primary production was unsuitable for thispurpose (Hodge and Wilson, 2005). Cullen hadrevived a debate raised at least three yearsearlier when several national ‘sacrifice zones’,exhibiting a fatal combination of both severeland degradation and declining farm profits, hadbeen identified. These included the Spencer Gulfand Eyre Peninsula regions in South Australiaand the Murchison River district in WesternAustralia (ABC Radio National, 2002). Keys

etal

. (2003), too, have written of the successivewaves of ‘ecocide’ that have unfolded across the‘sacrificial’ desert landscapes of South Australiasince the 1950s, first as a consequence of atomicbomb testing, then through uranium mining and,most recently, in calls to use this ‘useless’ areafor nuclear waste disposal. They pose the funda-mental question, does this mean that these desertlands are effectively ‘beyond sustainability’?

The interconnectedness between environmentalissues and responses needs to be constantly bornein mind. This includes the links between energy,trade and telecommunications policy and biodi-versity preservation, water policy and agricul-tural development, biodiversity preservation andemployment in rural areas, and so on, and meansthat realistically no one issue can be discussedin isolation from its multiple connections(Dovers, 2005). Environmental problems havebeen variously described as ‘wicked’ and ‘messy’and they defy simple solutions. Algal bloomshave been experienced in Australia since the1870s. But in 1991/1992 Australia had the dubi-ous distinction of establishing a world record forthe longest ever algal bloom along a river whenover 1000 km of the Darling River were con-taminated as a direct consequence of flow mod-ification and nutrient enrichment associated withintroduced European agricultural practices (e.g.the use of fertilisers). Another classic examplerelates to the ethical dilemma linking Australianimmigration and population policy with whathave come to be called ‘climate change refugees’.

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Strauss (2003) has already written about themoral responsibility that he feels the UnitedStates owes to the residents of low-lying coastalareas around the Gulf of Mexico should sea-levelrise as a consequence of that country’s dispro-portionate contribution to anthropogenic green-house gas emissions. Exactly the same argumentcould be mounted in relation to Australia’s futureresponsibilities towards a possible sharp rise inenvironmental refugees involving the 7 millionpeople from the 22 neighbouring low-lying Pacificisland nations.

A final example, linking the ‘global’ and the‘local’ (Mazlish, 2005), relates to the controver-sial issue of State subsidisation of agriculture.The OECD average for this is 30% of the totalincome from farm production, but for Australiathe figure is 4%.

5

This has several consequencesof direct relevance to this paper. First, it meansthat Australian primary producers have to com-pete on a global playing field that is far fromlevel. Moreover, all the indications are that thekey protectionist countries on the world stage –particularly Japan and the United States – areresisting any change to their policies and thatthe impending Doha round of trade negotiationsis doomed to failure (Alford, 2005). The bypass-ing of local Australian growers in preference tocheap imported potato imports for the domesticfast-food sector, and the importation of low-priced horticultural products from Europe andAsia, are especially contentious issues. Theseimports are often produced under less than opti-mal environmental conditions involving highlevels of herbicide, pesticide, fertiliser and waterapplication. Further, many food imports aretransported by air. This clashes head-on with acentral tenet of low-impact, sustainable agricul-ture – local production for local consumption. Ithas the effect of greatly increasing Australia’s‘food miles’ quantum and also adds to the wors-ening problem of greenhouse gas build-up fromthe fastest-growing global sector, aviation emis-sions. This was touched upon earlier in thepaper when discussing the green credentials ofagribusiness corporations and supermarket chainsin Australia.

At the time of writing (mid-2005), 50% ofAustralia is drought-affected (including 90% ofNew South Wales) and five States have farmersin 65 regions eligible for ‘exceptional circum-stance’ relief . Notwithstanding the fact that thecurrent drought has been labelled ‘unprece-dented’ in scale and longevity, once again it hasnevertheless been marked by vigorous political

debate, so characteristic of the widening urban/rural divide, around the issue of whether theagricultural sector deserves to be singled out forspecial compensation payments for loss ofincome (McColl and Young, 2005; Megalogenis,2005). On the urban front, a recently-releasedAuditor-General’s report in New South Waleshas warned that Sydney has reached its popula-tion limit in terms of water supply capacity,regardless of whether or not the city is drought-affected (

The Age

, May 12, 2005; Auditor-General, 2005)

6

; and in the face of a worseningwater crisis following a steady, 30-year declinein rainfall, construction has already started on adesalination plant for Perth and consideration isalso being given to the feasibility of employinga shuttle of environmentally-friendly ‘aquatank-ers’ to transport water from the Kimberleyregion delivered at the competitive price of lessthan A$1 a kilolitre.

Increasingly, as both Goyder (in the 1860s)and Taylor (in the 1920s) forewarned (Powell,1984) – in ‘pre-global warming conscious’times – water deficiencies and infertile soils willcome to present an enormous impediment toAustralia’s capacity to both support a largepopulation and produce export income fromprimary commodities, especially for the rapidlyexpanding Chinese market. Further, our view isthat – notwithstanding some examples of leading-edge innovation – Diamond is overly optimisticabout the level of public awareness and concern(of which more below), as well as the capacityand willingness of State and private institutionsto effect the radical, long-lasting reforms thatare now so urgently required. One of the mainreasons for this, highlighted later in the discus-sion of the 2001

State of the EnvironmentReport

(State of the Environment AdvisoryCouncil, 2001), is the extreme fragmentationand lack of ‘fit’ between institutions and ecosys-tems, a problem that is by no means unique toAustralia (Young, 2002; Dovers, 2005). We seemuch merit in the serious criticisms of ecologi-cal modernisation theory (EMT) advanced byYork and Rosa (2003). Their damning critiqueof incremental environmental reform, within a‘business-as-usual framework’, centres aroundthe tendency for countries like Australia to invokethe rhetoric of decentralised decision-making,toy with ‘weak sustainability’ and tinker withcosmetic changes to institutional structures thatultimately do little or nothing to produce positive,‘on the ground’ environmental outcomes (Lane

et al

., 2004). The strong emphasis on local-level



193


volunteerism in such high-profile programs asLandcare (Wilson, 2004), and the history andultimate demise of the short-lived NationalStrategy for Ecologically Sustainable Develop-ment in the 1990s, as well as the paucity oftangible environmental outcomes stemming fromthe

Environment Protection and BiodiversityConservation Act

(1999), to be discussed later,are all good examples.

One of the complicating factors already men-tioned, is the federal administrative structurewhich means that it is often inappropriate togeneralise about ‘Australia’ or ‘Australian’ envi-ronmental policy. ‘National’ parks, for example,are not managed by a national agency, but bythe individual States. As well, there is nonational coastal policy though, in July, 2005, theFederal Environment Minister threatened to usepotentially strong Commonwealth powers tooverride the States to force stricter regulationsregarding inappropriate coastal development.Further, not all States are connected to a nation-wide electricity grid, each has its own environ-mental protection agency and laws, and thereare marked variations in terms of their views onpopulation growth. While South Australia andTasmania, for example, are actively promotingin-migration, New South Wales, with 1000 in-migrants a week settling in the Sydney basin, is not.

As Toyne (1994) has so ably demonstrated,with respect to the environmental reform agenda,Australia is, and always has been, a ‘

reluctantnation

’. And as already noted with respect to thedifferential impacts of the present resourcesboom and the current debate surrounding nuclearenergy, with eight jurisdictions (six States andtwo Territories) there are always going to be‘leading’ and ‘lagging’ policy responses andoutcomes. The most recent of the independently-produced

State of the States

reports rankedWestern Australia and Tasmania equal first interms of their environmental performance for2004/2005 and Victoria sixth, and last (EvattFoundation, 2005). For many years, Queensland(ranked fifth in 2005) lagged well behind thedownstream States in the Murray-Darling Basinin setting a cap on water diversions. In this periodAustralia’s largest irrigated cotton farm – the14 000-hectare, Cubbie Station – was allowedby the Queensland government to expand its stor-age capacity from 15 000 megalitres to 450 000megalitres without having to go through any for-mal environmental impact assessment process.This stirred angry opposition from environmen-talists and farmers downstream on the Darling

River in neighbouring New South Wales and(ultimately unsuccessful) calls for the Federaland Queensland governments to combine to buyback the property . At the time of writing, too,several of the States have decided to ‘go italone’ and set their own, more ambitious targetsfor the reduction of greenhouse gases and thephasing in of renewable energy at rates that aresubstantially higher than those set by the Com-monwealth government (Kent and Mercer,2005). This marks Australia out as being quitedifferent, in an institutional and administrativesense, from New Zealand or the UK, for instance.

Another important issue relates to Australia’sobligations to the wider global community inthe form of international treaties and conven-tions to which the nation is nominally a signa-tory. These include such agreements as theConvention on Biological Diversity (signed inDecember 1993), the Convention for the Protec-tion of the World Cultural and Natural Heritageand the Ramsar Convention (both signed in1975), but there are also at least 55 others deal-ing specifically with environmental concerns. Intheory, these conventions grant the Common-wealth government significant power over theStates should they wish to invoke it, a ‘stick’that was used, for example, against Tasmania inthe famous High Court ‘dam case’. In practice,in recent times, Australia has followed the leadof the United States and shown itself to beespecially lukewarm about such ‘anti-growth’United Nations conventions as the Kyoto Protocoland the World Heritage Convention (Aplin, 2004).By contrast, the WTO agenda and associatedbilateral and multilateral trading agreements areaccorded a much higher priority and tend todominate government policy development.

Monitoring environmental policy performance

Since the early, analytical writings on resourcescarcity of Malthus and Jevons, and the morerecent, high-profile debates involving Ehrlich,Simon, Lomborg and others, the issue of

meas-urement –

exactly what to measure, and how –has always been central to the sustainabilitydebate (Kates

et al

., 2005). Not surprisingly, dif-ferent commentators have come up with widelyvarying judgments as to how well Australia ‘rates’internationally in terms of its record on environ-mental stewardship. In broad terms there are‘optimistic’ and ‘pessimistic’ assessments. TheAustralian government’s status report for theWorld Summit on Sustainable Development(Commonwealth of Australia, 2002) documents

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Australia’s recent record of achievements and isa classic example of the former, as are the manypublications attacking ‘environmental funda-mentalism’ produced by the pro-market, anti-regulatory, Institute of Public Affairs (see, forexample, Marohasy, 2003). In stark contrast,Christoff’s (2002) In Reverse, together with theprolific output of the Australia Institute and theAustralian Conservation Foundation, paint a farless sanguine picture of Australia’s environmentand the Commonwealth government’s recentpolicy record.

A 2001 assessment by Prescott-Allen com-pared 180 countries in terms of both their‘human’ and ‘ecological wellbeing’. Australiawas rated extremely poorly on the ecologicalindex, with a score of only 28 out of 100. Thisplaced it in the ‘poor performance/almost unsus-tainable’ category. High per capita greenhousegas emissions, excessive land-clearing activity,and high levels of resource and water use weresignificant factors in generating the low score.The Australian government has defended itsposition on the basis that the population isgrowing, especially through immigration. Yet bycomparison with other developed nations,Australia’s immigration levels do not justify a moregenerous quota. Another often-quoted reason isthat Australia is a major exporter of energy-intensive products, so that its emissions contri-bution is produced on behalf on those countriesusing Australian products. The industry oftenused in support of this claim is aluminium. Thisargument needs to be seriously questioned whenone considers that the Australian aluminiumindustry produces twice as much greenhouse gasper tonne of aluminium produced than any otherproducer in the world. This situation renders theAustralian aluminium industry one of the mostenvironmentally inefficient by world standards(Singer and Gregg, 2004).

Another 2001 study, this time by the OECD,followed on that organisation’s earlier (2000)‘broad-brush’ appraisal of the environmentalperformance of its 32 member countries. The2001 study also strongly criticised Australia,particularly for its lack of institutional coordina-tion, the extremely low price users are chargedfor water, the contradictions inherent in many ofits environmental policies, and the general reluc-tance to use economic instruments such as thetaxation system to achieve better environmentaloutcomes (Vourc’h and Price, 2001). By con-trast, at the 2001 meeting of the World EconomicForum held in Davos, Switzerland, the Global

Leaders of Tomorrow Environment Task Forceused a formula involving 22 indicators to rankAustralia a highly-commendable seventh out of122 nations, a grading that Friends of the Earthdismissed as being far too generous. They arguedthat the calculation used places undue emphasison a country’s ‘capacity’ to solve environmentalproblems rather than actual outcomes and, usinga different formula, ranked Australia 67th on theglobal list (The Ecologist /Friends of the Earth,2001). More recently, at the Forum’s meeting in2005, even though the country’s ranking hadslipped to 13th out of 146 countries on similarcriteria, this still represented another glowingperformance judged by this arguably crudemeasure (Yale Center for Environmental Lawand Policy/Centre for International Earth Sci-ence Information Network, 2005). Anotherrecent, international ‘benchmarking’ exercise –this time by IbisWorld (2005) – placed Australia11th among 50 nations on ‘environmental health’criteria. The country was pulled down by its rel-atively large ecological footprint (Austria beingranked first and the USA, 31st). Particular criticismwas levelled at the weak regulatory environmentfor corporations, as well as at the findings that170 million tonnes of carbon dioxide are releasedeach year from coal-fired power stations andthat greenhouse gas emissions have increased by30% since 1990.

Within Australia, two nationwide State of theEnvironment reports, separated by five years,allow some comparisons to be made for theperiod 1996 to 2001. The main conclusion to bedrawn is that the continued export push and anannual population expansion of around 200 000are placing ever-increasing demands on Aus-tralia’s natural capital and that, apart from urbanair quality, all of the other major environmentalproblems are steadily worsening (State of theEnvironment Advisory Council, 1996; 2001).The 2001 report noted (p. 1) that ‘degradation oflands and waters remains of critical concern’.

Three other national monitoring projects arealso worthy of mention. The first is the AustralianBureau of Statistics (2002) publication, MeasuringAustralia’s Progress, which highlighted seriousreversals for five out of the six environmentalindicators measured. Second, the ambitiousNational Land and Water Resources Audit(NLWRA) (2002) ran from 1997 to 2002 withinitial funding from the Natural Heritage Trust(Crowley, 2001). This reported on a range ofissues including the state of biodiversity, waterquality and quantity, and dryland salinity. The

David Mercer and Peter Marden: Ecologically Sustainable Development in a ‘Quarry’ Economy 195


most recent phase of the Audit’s work has beenfunded until 2007. Table 3 presents a summaryof some of the major environmental changesdocumented in these and other studies. The pos-sibility that funding for the NLWRA will ceasein 2007 raises the concern that this importantmonitoring and evaluation work will not beresourced after that date. This has been a long-standing problem with environmental monitor-ing in Australia and is in stark contrast to theunquestionable commitment that has alwaysbeen made to the five-yearly census and to eco-nomic and trade data collection, modelling andforecasting.

Finally, in 2005, in the most ambitious projectever undertaken to quantify the triple bottomline (TBL), accounts for 135 economic sectors ofthe Australian economy in the mid-1990s werefinally published (Foran et al., 2005). Balancing

Act presents a wide-ranging snapshot of the stateof the Australian economy at that time, meas-ured against nine TBL indicators. This innova-tive, four-volume study highlights the high ratesof material flows generated in Australia andreinforces the need to decouple material produc-tion and consumption from measures of economicgrowth.

Assessments at the national scale, of course,are fraught with problems because they oftenmask considerable regional variations in effective‘performance’. A recent appraisal of the ‘greencredentials’ of the long-serving Labor govern-ment in New South Wales, for example, arguedthat, while the administration could be said tohave done well in terms of making ‘easy’ deci-sions such as greatly increasing the area ofnational parks, it had demonstrated a poorrecord for dealing with the more difficult ‘brown’

Table 3 A Summary of Environmental Changes in Australia Reported in Recent Studies

Extinct Critically Endangered Endangered Vulnerable

Animals1 37 59 145 361Plants 5 14 37Threatened Ecosystems and Species2

• 2891 threatened ecosystems and other ecological communities• 94% of Australian bioregions have one or more threatened ecosystems• Almost 50% of threatened ecosystems are eucalypt forest and woodlands• All but 1 per cent of temperate lowland grasslands in south-eastern Australia have been lost• 1500 ecosystems are poorly conserved and threatened• 57 of the sub-regions in the intensive land use zone have less than 30% vegetation remaining;

88 sub-regions show little connectivity between remnants• 5.7 million hectares of prime agricultural land now salinity-affected or ‘at risk’; could rise to as

high as 17 million hectares by 2050Land Clearing3

• Fourth highest rate of land-clearing in the world; 564 800 hectares of native vegetation cleared in 2000• 13% of the continent has been cleared since European settlement• Approximately 32% of agricultural and urban zone native vegetation has been cleared or highly modified• Rate of clearing accelerating; as much land cleared in the last 50 years as in the 150 years prior to 1945• Particularly high rate of land-clearing in Queensland (1.05 mill hectares, August 2001–August 2003)

in the lead-up to the Statewide, 2007 ban on broadacre land-clearingCatchment and River Condition4

• Only 30% of intensively used catchments are in the ‘better condition’ class• Over 85% of assessed river length is modified• 33% of river length assessed has impaired aquatic biota; almost 25% has lost up to 50% of aquatic

macro-invertebrates• Modified habitat along more than 50% of river length assessed• 69% of water extracted comes from ‘stressed’ rivers

Atmospheric pollution5

• Annual emissions of sulphur oxides (kg/person): 100.6 (USA = 68.9)• Annual emissions of carbon dioxide (tonnes/person): 16.6 (USA = 20)• Percentage change, 1990–98: 20 (USA: 12).

Sources: (1) IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (www.redlist.org); (2) National Land and Water Resources Audit (NLWRA) (2002): Australian Terrestrial Biodiversity Assessment; (3) 2001 Australian State of the Environment Report. (4) National Land and Water Resources Audit (NLWRA) (2002) Catchment, River and Estuary Condition in Australia; (5) OECD (2000).

196 Geographical Research • June 2006 • 44(2):183–203


issues such as energy, water supply and trans-port, as well as river health and coastal over-development (Hodge, 2005). In common withall the States and Territories, New South Waleshas also produced a number of State of the Envi-ronment Reports (SoE) (for 1995, 1997, 2000and 2003) and requires each of its local govern-ments to produce SoE reports on an annual basis.SoE reporting also takes place at the regionalscale in various parts of Australia. Examplesinclude the work of the Great Barrier ReefMarine Park Authority (1998) and the GippslandIntegrated Natural Resources Forum (2005).

The environment and recent electionsIn terms of the ‘environmental debate’ and theworkings of the Australian federal system, theyears 2004 and 2005 saw three interesting elec-tions. The first was the October, 2004, federalelection which saw the conservative, Coalitiongovernment successfully returned for its fourthconsecutive term with an increased majority.The incumbent government increased its major-ity in the House of Representatives by ten seatsand the Opposition Labor’s first preference votewas the lowest for 70 years. Even though theAustralian Greens slightly increased their shareof the primary vote to 7%, the general mood ofthe electorate was certainly not one that accordedany kind of priority or relevance to environmentalconcerns. Indeed, just three days prior to theelection – in a masterful political flourish – the PrimeMinister gave a rousing and enthusiastically-received speech in Launceston, Tasmania, inwhich he promised to guarantee the timberindustry continued access to the native forestresource base and hence the jobs of forest work-ers in Tasmania. This was a policy that stood inmarked contrast to the Opposition Leader’sdoomed proposal to protect native forests in thatState but at the same time provide a generousrestructuring and compensation package forretrenched workers. Not only was this strongly‘preservationist’ policy opposed by the TasmanianLabor Premier but it also led to a perception inthat State that the Australian Labor Party wastoo closely aligned with the ‘radical’ AustralianGreens.

The second election of interest was that heldin Western Australia in February, 2005. This sawthe re-endorsement of that State’s Labor Partyadministration, a collapse in the Green vote, andthe continuation of the political situation wherebythe Commonwealth government is of a differentpolitical persuasion from those of all the eight

States and Territories. This political landscapehas been in place since 2002 but had notoccurred prior to that year. Of interest in the WestAustralian State election was the electorate’ssuspicion of the Opposition party’s grandioseuncosted plan to ‘solve’ Perth’s worsening watersupply problems by constructing a 3700 km‘canal’ from the Kimberley region in the northof the State to the south-west. Superficially, atleast, one election highlights an electorate withlittle or no interest in environmental concernswhile the other points to a citizenry that hasapparently matured in terms of critically apprais-ing simplistic engineering ‘solutions’ to, in thiscase, the water shortage problem.

In June, 2005, the people of the NorthernTerritory also went to the polls and re-electedthe incumbent Australian Labor Party adminis-tration with an unprecedented 12% swing and agreatly increased majority, including five Abo-riginal members. Although environmental con-cerns were not central to the election contest, aswith the long-distance canal plan in WesternAustralia, the electorate voiced their strongopposition to the Coalition/Liberal Party proposalto connect the Northern Territory to the nationalelectricity grid via an A$1.13 billion, 3000-kmtransmission line. Voters also backed a continu-ation of the current moratorium on any new ura-nium mines and on land-clearing and pastoralsubdivision in approximately 40% of the eco-logically significant Daly River catchment. This53 000 km2 catchment, to the south-west ofDarwin, has permanent water flows and excep-tional biodiversity values, including rare monsoonrainforests. The area currently subject to themoratorium is under constant threat from land-clearing and excessive water extraction forirrigated agriculture. In a post-election twist, twomonths later, the Commonwealth governmentargued that it was no longer acceptable for theNorthern Territory government to hold backextraction of the A$12 billion worth of estimateduranium deposits and used its constitutionalpower to overrule the Northern Territory’s ‘nonew uranium mines’ policy. This will trigger arenewed phase of exploration activity and islikely to see the start of a new mine at Koongarra,adjacent to the World heritage-listed, KakaduNational Park, as well as the re-opening of theJabiluka mine. The latter is surrounded by KakaduNational Park and was closed following envi-ronmental protests over ten years ago. Relatedly,in July 2005, the Commonwealth governmentmade it clear that – through the medium of the



Radioactive Waste Management Bill – it intendedto override the power of the Territory governmentand use its constitutional authority to establish anuclear waste facility in that part of Australia.

Attitudinal and behavioural surveysWhile elections are one way of gauging changingcommunity attitudes towards the environment,regular attitudinal and behavioural surveys suchas those conducted by Newspoll and the AustralianBureau of Statistics (ABS) are another. Since 1992,and in association with the monthly populationsurvey, the ABS has produced ten publicationsentitled Environmental Issues: People’s Viewsand Practices. This regular nationwide survey ofaround 15 000 adults aged 18 years and overprobes a series of topics that are rotated everythree years. Lothian (2002) carried out a detailedcomparison of these and related surveys for theperiod 1991 to 2001 and could have been pre-dicting voting patterns in the 2004 election whenhe concluded (p. 60) that ‘While the influence ofenvironment varies from year to year, the rangeof its contribution is not as great as for other issuessuch as unemployment or interest rates’. He alsodrew attention (p. 48) to a ‘downward trend in theproportion of persons concerned about environ-mental problems’. The most recent of these surveyswas conducted in March, 2004, and was publishedin November 2004 (Australian Bureau of Statistics,2004). Some of the key findings were that:

1. concern about environmental problems hasshown a constant decline since 1992 from75% of the adult problem voicing concern to57% in 2004;

2. environmental concern is strongly correlatedwith educational level. Also, the AustralianCapital Territory consistently rates the highestlevel of concern and the Northern Territorythe lowest;

3. in the year prior to March, 2004, only one infive of the adult population donated time ormoney to help protect the environment, aproportion that has remained stable since the1998 and 2001 surveys. Only 7% of the adultpopulation formally registered an environ-mental concern by writing a letter, signing apetition, etc.;

4. those aged 65 years and over consistentlyvoice the least concern about environmentalproblems of all age groups, and

5. there has been a steady decline in the level ofconcern shown by those in the 18–24 yearsage group.

This latter finding was a particular cause ofalarm for Lothian (2002). He noted (p. 48) that‘if it persists it does not augur well for thefuture’. But that trend has continued. By March2004 those in the youngest, 18–24 years agecohort, expressing a concern for the environment,had fallen from 57% in 2001 to 49%. Interest-ingly, this mirrors Commonwealth governmentdisinterest.

Government responsesMention has already been made of the com-plexities of policy development associated withAustralia’s federal structure, contradictory policyagendas such as those on trade, energy andconservation, and the competing influences ofindustry groups and non-governmental organisa-tions on legislation and policy outcomes. Onecertainty of Australian federalism is that anycentral government will have its environmentaland other policies subjected to intense criticismby State governments that are of a differentpolitical persuasion. This is particularly relevantat the present time when all the State govern-ments are Labor administrations while theCommonwealth government is dominated byCoalition (Liberal/National) politicians. Anotherreality is that the different States have alwaysprovided unique opportunities for carrying outpolicy and regulatory ‘experiments’ to tackleenvironmental and other problems (Craven, 2005).

Numerous environmental policy initiatives havebeen instituted by the Commonwealth governmentsince 1992 and a selection of these is highlightedin Table 4.

The remainder of this discussion focusesbriefly on three of these: the so-called, NationalStrategy for Ecologically Sustainable Develop-ment (NSESD); the policy response to climatechange and the growing water crisis, and theEnvironment Protection and Biodiversity Con-servation Act (1999).

The National Strategy for Ecologically Sustainable Development (NSESD)In December, 1991, following a year of exhaustivedeliberations, eleven expert Working Groups madeover 500 detailed recommendations as to how,in their considered opinion, Australia could movetowards a fully-fledged ecologically sustainabledevelopment strategy. However, over the courseof the following 12 months the bold recommen-dations were gradually watered down or dismissedoutright as discussions proceeded through amaze of dozens of State, Commonwealth and joint



government committees, most of which were deeplyantagonistic to the key principles and reformsunder review (Bennett, 2001). Subsequently,some of the recommendations were accepted inprinciple by various State and Commonwealthgovernments and agencies, most recently by theGovernment of Western Australia (2004), in itsState Sustainability Strategy, and the Governmentof Victoria (2005). But rarely were the recom-mendations backed up by strong legislation,targets or timelines. By 1997 the NSESD waseffectively dead in a policy sense, leadingChristoff (2002, 29) to lament that the lack ofreal political commitment and the accompany-ing bureaucratic emasculation process repre-sented that ‘decade’s greatest lost opportunityfor progressing sustainability in Australia’.

Climate change and water reformAs already noted, Australia has the highest percapita rate of greenhouse gas emissions in theworld. For some time, alongside the United States,the government used ‘scientific uncertainty’ asan excuse for inaction and outright opposition tothe principles underpinning the Kyoto Protocol(Lowe, 2004). But more recently a grudgingacceptance of the overwhelming scientific evidencehas gradually emerged along with acknowledge-ment of the inevitability of many of the projectedclimatic and related environmental changesdiscussed earlier. The Allen Consulting (2005)publication, commissioned by the AustralianGreenhouse Office, is the latest in a long line ofconsultants’ reports warning of the probable

consequences that will unfold over the next 30to 50 years and what this will mean for increas-ingly drought-prone, ‘at-risk’ regions such asWestern Australia and the Murray Darling Basin.Worst-case scenarios have runoff in the Basin –the irrigation heartland of Australia – diminishingby 20% by 2030 and as much as 45% by 2070.

Tellingly, the Allen Consulting report is sub-titled ‘Promoting an efficient adaptation response’,highlighting yet again the Government’s antipathyto what are seen as the kind of economicallydamaging emission reduction/mitigation policiesembodied in the Kyoto Protocol. In mid-2005the Government revealed that for some monthsit had been working on building partnershipswith three of the world’s largest coal producers,China, the US and India, as well as South Koreaand Japan, in the lead-up to the formalisation ofthe Asia-Pacific Partnership for Clean Develop-ment and Climate. While initially consisting ofonly six nations, together they account for halfthe world’s population and over 40% of theglobe’s greenhouse gas emissions. Though shorton detail, the ‘coal pact’ – based around non-binding, ‘clean coal’ technologies and voluntaryactions rather than targeted, and legislated,emissions reduction – is seen as being more‘practical’ than the Kyoto Protocol, the first phaseof which terminates in 2012. Needless to add,the ‘complementary’ initiative has been stronglycriticised by environmental groups and theOpposition parties, at least in part because it steerswell clear of instituting carbon-trading or a carbontax. We have already noted that – paralleling the

Table 4 A Selection of Commonwealth Government Environmental Milestones, 1992–2004.

1992 National Strategy for Ecologically Sustainable DevelopmentNational Greenhouse Response StrategyNational Forest Policy StatementIntergovernmental Agreement on the Environment (IGAE)Murray Darling Basin Agreement

1996 National Weeds StrategyNational Biodiversity Strategy

1997 Natural Heritage Trust1998 National Greenhouse Strategy

National Land and Water Resources Audit1999 Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act2000 National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality2002 Natural Heritage Trust (second round)2004 Council of Australian Governments National Water Initiative

Securing Australia’s Energy FutureNatural Heritage Trust ExtensionNational Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality



US experience – some of the Australian Statesare developing their own greenhouse policiesthat run directly counter to the anti-mitigationphilosophy of the partnership. Without any doubt,for the foreseeable future under the presentadministration in Canberra, Australia remainswedded to its traditional, coal-based energy regime.

By comparison, in response to growing alarmin many quarters about Australia’s worseningwater crisis and the unhealthy state of many ofthe nation’s rivers, recent policy reform in thewater sector has been slightly more progressive.After at least ten years of negotiations, in June,2004, at the 14th Council of Australian Govern-ments Meeting in Canberra, all the States exceptTasmania and Western Australia signed an his-toric agreement known as the National WaterInitiative (NWI). The fundamental aims of theNWI are to price water more effectively, toincrease environmental flows in over-allocatedcatchments, and to achieve greater efficiencies inwater use in both urban and rural environments.Significant increases in charges are now borneby water users and it is anticipated that substan-tial progress in terms of returning environmentalflows to the more seriously impacted river sys-tems will have been achieved by 2010. The issueof increased environmental flows to rivers ishighly contentious and sits right at the heart ofcurrent debates around the need for drastic envi-ronmental policy reform. A recent economicstudy of the stressed Loddon catchment in Vic-toria, for example, calculated that meeting thegovernment’s environmental targets for the riversystem would ‘cost’ the local dairy industry anannual average of A$2 million in ‘lost’ produc-tion and an additional loss of A$7 million tolocal communities (Hunt, 2005).

Prior to the launch of the NWI, inter-Statewater trading trials involving New South Wales,Victoria and South Australia were conducted inthe Murray-Darling Basin between 1998 and2000. Fifty-one transactions involving 9.5 GL ofwater (mainly moving into South Australia) andcosting some A$10 million were evaluated byCSIRO (Young et al., 2000). Given that 99% ofthe water sold was not needed by sellers, theunequivocal conclusion (p. 3) was that watertrading is having the effect of ‘… increasing thevalue of water use in the Murray-Darling Basin’.Nevertheless, the review highlighted a numberof significant teething problems with water trad-ing relating to long-term environmental impactsand obligations. These are yet a long way fromresolution, but at least a start has been made in

the direction of changing the wasteful water-useparadigm that has been in place in rural Aus-tralia for well over a hundred years. As we haveseen in the case of Cubbie Station, that mind-setinvolved strong government backing for exten-sive water storage and channel systems involv-ing the highly inefficient surface distribution ofwater, largely to properties producing low-valueagricultural products.

The Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC) (1999)Attention has already been drawn to Australia’ssignatory status with respect to over 50 interna-tional environmental treaties and conventions. Intheory, the Commonwealth government has con-siderable constitutional power over the States toachieve desired environmental outcomes. Initially,high hopes were held for the exercise of thispower and the adoption of strong national lead-ership through the passage of the wide-rangingEnvironment Protection and Biodiversity Con-servation Act (1999). The main object of theEPBC Act is to ‘provide for the protection ofthe environment, especially those aspects of theenvironment that are matters of national envi-ronmental significance’. Further, under the Actthe Commonwealth government can require thatapproval first be sought for any action that canbe deemed to have a ‘significant impact’ on theenvironment if it is deemed to be of ‘nationalsignificance’.

After five years of operation a heated discus-sion is currently underway regarding the efficacyof the Act and whether it has indeed matched upto its early promise. The debate was sparked bya damning critique of the Act’s (poor) imple-mentation, by Andrew Macintosh and DebraWilkinson (2005) of the Australia Institute. Echo-ing Lowe’s (2004, 245) brutal assessment that‘The Howard government has presided over thesteady and systematic decline of the Australianenvironment’, their critique centred around thealleged failure of the legislation to produce anytangible improvement in environmental outcomes.In response, McGrath (2005) has argued thattheir criticisms are too harsh and their overallconclusion too sweeping. However, his counter-appraisal provides little in the way of convincingevidence to support a markedly different judgment.

ConclusionOur objective in this paper has been to sketch anoverview of recent developments in terms ofenvironmental change and policy responses in



Australia, particularly over the last ten years.Inevitably, because of space constraints, thereare many important issues that we have not beenable to explore and, because of the sheer size ofAustralia, we have left ourselves open to thecriticism that we have over-generalised. Forreaders who may be unfamiliar with Australiawe have highlighted what we see as some of themost significant recent academic publicationsand debates around the theme of ‘ecologicalsustainability’. We remain unapologetic aboutthe general pessimism of our conclusions. Thereis little doubt that Australian politics has failedto grapple with the challenges posed by a post-sustainable development society. The unwilling-ness of liberal democracy to resolve environmentalproblems has been recognised for a considerabletime. New global reform agendas offer no solaceas we in Australia run headlong into trade treatieswithout due regard for ecological implications.To speak of failure, however, may suggest goodintention juxtaposed to institutional incompe-tence. Judgment on this basis is passive and eth-ically weak in terms of not directly engagingwith those forces at play to actively thwart orundermine genuine attempts at sustainable reforms.The demonstration of a clear public interest insecuring a sustainable environment is not enoughto foster institutional change, particularly as thisprocurement will run counter to vested interests.The dominant mode of rationality and its asso-ciated frame of values remain deeply committedto the fear of no growth and the imperative offree market forces. A reframing of values suggeststhat we need to help generate a humane politicssensitive to ecological values and a communallife more in tune with a biocentric consciousness.Unfortunately the Australian experience suggestsmovement in the opposite direction in our fer-vent desire to maintain a consumerist resource-extraction economy. To repeat Lowe’s (2004)quotation from the start of the paper, ‘… insteadof treating the termites, we’re giving the wall acoat of paint, so that it looks good’.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTSThe authors would like to thank Tim O’Riordan and ananonymous referee for their constructive comments on anearlier draft of this paper. The usual disclaimers apply.

NOTES1. With cities using around 8% of Australia’s water, by

comparison with irrigation’s 70%, it would be surprisingif there were not calls to divert water from inefficient orenvironmentally damaging agricultural activities to urbancentres. SA Water has recently bought 17 gigalitres forAdelaide from Murray irrigators and a recent proposal

– which is unlikely to be approved – has been to purchasewater from Murrumbidgee irrigators and pipe it to Can-berra, Goulburn and Sydney (Hodge and Bachelard, 2005).

2. Dairy products are the main export out of the Port ofMelbourne. The Victorian State government and businessinterests have been pushing for the deepening of the ship-ping channel leading to the port so that the new generationof large ships can gain access. This has been a verycontroversial proposal because of uncertainty surroundingthe environmental consequences. At the time of writingan independent panel’s assessment of the environmentaleffects study has identified significant problems with thereport, its methodology, and findings. The State govern-ment’s response nevertheless has been to proceed withan unpopular, A$32 million ‘trial dredging’ project.

3. At 6.7 tonnes per person, Australia has the highest percapita emissions of CO2 equivalents in the world. It issecond only to Canada as the world’s largest uraniumproducer. It also has around 30% of the world’s low-cost reserves. Uranium prices on the world market havequadrupled since 2000 to US$30 per pound (454 grams)in 2005. At a speech delivered to mining industry execu-tives in Melbourne in June, 2005, the Federal ResourcesMinister criticised the Western Australian governmentfor its ban on uranium mining, arguing that that it was‘costing’ Australia A$5.8 billion in lost export income(The Age, Melbourne, 10 June, 2005). At the time ofwriting the Commonwealth government is poised toallow mining companies to start exporting uranium toChina. On 18 June, 2005, the Australian Labor Partyadministration was returned to power in the NorthernTerritory election. Part of their campaign platform wasopposition to any new uranium mines.

4. To give a sense of the scale of this trade, China’s shareof global trade has risen from 2.5% to 6.7% in the pastdecade. It is now the world’s third largest trading nation.Mineral exports from Australia totalled A$53 billion in2003–2004 and A$65 billion in 2004/2005, or some 36%of total exports (The Age, Melbourne, 10 June, 2005).ABARE predictions for 2005/2006 are for this to rise toA$84.8 billion (The Australian, 21 June, 2005). BHP-Billiton sales to China alone (mainly coal and iron ore),have risen from US$600 million in 2001/2002 to aroundUS$3.3 billion in 2004/2005. BHP-Billiton now ownsOlympic Dam, the world’s largest known uranium deposit.The overseas minerals export trade is expected to escalateconsiderably in the future and will impact particularlyon the Pilbara iron ore region (‘BHP digs deep to get toChina’, The Australian 9 June, 2005). China currentlysoaks up 35% of all iron ore traded globally.

5. A counter-argument of course is that Australian agricultureis heavily subsidised by the environment (ABC RadioNational, 2002).

6. Following unheeded warnings over 25 years ago of animpending water crisis, the State government’s preferred— and controversial — response is to now build a A$2billion desalination plant to produce 500 megalitres offresh water each day, or about 15% of the city’s water. Thiswill cost consumers around 50% more than the currentprice of water. But the lack of consideration of the recy-cling alternative could see that State being penalisedunder the rules of the National Water Initiative andNational Competition Policy. Currently, 450 gigalitresof storm water are lost to the ocean from Sydney each year(see: Saltwater plan leaves bad taste in city’s south, TheAustralian, 7 July, 2005). Sydney currently recycles 3%of its water, by comparison with 19% in Adelaide.



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Ecologically Sustainable Development in a ‘Quarry’ Economy: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back