“Watt too busy consulting corporate CEOs.”
Ahead of next week’s economic reform roundtable, Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ claim that too many people across Australia are ‘burning cash waiting for approvals to build things’ is code for giving big business a cheap licence to smash Australia’s environment. Labor’s plan for ‘cutting cumbersome environmental regulation while maintaining environmental protections’ is doublespeak. It’ll be like getting rid of doctors while enlarging cemeteries for Australia’s wildlife, environmentalist and former Greens leader Bob Brown said today.
“Treasurer Jim Chalmers, Prime Minister Albanese and Environment Minister Watt are lining up to sacrifice Australia’s wildlife and natural habitats, including forests, woodlands, seas, corals and coastlines, on the altar of faster resource extraction for big business. Current federal legislation would work swiftly and well if the nation had a minister who’d abide by its ethos of protecting the environment. But Labor’s aim is to get rid of its safeguards or to park them out of the corporate-run political way,” said Bob Brown, who is founder and patron of Bob Brown Foundation.
“What is cooking here is fast-track decision-making against the environment with an Environment Protection Authority left to administer the wreckage. Our feisty foundation is being let nowhere near the process because we are strong defenders of nature. Minister Watt refuses to see us at all. He is too busy consulting corporate CEOs.”
“With Australia’s environment in rapid decline by the Commonwealth‘s own account (‘Overall, the state and trend of the environment of Australia is poor and deteriorating because of increasing pressures from climate change, habitat loss, invasive species, pollution and resource extraction’) Labor’s mood, from Prime Minister Albanese down, is to side-swipe or duchess the environment movement while big business redesigns the law to license fast-track, pro-destruction processes with punitive laws against environmental defenders. It’s what we are also seeing in Trump’s USA and Starmer’s UK. There will be a huge public reaction,” Brown said.
