Big Blue Sky

by Peter Garrett

  The truth about what a minister could and should do was, as ever, more complex. For starters, decisions under the legislation to approve or deny development had to be made by the minister alone. A decision couldn’t be made simply as a consequence of a cabinet decision or as a result of direct influence by colleagues.

  Second, even though opportunities for legal challenge had been unnecessarily limited by the former government, any decision could still be appealed to a higher court, and so had to be made properly, not on a whim. On more than one occasion I was left with the unenviable task of remaking decisions, including approving McArthur River Mine in the Northern Territory and the exploitation of Christmas Island phosphate reserves already underway, which had been sloppily made by previous Coalition ministers and were subsequently overturned in court. I later refused the next application for mining on Christmas Island.

  Third, under the Australian Constitution, state governments still had powers over land use and the environment. Unless a specific action infringed on those activities listed in the Commonwealth act, a federal minister’s power was limited.

  I may have been an occasional student at law school, but I knew this much: the whole system of public trust and political accountability would break down if ministers turned into Dr Strangelove and started making it up as they went along. You had to operate within the legislative framework, and if it needed changing, then get about that task as well.

  But this bigger picture was irrelevant to the public debate, in which the narrative of a high-profile minister mired in conflict or under pressure for alleged compromises was irresistible to the press.

  The centrepiece in creating big corridors of healthier natural landscapes was an extra $180 million for the National Reserve System, which would significantly increase its scope and lift the funding from a paltry $2–$3 million in the final Howard years. It was one of our first announcements, and represented a hefty injection of funds along with a more ambitious approach.

  At 9.30 a.m. early in the New Year, I was raring to go at a national park close to Canberra. Very few journos showed up for the presser (‘Too early in the morning,’ one office wit remarked) and the coverage was risible—as it would remain for the next three years: outside of whaling, The Sydney Morning Herald, for example, barely covered any announcements in the environment portfolio at all. The exception to this lack of interest was a front-page headline, accompanied by a suitably unflattering photo, from leading rural newspaper Stock & Land. The caption read: ‘This man wants to increase the National Reserve System by 25 per cent—and he has your farm in his sights.’

  When it came to decisions under the EPBC Act, the in-tray had been stuffed with explosive devices and hospital passes so we strapped ourselves in for the ride.

  The issues generating the most public interest, and hate mail in both directions, were the ongoing sagas around the fate of a proposed pulp mill in Tasmania being pursued by Gunns Limited, and the plans by the Queensland government to build a dam—called the Traveston Dam—on the Mary River, inland from the Sunshine Coast. There were plenty of others waiting in the queue, including: the expansion of the Beverley Uranium Mine; proposed development around the lighthouse at Nobbys Head in Newcastle; dredging in Port Phillip Bay; the Gorgon gas project on ‘Australia’s Ark’, Barrow Island; and a proposal by Waratah Coal—owned by Clive Palmer, who later bankrolled himself into parliament—to build a railway line across a vast tract of undisturbed native vegetation and rainforest, including the southern part of Shoalwater Bay.

  In the case of the pulp mill, many people saw this as an opportunity for me to flex some ministerial muscle and break the ugly nexus between industry and the unions that had kept destructive native forest logging afloat in Tasmania. There was one major problem: in a novel approach, Malcolm Turnbull, the Howard government’s environment minister, had split the project into a series of modules—representing stages from site clearance to mill construction—each to be dealt with on their individual merits. As a consequence, the project was already partially approved. It would require extreme circumstances and rock-solid reasons to withdraw this approval, or the Commonwealth would be taken to court and likely lose.

  During my time at the ACF, I’d come to believe we should value-add from our timber, so I wasn’t automatically opposed to a pulp mill, so long as it didn’t draw on environmentally important forests or pour toxic chemicals into the adjoining waters of Bass Strait. It was ridiculous that Australia simply clear-felled and woodchipped its forests, selling the raw material overseas only to buy it back again as processed paper at much higher prices. As long as we protected native forests with high conservation values, and carefully used other forests and plantations as feedstock for building materials and paper products, then more employment could be generated in rural areas and Australia’s balance of payments would get a boost. Utilising forests carefully could help combat climate change. In housing construction, for example, it is better to use a renewable resource like trees for timber walls and floors instead of concrete and steel, major sources of greenhouse emissions. The best course of action, unless the mill project fell over altogether (as ultimately happened), was to set the bar for approval as high as possible, while encouraging another company with first-class green credentials to get involved.

  Yet none of these arguments washed with opponents of the mill, who were aghast at the prospect of a large industrial facility being built close to the farms and bays of the Launceston region. And the odour emanating from Gunns was rotten-egg gas plus; I could smell it from Canberra. The company’s reputation for logging pristine forests, and an unholy alliance between Gunns and Tasmanian politicians—including a highly compromised former Labor premier, Paul Lennon, who’d pushed legislation favouring the company through the state parliament—added more fuel to the fire.

  Matters came to a head when, on a visit to Hobart, I attended a dinner marking Labor MP Duncan Kerr’s twentieth anniversary in parliament.

  With Kate Pasterfield acting as media adviser, I arrived at the hotel where we were staying to find an angry crowd milling outside. We set out on foot along the road opposite Constitution Dock on the way to Kerr’s celebration, trailed by a growing swarm of protestors demanding loudly that the mill be stopped. A couple of burly union officials joined us as we stepped up the pace, hoping to shake off the uninvited guests.

  When we approached the entrance of the restaurant, a bevy of cameras rushed out to film the spectacle. On cue, the mob, by now increasingly agitated, upped the ante by throwing handfuls of woodchips and pouring boiling wax over us. As party tricks go it was a little extreme, but certain to make the evening TV bulletins. (It also succeeded in seeing off our amateur security detail, who promptly headed for the back door.) Fortunately, with a bit of ducking and weaving, Kate and I managed to make our way inside relatively unscathed. Almost immediately I was hounded by a wild-eyed activist with a camera crew in tow, offering me a plate on which were two small round chocolate cakes covered in coconut icing, with the sign ‘Mr Garrett’s balls’ attached.

  Even staffers accustomed to the rough and tumble of Labor politics had never seen anything like this. In part it was a classic set-up, in part a local overreaction to a national malaise. People no longer had any faith in political processes—and considering how shonky Tasmanian Labor politics had been, who could blame them?

  In time, I added conditions that applied civil and criminal penalties if the mill exceeded its environmental limits, and a sunset clause that denied any company the opportunity to proceed unless they could show the mill wouldn’t damage the marine environment. At the very least, this meant installing the world’s best tertiary treatment equipment; the expense would be significant, making agreement a true test of the bona fides of whoever wanted to operate a pulp mill. At the same time we entered into discussions with a Swedish company which was committed to world’s best environmental standards in pulp and paper manufacturing.

  Later, there was a new minister
and events moved in an entirely different direction. While my successor eventually approved the final modules, in line with the higher bar that had been set, Gunns went into receivership and, despite the efforts of the state government and others, the mill remains unbuilt. Only the memory of Kate’s singed hair, my stained suit and flushed, angry faces remains.

  Two thousand kilometres to the north, the Traveston Dam decision was a different kettle of fish. The Queensland government had spent hundreds of millions of dollars planning the project, including going so far as to resume people’s properties, with the aim of providing more water for South East Queensland, still reeling from a severe drought.

  The dam was to be constructed at the lower end of the Mary River, in relatively flat country, and a visit to the site revealed it would have generated a large shallow pond of water rather than a deep pool, as is normally the case with a dam. More problematic was the fact that any dam would impede the breeding cycle of the endangered and rare Australian lungfish and the Mary River turtle, for whom the river was prime habitat.

  Some colleagues were less than impressed with the way the issue was shaping up, especially as a number of National Party members who’d never met a dam they didn’t love were opposed to Traveston because it fell within one of their electorates. Even the Senate became involved and, spotlighting the major flaw in the Queensland government’s case, passed a resolution calling on me to explain how the spawning grounds for these species would be protected if the dam went ahead. The intricate system of fish ladders designed to allow fish to get over the dam wall had been proven unworkable, so I was pleased to confirm this unhappy fact.

  In the final days before the decision I went to the Sydney Opera House wharf to accept a petition of thousands of signatures that had been collected by kayaker Steve Posselt, who’d paddled more than 1000 kilometres from the mouth of the Mary River to deliver the document. My acceptance of the petition was seen as a provocative act by supporters of the dam, including the office of the Queensland premier, Anna Bligh, who felt I was prejudging the issue. The query came down from Rudd’s staff: what is he up to?

  On the face of it, this proposal was yet another example of a government and a powerful bureaucracy steamrolling small-town people in order to fulfil a political imperative, regardless of the consequences. I didn’t like it, but that wasn’t a sufficient reason to reject the plan. My eventual decision was never in doubt. In this case the advice and the science were crystal clear: the effect of the dam on endangered native fish would be fatal.

  I refused to approve the project, and flew to Brisbane to broadcast the announcement from a crowded conference room at the Commonwealth Offices. Cue cheers and tears from the locals watching the press conference from the Kandanga Hotel in the Mary Valley, and howls of outrage from The Australian and some right-wing Labor types like former Queensland premier Peter Beattie, complaining about the process. The Age newspaper claimed it was ‘the biggest decision made by an environment minister in ten years of national environment law’. The speaking notes issued the following day to ministers, known as round the worlds (RTWs), offered that Rudd used to love swimming in the Mary River—turning a negative into a positive, Queensland-style.

  Travelling back to the airport, I asked the driver to turn up the music; Chisel’s classic ‘Flame Trees’ was on his iPod. My advisers Jack Smith and Ben Pratt joined in as we sang along to this heart-of-the-country tune—a way of letting off a little steam after the compressed intensity of the past forty-eight hours.

  The local community’s joy was understandable. The dam had been poorly conceived, and flooding farmland and the small hamlets in the valley would have permanently changed their way of life. But their relief was a by-product of a decision to use the Commonwealth law in the way it was designed to be used: namely, to protect the nation’s environment, and the native plant and animal species that make it up—no more, no less.

  …

  In the midst of these high-profile cases, my office continued to work towards having the Koongarra mining lease incorporated back into Kakadu National Park. Jeffrey Lee, the traditional owner, was keen—the original decision to exclude it from the park had been made without the consent of his family—and long-time ACF campaigner Dave Sweeney had never wavered in his efforts to make it happen.

  It took a good deal of pushing and shoving before we were able to announce in August 2010 that the government would move ahead. The correspondence from Julia Gillard, as acting prime minister, confirming the course of action we proposed was one of the most welcome letters I received. Eventually the incorporation of Koongarra into Kakadu was finalised by Tony Burke when he became environment minister.

  Jeffrey Lee came down to Canberra that day to see the bill brought into parliament, and we greeted him like the Australian hero he surely is.

  The opportunity to draw a line and secure Koongarra, now a part of Kakadu National Park, was a validation of my decision to enter formal politics. It was one of the positives that could be deposited in the vault, and was very difficult to undo. You walk on air for a second or two when decisions like this happen. In distinct contrast, the request to approve the expansion of an existing uranium mine at Beverley in South Australia was the most difficult decision I faced. Here I suffered pangs of conscience colliding with ministerial duty in a way no other matter affected me during my time in parliament.

  I could rationalise making a decision that came through my department’s assessment process with a positive recommendation—one that imposed rigorous conditions, buttressed by two additional scientific reports I’d sought that reinforced the department’s view—for a mine that already existed, in an area that was not overly sensitive to the mining process. I was as certain as I could be that every aspect of the decision was correct, if you accepted that the mine was already legally in place and bound to remain. But I was emotionally torn and, at the same time, dogged by the public perception—fuelled by Labor’s political opponents on the left and right—that I was fatally compromised, given that I’d opposed uranium mining in the past. The fact that I continued to oppose uranium mining throughout my time in government didn’t count for much in the heat of the moment. This included subsequently leading the debate on the floor of the ALP National Conference, arguing for the party not to relax its vexed three-mine policy—an argument that was narrowly lost.

  In the case of Beverley, I had three options. I could refuse the department’s advice, which in this instance was sound, thus provoking the company to mount a legal challenge that could succeed, leading to a political fight with no prospect of victory for the anti-uranium constituency. I could resign and go to the backbench (a prospect that didn’t appeal; it wasn’t clear what purpose would be served and, besides, I wasn’t the resigning type). Or I could treat the matter on its merits and take the action that was required, as ministers do every day when applying the policy of the government they have sworn to uphold.

  I chose the last course of action, and don’t regret the decision I made. Of course it didn’t turn me into an apologist for uranium mining; in fact, it reinforced my existing view, and I applied extensive conditions relating to water management to prevent any long-term impacts from the enterprise.

  Approving the expansion would have sent a message to my colleagues, and anyone who thought seriously about the political system, that I was willing to put my responsibilities ahead of my personal feelings, in this case at least. But it was a painful step to take, a reminder of what a double-edged sword the environment portfolio was for me.

  It was as if one half of the country expected me to wave a magic wand over every single issue, regardless of its history or circumstances, even if that meant breaking the law, while the other half were fearful that I’d stop at nothing to advantage the environment. I wanted to be the best minister I could in the circumstances, and I was certain I could make a better fist of it than most, if not all, of the alternative candidates. I was fine with being judged on the criteria of the substance
of the decisions I took and the policies I brought to the table. But my rock’n’roll and activist past well and truly caught up with me at this time. Perception was everything and people wanted fireworks every step of the way.

  There was a welter of proposals on the table for energy projects in the Kimberley, with a number to be sited on the pristine coastline, posing risks to the environment, and a contentious one, a gas hub at James Price Point, which drew opposition from across Australia, as well as locally. Part of the solution was to enable a strategic assessment for one area only (something that hadn’t been tried before), thus confining the impact of any development. In fact I hadn’t forgotten the note I’d received years before from Joseph Roe, one of a group of Aboriginal traditional owners opposed to the industrial facility being constructed on their land. I’d taken the opportunity when visiting Broome to remake the point that James Price shouldn’t go ahead if traditional owners weren’t onside and there was significant impact on marine species, but the media were short-staffed that day and the comment went unnoticed. Not long afterwards the project was halted on legal grounds as public opposition reached fever pitch.

  A chance remark from a senior official as I pushed to get work on a set of national environment accounts underway put the job in perspective. ‘We’ll do our best,’ he said, ‘but as you know, Minister, the average length of time someone spends in this office is less than eighteen months.’ The message was clear: we’ve seen the occupants of this office and their brave new plans come and go. So, Mr Hyper Driven Greenie Muso, just remember we’ll outlast you.

  It was a tart reminder that in this place you never knew what lay around the corner, and it caused me to drive my staff and myself even harder. So off we went, running through airports, dashing from meeting to meeting, and staying up till the early hours to wade through legal advices and numerous reports in order to get decisions out the door. There’s nothing unusual in this scenario for anyone working in government. I could only look back in wonder to the time when I could spend a few hours sitting poolside working on a song list, or taking a few days or, in one case, a year off to recharge the batteries. They really were the good old days.