The dire state of the environment report is a major challenge for Labor – and an opportunity

The state of the environment report paints a detailed and brutal picture of destruction and loss, and almost none of it is new.

Virtually everything in this five-yearly government report card – that another 202 animal and plant species have been identified as threatened with extinction or worse, that at least 19 ecosystems show signs of collapse, that hundreds of thousands of hectares of native forest have been bulldozed, that vast southern kelp forests have disappeared – was already known and publicly documented.

We already knew that the black summer bushfires, exacerbated by climate change, may have killed or displaced 3 billion animals, and that marine heatwaves on the Great Barrier Reef have caused four mass coral bleaching events in just seven years. We know the combined impact of the climate crisis, habitat clearing, invasive species, pollution and mining is growing. It’s all been out there for anyone interested enough to pay attention.

What is most striking in reading the report is how much the pace of environmental deterioration has accelerated over the past five years. As Tanya Plibersek noted in her speech to the National Press Club on Tuesday, one of the valuable things about the review is that it offers a holistic view. It is only when you consider the cumulative impact of the growing range of threats to our natural heritage that you get a true picture of how bad things have become.

It is vanishingly rare for Australia’s political-business-media class to treat the health of the environment as a top-tier issue. A couple of brief moments aside, it hasn’t really happened since the 1980s, when Bob Hawke prioritised protecting the Franklin River, the Daintree, Kakadu and Antarctica.

The status quo position since has mostly been to treat environmental devastation as a marginal concern championed by ideologues and minor party extremists. The state of the environment report makes clear that this sort of thinking is fundamentally wrong-headed. It says the environment “holds the key to our survival and wellbeing”, providing our food, water, air and raw materials. When it struggles, we struggle. To co-opt a cliche: it’s the economy, stupid. But it also has intrinsic value in its own right, divorced from what any market says.

To say this sort of thinking doesn’t hold much sway in corridors of power is an understatement, but Labor – and Plibersek, in particular – have a unique opportunity to try to change this if they choose.

Unlike some other ministers, Plibersek comes to the environment portfolio with a significant advantage: she is not tied to a policy platform. The environment was missing from the election campaign, and Labor deliberately had next to no policies in the area. The few notable commitments the former shadow minister, Terri Butler, did make – promising to introduce an independent environment protection agency (EPA), for example – came with little detail.

It’s not the recommended preparation to dealing with a problem as vast as the one we face, but it left Plibersek with a near blank slate to start from when she moved to the portfolio without warning six weeks ago. She is a senior minister from an environmentally conscious inner-city electorate with a large national profile and a new 2,000-page document of evidence that she can use to persuade (or whack) anyone who argues that sweeping change isn’t needed.

Theoretically, anything is possible.

One of the things made clear in the new minister’s speech was that there is not much detail yet about what Labor intends to do – it was mostly dedicated to how bad things got during nine years under the Coalition. Fair enough. It’s true that funding for environment programs was slashed by about 40% under Tony Abbott, and the culture of the environment department changed so markedly that talented people left, wondering what the point was.

But Plibersek set down some clear markers against which she will be measured. She said she would consult widely in the second half of the year before giving a belated response to a formal review of national environment laws that the ex-competition watchdog chair Graeme Samuel handed to the Morrison government nearly two years ago. New laws – whether amendments to the failing Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act or a brand new act – are promised next year.

She said there would be clear environmental standards with explicit targets that would have to be met, an EPA empowered to enforce the new laws, much better data on key environmental indicators that would be available for the public to see how things were tracking in real time, and a greater emphasis on using Indigenous knowledge.

Saying this is, of course, the easy part. Huge questions lie ahead.

Protection of Australia’s environment has been drastically, disastrously underfunded. Cuts have contributed to the decline, recovering threatened species and lost habitat is more expensive than protecting what exists, and Plibersek herself noted estimates that it would cost more than $1bn a year to restore landscapes and prevent further degradation. Rebuilding the environment department will also come at a price. It is all going to have to come from somewhere.

The question of where federal responsibility for environmental protection starts and ends looms as another major issue. The report shows that native forests and land covering an area larger than Tasmania – more than 7m hectares – have been destroyed this century without having to be referred to the federal government for approval under the EPBC Act. The explanation is simple enough: decisions on step-by-step agricultural and urban expansions are state responsibilities, and native forest logging is exempt from national laws under agreements between Canberra and the states.

But there is a straight line between this vast habitat destruction and the growing list of threatened species and ecosystems. Plibersek will need to decide whether the federal government will take more responsibility for land-clearing to prevent threatened species such as the koala, the greater glider, the swift parrot and Leadbeater’s possum being pushed closer to extinction.

A bunch of further questions flow from here. Will the new EPA have investigative powers that reach into what have traditionally been state responsibilities? And what happens to the Morrison government plan – recommended by the Samuel review – to push even more decisions that affect the environment down to the states and territories?

Sitting above all this is the big question of how new laws will deal with the climate crisis. For more than 20 years, there has been debate about whether the EPBC Act should include a “climate trigger” – a test of the climate impact of fossil fuel projects. It has never happened. Plibersek has left the door open in the name of not ruling anything in or out, but suggested she was not persuaded, referring to Samuel’s belief that climate impact could be dealt in other ways.

Maybe. But if the end result of overhauling environment laws is a system that still allows the development of new coal and gas mines – when the state of the environment report finds climate change is compounding every other problem and threatening every ecosystem – the logic will be stretched beyond breaking point.