Last minute law change is worse than doing nothing

The Albanese Government has introduced an amendment that will make our broken nature laws even worse.

Two years ago, the Government made a commitment to end Australia’s extinction crisis. They made promises to reform our broken environment laws and to ensure ‘no new extinctions’.

In a whole term of government, nothing was achieved.

As the election looms, an imminent extinction is being wilfully accelerated, in a way that allows this scenario to be repeated with other endangered species in the future.

This time, it’s Tasmania’s Maugean Skate in Macquarie Harbour. The Swift Parrot, Carnaby’s Black-Cockatoo or the Far Eastern Curlew could easily be next. One in six Australian birds are facing the threat of extinction.

Albanese’s last-minute legislation is law-making at its worst.

Under this amendment, the ability to review environmental decisions in the light of new evidence will be greatly restricted, meaning that changing circumstances will be ignored, accelerating extinctions.

The Black Summer bushfires showed us how quickly things can change. Virtually overnight, the outlook for hundreds of species was drastically worsened. When things change we must be able to adapt.

BirdLife Australia, on the frontline of the battle to save species from extinction, are among the first to know of changes to the situation of threatened birds. It’s critical that we can bring this to the attention of our environmental decision makers so that it can be acted on.

Since the Government’s commitment to ‘no new extinctions’, we have been bitterly disappointed to see a whole term of government deliver nothing to improve Australia’s nature laws. This latest development is worse than inaction – it is a deliberate act, supported by both sides of politics, to damage these broken laws even further.

Far from fixed, our Nature Laws will now be left worse than before.