From Schwartz Media. I'm Daniel James. This is seven am.
Anthony Albernezi was triumphant on Friday as he talked up the government's passing of dozens of bills through the Parliament, but there was one key piece of environmental legislation set to sail through that he personally stopped right at the last minute, with no heads up for one of his most senior ministers, the Minister for the Environment, Tanya Plever sec The decision by the Prime Minister puts mining interests and the hope of votes in Western Australia ahead of
a deal that source to say he had already approved. Today. National correspondent for the Saturday paper Mirk Secam and why Alberanezi did it and whether it's the green till end up winning out. It's Tuesday, December three, Mike, thanks for joining us. There was a rush of bills passed last week. Can you tell me what went through?
Well, thirty one bills on Thursday and forty five over the week. Among them some key pieces of Labour's housing legislation, including its Bill to Rent bill. They're twenty two billion dollar Future Made in Australia package.
What we're doing is getting things done.
And in a press conference on Friday, the Prime Minister Anthony Albanez, he talked up the government's success in getting the legislation through.
If we listened and we engaged, we had our amendments ready to go to make a difference to people's lives, so cracking down on supermarkets.
Watching the Parliament, actually, I was reminded of a quote by the great Irish actor Richard Harris, you know, perhaps most famous for playing Marcus Aurelius and in Gladiator, and he once observed that the defining characteristic of a successful politician was selective cowardice. And apart from all the stuff that passed, there were also some startling examples in my view of selective cowardice last week.
How so well.
For one, there was Labour's adoption of a suite of draconian measures against immigrants.
Other things, they create powers for the Australian government to pay third countries to receive non citizens and give new powers to search for drugs and confiscate phones in detention. Advocates say the laws are heartless and deplorable.
This was quite clearly put forward in an attempt to prevent the Conservative parties from portraying them as weak on the issue. And I might add that when he announced the Coalition would support Labour's bills, the Shadow Immigration Minister Dan Tien boasted that his side of politics was quite basically running the immigration system from opposition, and I think that he's pretty right. But perhaps the most clear cut
example is, in my view, related to environment policy. The government had a chance to get its so called Nature Positive package of environmental legislation, which was promised at the last election and had long been subject of difficult negotiations
with the Greens and anothers on the Senate crossbench. The Government had the chance to get that wave through the Greens and Labour's Environment Minister Taniel Plubsecud reached a deal, but the Prime Minister blew it up because he was scared of the response from the mining industry, from the logging industry, and above all from the West Australian Labor government.
Can you tell me about that, yeah?
Sure. The history of it goes back to before the twenty twenty two election. Labour promised to fix Australia's environment laws, which they said and which most people who know about them said were inadequate. There was even a template to
work from. There'd been an independent expert review of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act EPBC ACT presented to the former Liberal Environment Minister Susan Lee in twenty twenty and it painted a very bleak picture of the state of Australia's natural environment and it recommended comprehensive reforms to environmental law and regulation. Anyway, Lee sat on it for three months before releasing it and then didn't follow it through.
So Labour promised to do better, and in December twenty twenty two it formally responded with something called the Nature Positive Plan, which picked up most of the changes that had been recommended in that expert review, the so called Samuel Review.
Our government is getting on with our goal of delivering a nature positive Australia. A nature positive Australia which means protecting more of our natural environment through our kids and our grandkids to enjoy, protecting more of what's what's precious, repairing more of what's damaged, and managing nature better for the future.
So central to the plan was the establishment of an independent environmental protection Agency, and when she introduced the bills in May Plebisek called the new body the heart of the reforms, a tough cop on the beat that would be able to issue stop work orders to prevent serious environmental damage.
This is an exciting Australia first and it delivers on an important, an important promise that we made during the election to have a strong independent APA, a tough pop on the beat that is operating at arms stakes from government.
The proposed legislation included potential finds of up to seven hundred and eighty million dollars or prison for up to seven years for the most serious intentional breaches of environmental law, but the Liberal National Parties wouldn't support it, and the Greens insisted that they would neither unless they got into it something called a climate trigger, whereby greenhouse gas emissions of proposed projects would be factored into the Environment Minister's
final decision. And this, I must say was not a particularly new idea. Alberzi himself had argued for this when he was the shadow Environment Minister almost twenty years ago, but nothing came of it. So anyway, if we fast forward to this week, Albanese into our Prime Minister. He's not only opposed to the climate trigger, but has spent months public liberating the Greens for obstructionism, for advocating essentially
a policy that he used to champion. So anyway, there'd been this long, long standoff between Labor and the Greens over this package of bills which were reforming our environment protection laws. Then the week before last we got a breakthrough. Tanya Plibersek, the Minister, and the Green spokesperson Sarah Hanson Young had finally reached an agreement that would have allowed
it to go through the Senate. The Greens dropped their calls for a climate trigger and they said they would support the government's legislation package if the government agreed to act on native forest logging. Both sides were happy with it. And what happened then, confirmed to me by people on both sides of the negotiation, both Labor and the Greens, is that the deal was struck Tuesday morning. It was in writing. It went to Alberanizi, who, as I was told,
okayed it. Plibbersecond Hands and Young were preparing statements announcing the breakthrough for release on Wednesday morning. Everything looked like, you know, it was going and then late on Tuesday, Alberanzi reversed his position and canned the whole agreement. What's more, the Greens re informed the deal was off before plebisk was, which was an extraordinary slap in the face for a very senior labor minister.
Coming up after the break Alberese's cowardice on environmental reform and what it means for ranker in the government's ranks. Markey spoken to people on both sides of this deal. Tell me what pussure you formed about why Albanzi killed it?
Well, there's no mystery about it. Frankly, the Labor Premier of Western Australia, Roger Cook, actually claimed responsibility for it himself. At a press conference last Wednesday, Cook said that he had spoken at the quote highest level unquote to share his view that the bills should not be progressed, so pretty clearly his intervention had a lot to do with it.
Even before the Premier came out and said that. According to West Australian media, his Minister for Mines and Petroleum Dave Michael, told around two hundred mining industry figures that the WA government had been assured there would be nodeal so anyway to put it simply, this was a triumph of electoral politics over policy, and the reason for that is that Western Australia has not historically been a strong state for federal labor, but in the twenty twenty two
election it picked up nine seats in the West, so it was a very strong result and essentially the West was the state that propelled labor in the government. So labor doesn't want to upset people in the West. Powerful mining interests own most of the West's media, and one might say they effectively owned both major political parties too, So really this was indeed an active, selective cowardice on Albanese's part.
How did Tenya Plebasik respond to the way Alberanuzi handled this. You can imagine she'd be quite annoyed by it all.
Well, want to imagine she was. But Plibisek is a pro right, she's a stoic. She's not stuck her head up and said that she was screwed over and she's angry. But other people have been saying it for her, I might add Sarah Hanson Young clearly is also furious about it. She lays the blame squallion LB and easy I.
Walk out of the room, of course, and before we know it. The front page of The Australian, the West Australian and virtually every newspaper the next morning was saying that the business lobby, the miners and the loggers had convinced the Prime Minister to dump these laws. I mean, you don't have to take my word for it. You take the word of that crowing.
But the most concerning thing I think is the internal descent. Felicity Wade, who's the co convener of the Labor Environment Action Network, stressed that the EPA that Albanizi had killed off was an election commitment and had been in the national platform since twenty eighteen, and that was backed by five hundred local ALP branches and that it was, as she put, a core to their claim of caring for
the natural environment. So Felicity Wade was furious. I spoke to her and she was really angry, and so are a lot of other people in the party.
So how do you think this has going to player for Alberdez given it sounds like it was merely an electoral calculation.
Well, look that waits to be seen, you know, but you'd have to think it will damage labor with environmentally concerned voters and it will help the Greens, and everything that helps the Greens increases the chances that Labor will not command a majority after the next election. You know, we keep hearing from the pundits and sophologists looking at the state of things that we're probably heading towards a hung parliament in which neither Labor nor the Coalition can
govern alone. And that makes the Labour Greens dynamic particularly interesting. You know, for most of this term, Labour has sought to portray the Greens as being obstructionist and being part of a nolition with the Liberal and National parties, but that's changed recently. The Greens have become much more accommodating
of the government's agenda. Some read this shift as evidence that the Greens had realized there was a growing perception that they were indeed obstructionist and were too often voting with the Coalition arties against Labor, and that this was hurting them. I spoke to Adam Band about this, though,
and he puts a pretty strong countercase. He points out that the Greens have finished this year with more seats in parliaments across Australia than they started the year sure, they'd underperformed at a couple of recent elections, notably in Queens and the Act, but not by much. And he also points to the fact that they're still doing very
well in opinion polls. And it's true. There was an analysis by Guardian Australia early this month which factored in all the major polls and found the Greens were sitting on thirteen point four percent of the first preference vote, which was up from twelve point three percent at the twenty twenty two election. By comparison, the same Guardian poll found that Labor was down more than five points, the Coalition was up two point two and the independents were
also up. So while the Greens aren't happy about this move from Melbourne Easy and they think that ultimately fighting between the Greens and Labor only benefits the coalition, it's clear they're trying to pressure the government for outcomes they want, but they ultimately believe that when push comes to shove, it's time to work together because that's in their overall
best interest. What the Greens want is a minority Labor government, in which case the balance of power will fall to them and probably some minor party and independent people who also are very environmentally concerned, you know, the so called teals and things that there will be much more leverage in the new parliament if that happens for them to get their way. What he doesn't want is what he calls the Trumpian Dutton opposition to win the election. So anyway,
it was a very interesting week in Parliament. The fact that Labor managed to pass such a huge bunch of legislation at the last minute shows what can happen when it works together with the Greens and the minor players. The embarrassment suffered by Labor and the environment stuff shows how badly it can go when they don't work together.
Mark, thanks so much for your time.
Thanks Lodan.
Also in the years, today, Joe Biden has signed a pardon for his son, Hunter Biden, in one of his last acts as President of the United States. Hunter Biden will be spared a prison sentence for federal felony, gun
and tax convictions. President Biden had previously ruled out intervening in the case, but in a statement, he said he believes politics had infected his son's treatment and that he hopes Americans will understand why father and president would come to this decision, a military personnel found guilty or sexual
offenses will be expelled. According to the government's response to the Royal Commission in Defense and Veteran Suicide, there will also be a new formal inquiry into military sexual violence in the Australian Defense Force, with a scope and timing still to be determined. The government has accepted most of the Royal Commissions one hundred and twenty two findings, three months since the report was released. I'm Daniel James. This is seven am. See you tomorrow.