Two weeks ago, Garrett spoke to the National Press Club in Canberra. He was there as Australian Conservation Foundation president, but representing the environment movement at large. His speech was hard-hitting and insightful, one of the best I have heard from a greens leader in recent years. He attacked the Government’s environment performance, particularly its decisions on climate change and Jabiluka, and concluded that it did not deserve the support of environmentally concerned voters. He was almost as harsh on the ALP. This speech would once have made headlines, but few journalists attended and it received little coverage.
A couple of years ago, the environment movement seemed to be at its zenith, with a huge membership, political clout and daily media coverage. What has changed? Politics is now focused almost exclusively on the economy and its sub-parts: tax and unemployment. The Australian Council of Social Service receives the massive attention that ACF did in elections past. For more than a decade, I have followed opinion polls, which rate voter concern on issues. The environment has consistently sat at number three, concerning about 63 per cent of voters. It recently slumped to seventh - concerning 57 per cent of voters - but still sits above interest rates, inflation, balance of payments and industrial relations. The Democrats believe it is still a big issue, although perhaps no longer a vote-changer.
Yet, whatever voters think, mainstream politicians clearly aren’t listening. Why? It’s certainly not because environmental problems have been overcome. Some progress is being made in some areas the decline of lead in the urban atmosphere, for example - but in most areas things are getting worse. Consider the frightening loss of species; the galloping rate of landclearing; fisheries in collapse; pollution reaching the furthermost points of the globe and the atmosphere getting steadily warmer.
The community understands this and I believe that its concerns about the environment have remained substantially unchanged for close on a decade-and-a-half. True, it is showing signs of “green fatigue” and I think people want solutions, not just protest. Yet part of the alienation young voters feel from politics stems from the unwillingness or inability of recent governments to face issues close to people’s deep concerns. Environment is such an issue. For the main political parties, finding a genuine balance between economy and environment has just been- too hard. “We are all environmentalists now’ is the catch-cry, but really little has changed. Economic growth, particularly in the harder climate of the ‘90s, remains the central mantra of government.
Australia’s performance at the Kyoto climate change negotiations is eloquent proof of the point. In the late ‘80s and early ‘90s the Labor Government achieved many things, including protection for the wet tropics and Antarctica. Yet increasingly this belied the bitter opposition to green initiatives inside both the Hawke and Keating Cabinets, even though the green vote was undeniably vital to Labor’s electoral success. The environment movement frustrated Labor because it circumscribed its unfettered economic activities. And the movement’s close dialogue with Labor had to bring a cost. Sooner or later the movement was going to encounter a coalition government in punishment mode.
Green groups, which in recent years have subsided in numbers and influence, also have to change. There needs to tie a changing of the guard; young activists need to be trained and given responsibility as one way of reviving the huge enthusiasm displayed by young people at the start of the 1990s. The groups urgently need to consider how to influence voters without incurring the damage caused by endorsing parties. Above all, they need to project a vision for a sustainable future.
The picture is not entirely bleak. Many farmers have made imaginative contributions to the LandCare program. And some industry is starting to change. One company, for example, is designing a pollution-free pulp mill using waste paper and plantation timber. Yet many companies cynically appropriate the language and imagery of greenness” to keep the environment off the agenda.
Anxiety over the environment is there for the green movement to tap into again. True, the messages of the 1980s and early ‘90s are no longer resonating as they did then, but there are signs that the support can be reharnessed. Take the recent anger over French nuclear tests in the Pacific and the number of people who have blockaded the Jabiluka uranium mine site. Environment groups have just announced their “yardstick” for the main political parties. It includes a doubling of Commonwealth spending on the environment, establishment of a Commonwealth Sustainable Energy Authority, and halting Jabiluka.
If governments are unwilling to talk seriously to green groups, they misread the public mood. For their part, green groups need to work more closely with the community and forward-looking business to produce projects that cannot be ignored by policy-makers. LandCare, initiated by the ACF and the National Farmers Federation, was one of these.
There are rich opportunities with innovative companies, especially in fields such as greenhouse gas reduction. Smart companies realise that the Government’s so-called “win” on carbon dioxide emission quotas will ironically make us far less efficient and profitable than our competitors overseas, who are now implementing mandatory emission reductions measures. The threats to the environment will not go away. The community expects action. The need for our politicians to show leadership in finding solutions is long overdue.
Phillip Toyne is a former director of the Australian Conservation Foundation
and a former deputy secretary of the Department of the Environment.
He now advises industry on sustainable development. E-mail: toyne@igc.orq