LAST week you published my letter regarding the Abbott government’s proposed changes to the EPBC Act.
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Two days later Dr David Suzuki wrote in The Age newspaper how a government minister had claimed that “environmental and other radical groups” were trying to block opportunities to create jobs and stimulate economic growth. He claimed these groups threatened to hijack the regulatory system to achieve their “radical ideological agenda and kill off jobs”.
Very familiar, but Dr Suzuki was not referring to the Abbott government, but a January 2012 letter from one of Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s ministers. It was, he said “the first salvo in an ongoing barrage of government tactics to stifle organisations and individuals from speaking out about legitimate environmental concerns”.
So is what the Abbott government claims to be actions from the playbook of “well funded” radical green activists, really (as Dr Suzuki suggests) something “straight out of the Stephen Harper playbook”?
Dr Suzuki said Canada had introduced a bill making “sweeping changes to environmental laws, gutting much of the protection that had been carefully crafted over decades, and which Canadians had come to depend on for clean air, water and soil”.
The Abbott government infers that actions like those questioning the Adani Carmichael mining project are “vexatious” litigation. Yet the Federal Court did not find it to be, and Minister Hunt accepted that the government had failed to abide by the EPBC Act; as a result of which he actually asked the court to set aside his decision approving the project.
I’d like to finish with another quote from Suzuki: “It might be framed as a jobs and economic issue, but in reality this is an attack on democracy and responsible government. Do everything you can now to expose efforts to shut down the important work of environmental organisations. Australians, don’t let it happen to you”.
S. Amesbury,
Tapitallee.