Minister creating a hostile environment

The Weekend Australian,
June 24, 2006

CRAIG Chappelle has learned the hard way the danger of standing between federal Environment Minister Ian Campbell and political opportunity.

When a group led by Chappelle was seeking to build a wind farm in the holiday town of Denmark, south of Perth, last November, they did everything by the book, winning state government approval and then $240,000 in federal funding for the project. But when Senator Campbell got a whiff of community unease about the project - and the possibility of an electoral backlash in the seat of veteran Liberal MP Wilson Tuckey - he suddenly moved to scuttle it.

"He barnstormed into town without telling us and made all sorts of ridiculous comments about the plan," Chappelle said yesterday of Campbell, who has tried to freeze funding for the wind farm. "It was a political grandstanding exercise." A stunned Chappelle wrote to the minister about his behaviour: "For you to sweep into town virtually unannounced and pontificate on a project you clearly had no knowledge about, spent precious little time getting acquainted with, and then condemned to gratify a rowdy minority, displayed incredible arrogance. To cap that by publicly threatening to withdraw an existing federal grant is stupefying."

Barely seven months on, Campbell's critics have only grown louder, with business and green groups accusing the nation's Environment Minister of playing politics with the environment on a grand and damaging scale. They say a raft of baffling decisions, poorly explained and inconsistent, have sent a chill through the country's mining, renewable energy and infrastructure industries.

This week, the minister decided to try to soothe jangled nerves when it appeared that a $650 million pulp mill in South Australia was under threat from a red-tailed black cockatoo that had never been seen on the planned site. The developer of the planned Penola Pulp Mill, which would employ 600 people during production and permanently employ 120, was told the project would need federal approval because of the potential danger it posed to the cockatoo, which feeds more than 4km away.

The notification alarmed the project's managers, given Campbell's decision in April to stop the $220 million Bald Hills wind farm in regional Victoria, supposedly because of the threat it might pose to the endangered orange-bellied parrot. Campbell's bizarre Bald Hills decision was criticised by pro-business and green groups, who say it had less to do with parrots than with a pre-election promise by the Liberals to oppose the Bald Hills plan.

So this week, when a rare bird threatened to spark another political controversy, a gun-shy Campbell effectively pre-empted his department's findings by telling The Australian that he did "not expect any problems" from the cockatoo issue.

Campbell strongly denies any inconsistency in his approach. "We have an approvals process which is applied consistently based on science and based on what is recognised internationally as one of the best environmental (planning) processes in the world," he told The Weekend Australian yesterday.

Danny Kennedy, campaign manager with Greenpeace Australia Pacific disagrees. "Consistency is not this minister's strong point - he does what is politically expedient. His record so far is all style and no substance. He is big on having parrots and whales on the front page but there is nothing of substance on climate change and the energy revolution we need to have."

The Business Council of Australia has also been unsettled by the parrot and cockatoo controversies. "When you look at those sort of decisions, and they appear to come out of the blue without clarity about why they were taken, it creates a sense of concern about making long-term investments," says Maria Tarrant, director of policy at the BCA, which represents the nation's top 100 companies.

Andrew Macintosh from the left-wing think tank The Australia Institute believes Campbell is driven by political rather than environmental motives and is misusing the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. "The use of the act has descended into a farce," he says.

Ironically this might be less controversial if Campbell were a consistent colour on environmental issues, but the minister has proven to be uneven in his passions. "On the positive side he has been a strong voice for whale conservation and he has also recently been acknowledging that we need to look at a carbon price to tackle Greenhouse," says Don Henry, executive director of the Australian Conservation Foundation. "But on the negative side, environment legislation has been applied weakly by Ian Campbell and his predecessors."

Although Campbell has been big on saving whales and the orange-bellied parrot, he has been less loving towards other animals. The flatback turtle on Barrow Island in Western Australia did not get preferential treatment, with Campbell this month choosing not to block the $11 billion Gorgon gas project there despite the threat it poses to the rare turtle.

Campbell has also dismissed concerns about the southern blue-fin tuna which remains a legitimate target for commercial fishermen despite being endangered. "He is hunting with the hounds and running with the foxes," says Chappelle. "You can't pick up where he is coming from or where he is going to. That makes it tough."