How a minister buckled in the face of a mob of locals

by Andrew Macintosh in The Canberra Times

Share

Originally published in The Canberra Times on April 10, 2006

The Howard Government has made a mockery of the environment and heritage portfolio, turning it into little more than a pork-barrel buffet. But who would have thought that things would stoop to the level where the federal Environment Minister would use environment laws against the environment. This is precisely what occurred on Wednesday when the minister announced that he was using the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act to block a wind-farm development at Bald Hills in Victoria’s South Gippsland, supposedly on the grounds that the wind turbines would threaten the survival of the endangered orange-bellied parrot. The Government’s own study on the impacts of wind farms on the species says that stopping these developments would have “extremely limited beneficial value to conservation of the parrot without addressing very much greater adverse effects that are currently operating against it”.

Related documents

Attachment

Between the Lines Newsletter

The biggest stories and the best analysis from the team at the Australia Institute, delivered to your inbox every fortnight.

You might also like

Dutton’s nuclear push will cost renewable jobs

by Charlie Joyce

Dutton’s nuclear push will cost renewable jobs As Australia’s federal election campaign has finally begun, opposition leader Peter Dutton’s proposal to spend hundreds of billions in public money to build seven nuclear power plants across the country has been carefully scrutinized. The technological unfeasibility, staggering cost, and scant detail of the Coalition’s nuclear proposal have

The Productivity Commission is floating AI copyright exemptions – with worrying implications for Australian authors and publishers

by Alice Grundy

In an interim report released overnight, Harnessing data and digital technology, the Productivity Commission has floated a text and data mining exception for the Australian Copyright Act. This would make it legal to train artificial intelligence large language models, such as ChatGPT, on copyrighted Australian work. AI training would be added to the list of “fair

The Productivity Commission is floating AI copyright exemptions – with worrying implications for Australian authors and publishers

by Alice Grundy in The Conversation

In an interim report released overnight, Harnessing data and digital technology, the Productivity Commission has floated a text and data mining exception for the Australian Copyright Act. This would make it legal to train artificial intelligence large language models, such as ChatGPT, on copyrighted Australian work. AI training would be added to the list of