Our law to ‘save’ nature is a rubber stamp for species extinction

Australian governments have perfected the art of watching things die, then approving more things to keep the dead things company. For example, many people assume that Australia’s federal nature law does something to protect the environment. But no. This law is known as the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, and in practical terms, it’s mostly good at extincting things.

The EPBC Act, at present, performs two key functions: it irritates business and destroys nature. For more than two decades, this law has presided over a grand national experiment: how much nature can you destroy while pretending to save it? The results have been spectacular. Australia now has one of the highest rates of deforestation in the developed world and more than 2000 species teeter on the edge of extinction, all under the watchful eye of a law specifically designed to prevent exactly that.

In 2021, the Coalition government’s own independent review concluded that the act is not only ineffective, but that it actively harms nature. This revelation – entirely expected, actually – spurred the succeeding Labor government into action, whereby it spent at least three years repeatedly promising to reform the law, then doing no such thing.

This week, however, the Albanese government unveiled its latest attempt at reform, when Environment Minister Murray Watt tabled a revised EPBC Act in parliament. Watt’s big plan ignores many substantive recommendations and instead proposes a range of changes that sound impressively serious and responsible but, ultimately, are not.

He has promised to provide a “clear, strong definition of an unacceptable impact”. This is progress of a sort. For decades, the law has allowed the destruction of nature without ever distinguishing between really bad and disastrously bad. Now, at last, we will know what is bad, and then we can keep doing the bad things, but with greater definitional accuracy.

Watt is also seeking to establish an environment protection agency to enforce the existing rules. Of course, the rules themselves won’t change – and they don’t work. The plan, as it stands, is to enforce the ineffective rules, but with more enthusiasm. It’s like appointing a lifeguard to supervise a swimming pool with no water in it.

The minister will also have final say over the EPA, which means the agency will be “independent” only in the sense that it is completely at the mercy of whichever major developer has the most influence over the minister at the time. Under a better model, of course, the government would set strong national environmental standards – clear science-based protections for nature – while the EPA independently assesses and approves projects, and enforces those standards without political interference.

Alongside the EPA, the minister announced that development projects will need to demonstrate a “net gain” for nature, which is a polite way of saying projects will continue as usual, but developers will be encouraged to offset their damage. In practice, this could conceivably mean that one could smack a koala across the face in one forest and pay for another koala to keep its favourite tree in another.

And crucially, the plan won’t include a climate trigger, meaning climate change won’t factor into decisions about the environment and it will most likely be something for future committees to ruminate over at length in between disasters.

Australia’s proposed approach for nature, in other words, is to have a law that doesn’t protect anything, policed by an agency that will make sure we keep not protecting anything properly. But now there will be definitions. And offsets.

On the bright side (and it’s a small bulb), the minister has announced stronger penalties for severe breaches of environmental law; improved data and reporting; the removal of duplication in approvals and assessment systems; and a requirement for projects to disclose their emissions as part of the assessment process (though these emissions figures won’t affect whether a project is approved or not). If these measures are implemented with integrity, they could partially form the faint beginnings of a credible system of environmental protection.

There is still time for amendments in the coming weeks, but in its current form, the EPBC Act is the perfect reflection of Australia’s national political psyche when it comes to nature: bureaucratically complex and functionally useless.

One of the reasons Murray Watt is championing these flaccid reforms is, presumably, his reluctance to disturb certain powerful interest groups. Despite holding the environment portfolio, his speeches reference “business”, “industry” and “productivity” far more often than “nature”, “extinction” or “environment”. For a minister whose main priority appears to be indulging Australia’s largest corporations, he should be aware of one glaring detail: businesses are wholly and irrevocably dependent on nature. Good nature law isn’t anti-business; it’s anti-extinction. It protects the greatest assets Australian businesses depend on: clean water, fertile soil, forests, oceans, a stable climate and the plants and animals that make all of that possible.

Saying that strong environmental laws hurt business is like claiming it’s bad for restaurants to have food safety standards. It might be easier in the short term to let your prawns bake in the sun all day, but poisoning your customers isn’t a sustainable business model.

Similarly, it may be expedient to level a forest today for a few quarters of profit, but harder to stay in business once there’s no living system left to sustain it. Not to mention, these living systems are the things that allow people to breathe, and breathing is important for running a business and ensuring productivity.

Australia’s nature law urgently needs reform, and there are four critical steps that must be taken.

Deforestation loopholes must be closed. In some states, native forest logging neatly sidesteps federal law under “regional forest agreements”, a series of outdated deals that allow states to keep logging without federal oversight. Meanwhile, agricultural land-clearing is often exempt from federal environmental assessment, falling under the EPBC Act’s “continuous use” exemption, a built-in clause that lets clearing continue simply because it’s been happening for decades.

Second, set clear, strong rules for nature protection (rules, or “standards” that actually protect species and habitats, not ones that make everyone feel regulated while simultaneously killing more than ever. The current law has allowed the Albanese government to approve the destruction of more koala habitat in 2025 than in any other year, according to the Australian Conservation Foundation.)

Next, establish an independent environmental regulator (one that isn’t merely a minister with a press release who has walked straight out of a closed-door meeting with the country’s biggest polluter that has an extensive history of tax avoidance).

And finally, ensure nature laws consider climate harm in all decisions (for example, laws that could potentially say no to projects that wreck the climate, such as Woodside’s North West Shelf gas expansion which was approved, despite the fact it will pump out more pollution than 153 countries in a single year, according to the Australia Institute).

There remains a narrow window to get this right. Murray Watt would do well to remember that his job is to protect the environment, which, incidentally, is also what keeps communities, businesses and humans alive.

Natalie Kyriacou is an environmentalist and the author of Nature’s Last Dance: Tales of Wonder in an Age of Extinction. She is an ambassador for the Australian Conservation Foundation.