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DANIEL:

From Schwartz Media. I’m Daniel James, this is 7am.

Anthony Albanese was triumphant on Friday as he talked up the government’s passing of dozens of bills through the parliament.

But there was one key piece of environmental legislation set to sail through, that he personally stopped, right at the last minute, with no heads up for one of his most senior ministers, the minister for the environment Tanya Plibersek.

The decision by the prime minister puts mining interests, and the hope of votes in Western Australia, ahead of a deal sources say he’d already approved.

Today, national correspondent for The Saturday Paper Mike Seccombe on why Albanese did it, and whether it’s the Greens who’ll end up winning out.

It’s Tuesday, December 3.

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DANIEL:

Mike, thanks for joining us. There was a rush of bills passed last week. Can you tell me what went through?

MIKE:

Well, 31 bills on Thursday and 45 over the week, among them, you know, some key pieces of Labor's housing legislation, including it's build to rent bill, the $22 billion future made in Australia package.

Audio Excerpt - Anthony Albanese:

“What we’re doing is we are getting things done.”

MIKE:

And in a press conference on Friday, the Prime Minister Anthony Albanese talked up the Government's success in getting the legislation through.

Audio Excerpt - Anthony Albanese:

“We listened, we engaged, we had our amendments ready to go to make a difference to people’s lives...”

MIKE:

But watching the Parliament actually I was reminded of a quote by the great Irish actor Richard Harris, you know, perhaps most famous for playing Marcus Aurelius in Gladiator. And he once observed that the defining characteristic of a successful politician was selective cowardice. And apart from all the stuff that passed, there were also some startling examples, in my view of selective cowardice last week.

DANIEL:

How so?

MIKE:

Well, for one, there was Labor's adoption of a suite of draconian measures against immigrants.

Audio Excerpt - Unknown:

"Among other things they create powers for the Australian government to pay third countries to receive non citizens, and give new powers to search for drugs, confiscate phones. Advocates say the laws are heartless and deplorable."

MIKE:

This was quite clearly put forward in an attempt to prevent the conservative parties from portraying them as weak on the issue.

And I might add that when he announced the Coalition would support Labor's bills, the Shadow Immigration Minister, Dan Tehan, boasted that his side of politics was quote “basically running the immigration system from opposition”. And I think that is pretty right.

But perhaps the most clear cut example in my view, related to environment policy. The government had a chance to get its so-called nature positive package of environmental legislation, which was promised at the last election and had long been subject of difficult negotiations with the Greens and others on the Senate crossbench. The Government had the chance to get that waved through. The Greens and Labor's Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek had reached a deal, but the prime minister blew it up because he was scared of the response from the mining industry, from the logging industry and above all from the West Australian Labor Government.

DANIEL:

Can you tell me about that?

MIKE:

Yeah, sure. The history of it goes back to before the 2022 election. Labor promised to fix Australia's environment laws, which they said and which most people who know about them said were inadequate. There was even a template to work from. There'd been an independent expert review of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, EPBC Act presented to the former Liberal Environment minister, Susan Ley in 2020. And it painted a very bleak picture of the state of Australia's natural environment and it recommended comprehensive reforms to environmental law and regulation. Anyway, Ley sat on it for three months before releasing it and then didn't follow it through.

So Labor promised to do better and in December 2022 it formally responded with something called the Nature Positive Plan, which picked up most of the changes that had been recommended in that expert review, the so-called Samuel review.

Audio Excerpt - Tanya Plibersek:

“Our government is getting on with our goal of delivering a nature positive Australia, a nature positive Australia, which means protecting more of our natural environment for our kids and our grandkids to enjoy, protecting more of what's what's precious. Repairing more of what's damaged and managing nature better for the future.”

MIKE:

So central to the plan was the establishment of an independent Environmental Protection Agency. And when she introduced the bills in May, Plibersek called the new body the heart of the reforms. A tough cop on the beat that would be able to issue stop work orders to prevent serious environmental damage.

Audio Excerpt - Tanya Plibersek:

“This is an exciting Australia first and it delivers on an important and important promise that we made during the election to have a strong independent EPA, a tough cop on the beat that is operating at arm's length from government.”

MIKE:

The proposed legislation included potential fines of up to $780 million or prison for up to seven years for the most serious intentional breaches of environmental law.

But the Liberal National Parties wouldn't support it and the Greens insisted that they wouldn't either unless they got into it, something called a climate trigger whereby greenhouse gas emissions of proposed projects would be factored into the environment ministers final decision. And this, I must say, was not a particularly new idea. Albanese himself had argued for this when he was the shadow environment minister almost 20 years ago, but nothing came of it.

So anyway, if we fast forward to this week Albanese now Prime Minister, he's not only opposed to the climate trigger, but has spent months publicly berating the Greens for obstructionism, for, you know, advocating essentially a policy that he used to champion. So anyway, there'd been this long, long stand off between Labor and the Greens over this package of bills which were reforming our environmental protection laws, then the week before last we got a breakthrough.

Tanya Plibersek, the Minister and the Greens spokesperson Sarah Hanson-Young, had finally reached an agreement that would have allowed it to go through the Senate.

The Greens dropped their calls for a climate trigger and they said they would support the Government's legislation package if the Government agreed to act on native forest logging.

Both sides were happy with it. And what happened then confirmed to me by people on both sides of the negotiation, both Labor and the Greens, is that the deal was struck Tuesday morning. It was in writing. It went to Albanese, who, as I was told, okayed it. Plibersek and Hanson-Young were preparing statements announcing the breakthrough for release on Wednesday morning. Everything looked like it was going. And then late on Tuesday, Albanese reversed his position and canned the whole agreement. What's more, the Greens were informed the deal was off before Plibersek was, which was an extraordinary slap in the face for a very senior Labor minister.

DANIEL:

Coming up after the break - Albanese’s cowardice on environmental reform and what it means for rancour in the government’s ranks.

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DANIEL:

Mike, you've spoken to people on both sides of this deal. Tell me, what picture have you formed about why Albanese killed it?

MIKE:

Well, there's no mystery about it, frankly.

The Labor Premier of Western Australia, Roger Cook, actually claimed responsibility for it himself at a press conference last Wednesday. Cook said that he had spoken at the quote, “highest level” unquote to share his view that the bill should not be progressed. So pretty clearly his intervention had a lot to do with it.

Even before the Premier came out and said that, according to West Australian media, his Minister for Mines and Petroleum, David Michael, told around 200 mining industry figures that the WA Government had been assured there would be no deal.

So, so anyway, to put it simply, this was a triumph of electoral politics over policy. And the reason for that is that Western Australia has not historically been a strong state for federal Labor. But in the 2022 election it picked up nine seats in the West, so it was a very strong result. And essentially the West was the state that propelled Labor into government. So Labor doesn't want to upset people in the West. Powerful mining interests owned most of the West's media. And one might say they effectively own both major political parties, too. So really this was indeed an act of selective cowardice on Albanese's part.

DANIEL:

How did Tanya Plibersek respond to the way Albanese handled this? You can imagine she'd be quite annoyed by it all.

MIKE:

Well, one wouldn't imagine she was. But if Plibersek is a pro, right? She's stoic. She's not stuck her head up and said that she was screwed over and she's angry, but other people have been saying it for her, I might add. Sarah Hanson-Young clearly is also furious about it. She lays the blame squarely at Albanese.

Audio Excerpt - Sarah Hanson Young:

“I walk out of the room of course, yeah. And before we know it, the front page of The Australian, The West Australian in virtually every newspaper the next morning was saying that the business lobby, the miners and the loggers had convinced the prime minister to dump these laws. I mean, you'd have to take my word for it...”

MIKE:

But the most concerning thing, I think, is the internal dissent. Felicity Wade, who's the co-convenor of the Labor Environment Action Network, stressed that the EPA that Albanese had killed off was an election commitment and had been in the national platform since 2018, and that was backed by 500 local ALP branches and that it was, as she put it, core to their claim of caring for the natural environment. So Felicity Wade was furious. I spoke to her and she was really angry and so are a lot of other people in the party.

DANIEL:

So how do you think this is going to play out for Albanese, given it sounds like it was merely an electoral calculation?

MIKE:

Well, look, that waits to be seen. You know, but, but you'd have to think it will damage Labor with environmentally concerned voters and it will help the Greens and everything that helps the Greens increases the chances that Labor will not come out with a majority after the next election. You know, we keep hearing from the pundits and the psephologists looking at the state of things that we're probably heading towards a hung parliament in which neither Labor nor the Coalition can govern alone. And that makes the Labor Greens dynamic particularly interesting. You know, for most of this term. Labor has sought to portray the Greens as being obstructionist and being part of a “no-alition” with the Liberal and National parties.

But that's changed recently. The Greens have become much more accommodating of the Government's agenda. Some read this shift as evidence that the Greens had realised there was a growing perception that they were indeed obstructionist and were too often voting with the Coalition parties against Labor and that this was hurting them.

I spoke to Adam Bandt about this though, and he puts a pretty strong counter case. He points out that the Greens have finished this year with more seats in Parliament across Australia than they started the year. Sure they’d underperformed at a couple of recent elections, notably in Queensland, the ACT, but not by much. And he also points to the fact that they're still doing very well in opinion polls. And it's true.

There was an analysis by Guardian Australia earlier this month which factored in all the major polls and found the Greens were sitting on 13.4% of the first preference vote, which was up from 12.3% at the 2022 election. By comparison, the same Guardian poll found that Labor was down more than five points. The Coalition was up 2.2 and the independents were also up.

So while the Greens aren’t happy about this move from Albanese and they think that ultimately fighting between the Greens and Labor only benefits the Coalition, it's clear they are trying to pressure the Government for outcomes they want, but they ultimately believe that when push comes to shove it's time to work together because that's in their overall best interest.

What the Greens want is a minority Labor government, in which case the balance of power will fall to them and probably some minor party and independent people who also are very environmentally concerned, you know, the so-called Teals. And Bandt thinks that there will be much more leverage in the new parliament if that happens for them to get their way. What he doesn't want is what he calls the Trumpian Dutton opposition to win the election.

So, anyway, it was a very interesting week in Parliament. The fact that Labor managed to pass such a huge bunch of legislation at the last minute shows what can happen when it works together with the Greens and the minor players. The embarrassment suffered by Labor on the environment shows how badly it can go when they don't work together.

DANIEL:

Mike, thanks so much for your time.

MIKE:

Thanks a lot, Daniel.

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DANIEL:

Also in the news today,

Joe Biden has signed a pardon for his son Hunter Biden, in one of his last acts as president of the United States.

Hunter Biden will be spared a prison sentence for federal felony gun and tax convictions.

President Biden had previously ruled out intervening in the case. But in a statement, he said he believes politics has infected his son’s treatment and that he hopes Americans will understand why a father and president would come to this decision.

And, Military personnel found guilty of sexual offences will be expelled, according to the government’s response to the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide.

There will also be a new formal inquiry into military sexual violence in the Australian Defence Force, with the scope and timing still to be determined.

The government has accepted most of the Royal Commission’s 122 findings, three months since the report was released.

I’m Daniel James, this is 7am. See you tomorrow.

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