Australian Government warned competing ministries won’t help Nature Positive plan

Fragmented governments with contradictory policies pose significant risks to the global nature positive movement, international delegates at a green summit have warned.

As Federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek touted Labor’s agenda and issued a rallying cry at the inaugural Global Nature Positive summit in Sydney, critics slammed the Government for being hypocritical, and a leading conservationist declared a “paradigm shift” was needed.

Former Costa Rican environment and energy minister, and current chairperson of the Global Environment Facility, Carlos Manuel Rodriguez did not name Australia, but told the summit nature positive governance needed to be the global “ideal institutional setting”.

“Nature positive governance is the underlying necessary condition of the needed system transformation towards a nature positive society … which can be achieved through a paradigm shift that will generate more policy coherence and integration at all levels of scale,” he said.

Speaking from his experience of holding the environment and energy portfolios simultaneously, he suggested the global norm of siloed, competing ministries, was outdated.

“In many countries, several ministries simultaneously manage the renewable and non-renewable natural resources and landscape without sufficient, or any common planning and budget,” he said.

“This level of fragmentation limits an integrated management of common natural resources, which in many cases result in contradictory policies.”

Former Treasury secretary Ken Henry, who now chairs the Nature Finance Council, told the summit while he was optimistic about the general trajectory of nature positive, he agreed what was missing was “nature positive governance, both global and domestic”.

“It’s a concept that is quite foreign, I think, to the way that most governments operate,” he said.

Ms Plibersek used her speech at the inaugural summit as a victory lap of the Albanese Government’s nature positive agenda, despite the centrepiece Environmental Protection Agency legislation remaining stuck in the Senate, still without support from the Greens or the Coalition.

She officially announced Australia now protected more ocean than any other country in the world, after approving a 310,000 sqm expansion of the sub-Antarctic Heard and McDonald Island Marine Parks.

It was an announcement celebrated by Niue Natural Resource Minister Mona Ainu’u.

“I’m very proud that Australia, through my sister minister Tanya, has made that announcement, because it’s very important because we have recognised the importance of trying to have some programs or innovation ideas and products that can help ourselves,” she told the summit.

But back in Canberra for Question Time, Ms Plibersek was asked by Independent Sophie Scamps to justify how the Government could host the global summit while still partaking in “nature negative” policies, like approving coal mine extensions.

Ms Plibersek did not address the claims of hypocrisy, instead saying the summit was a chance for Australia to be recognised as “global leaders in conservation”.

“Delegates are so impressed by the fact we’ve already passed our first tranche of environmental laws ... That we are hoping to set up Australia’s first environmental protection agency, if we can just manage to get the Greens and the crossbench, or the (Coalition) to vote for it,” she said.

Thinktank the Institute of Public Affairs had earlier slammed the summit, which they said would be attended “exclusively by inner-city elites and the political class” and underscored how “secretive and undemocratic” Labor’s agenda was.

Much of the summit’s first day focused on the importance of integrating the economy and the environment, and delegates were urged to listen to Indigenous voices.

Ms Plibersek also issued a call to arms to delegates to “build coalitions with unlikely allies... and to persuade, not to demonize those who might need a little more convincing that nature needs help”.

“Let’s win people over rather than alienating them,” she said.