Part 2 How Australia’s Government Convinced Us It Cares About The Bush (Spoiler: It Doesn’t)

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One step forward and a giant leap backward. Real concessions on forests meet systemic failure on climate. This is how you manage environmental decline while calling it conservation.

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Credit Where It’s Due: What The Greens Actually Won

Let’s be precise about the 27 November deal. Precision matters when dissecting corporate capture. The Greens negotiated hard; extracted real concessions. To deny this is to mis-read how power works.

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Native Forest Logging Exemptions Sunset in 18 Months:

Regional Forest Agreements, the mechanism that’s allowed states to log without federal scrutiny for decades, must now comply with national environmental standards within that period. This is real. Trees will stand that would have fallen. Picture eucalypt forests, rainforests, acacia, callitris, casuarina, mangroves, and melaleuca. Greater gliders in Tallaganda State Forest get a reprieve. Ecosystems in Tasmania and Victoria get breathing room. But over the next 18 months, state harvest plans under existing RFAs could still claim tens of thousands of hectares of high-value native forest, including koala habitat and ancient eucalypt stands already on the chopping block.

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Coal and Gas Removed From Fast-Track Approvals:

The streamlined 30-day assessment process explicitly excludes fossil fuel projects. No more rubber-stamping gas fields. Coal and gas must go through full environmental assessment: slower, more scrutinised, harder to approve quickly and quietly. Yet at least 42 such projects; mines, wells, expansions, sit in the federal queue, poised for approval under the new rules.

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The “National Interest” Loophole Closed for Fossil Fuels:

Projects can’t bypass environmental standards by claiming national interest status. This matters. It prevents the kind of ministerial override that saw the North West Shelf extension approved immediately after Labor’s 2025 re-election. Unfortunately, we will never recover from the repercussions of that act.

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$300 Million Forestry Transition Fund:

Workers in the declining native forest logging industry get retraining support. Retraining support for workers in the declining native forest logging industry is feasible but requires strong government intervention and investment in structural reforms. So jobs do grow on trees, after all?

Reports indicate that in New South Wales alone, with proper funding and policy changes, about 1,200 jobs could be supported by transitioning workers into alternative hardwood plantations, innovative timber manufacturing, forest management, and restoration roles. This involves expanding hardwood plantations, investing in new processing technologies, and shifting logged native forests to protected areas, which also creates new job opportunities in forest restoration and management. Such a transition requires coordinated government effort and funding, but is seen as a viable path to sustain regional employment while ending native forest logging.

Communities dependent on forestry get transition assistance. Sheer poetry. This is Labor managing industrial decline rather than letting it collapse, standard social democratic policy. Companies get growth capital to pivot to plantations; on the public coin, while logging rolls on until sunset.

These wins are genuine. For a government that began negotiations with legislation that Greens leader Larissa Waters described as “1,400 pages gift-wrapped for big business,” this represents a shift. Environment spokesperson Sarah Hanson-Young, who initially blasted the bill as written “to satisfy big business, the miners and the fossil fuel companies,” secured real constraints on the machine. The Wilderness Society’s position (end dangerous exemptions for native forest logging, establish an independent watchdog, implement legally binding standards) partially advanced. Not fully. But partially.

Workers retrained. Companies capitalised. Forests countdown. Three boxes ticked.

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What Got Away, And Why It Matters More

But it’s by no means the win-win that the PM claims. Here’s the (rogue) elephant in the room: Labor still refuses to consider whether new coal and gas projects should exist at all.

Coal and gas projects can still get the nod. They just can’t be approved quickly. They can’t be declared projects of “national interest” to bypass standards. But they’re still approved. The Environment Minister literally cannot treat climate harm as grounds for refusal; disclose emissions, certainly, but ignore them in decisions. That’s not a gap in the law. That’s the law: a “climate harm immunity clause,” upsetting and defying decades of demands for a true climate trigger. It’s also a staggering betrayal of trust.

Imagine fire safety legislation that explicitly prevents fire inspectors from considering whether buildings burn. Imagine health laws forbidding doctors from considering disease. This is what we’ve got: environmental law that forbids environmental ministers from considering environmental catastrophe.

The national discourse is, of course, immediately seeded with the Win-Win feel good bullshit. Our MSM, as ever, is delighted to run any propaganda that helps its mining and business lobby masters.

Environmental groups do a double-take. Greenpeace is diplomatic: “Removing the risk of fast-tracking coal and gas projects is welcome. But the big sting in the tail is that the legislation still fails to address the enormous climate harm to nature from coal and gas, major drivers of worsening bushfires, floods, and other climate disasters that destroy ecosystems and harm species.”

You’ve made degradation slightly harder and slightly slower, Albo, but you haven’t stopped the degradation. You’ve made it marginally more transparent. But you’ve also made it legally sanctioned.

Those 42 queued projects? Their lifetime emissions could rival entire national budgets; imagine 5.8 billion tonnes CO2 from one gas field alone, locking in heatwaves, floods, and fires that wipe ecosystems while “reforms” protect. That’s managed decline. Not environmental protection.

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The $300 Million Tells You Everything

The forestry growth fund reveals Labor’s actual strategy: they don’t want to kill the native forestry industry. They want to manage its decline while keeping it profitable until it’s politically safe to end it.

Workers get retraining. Companies get growth capital to shift to plantations. By the time native forest logging becomes technically illegal in 18 months, the industry has already transitioned, on the public dollar. The forest gets protection eventually. The industry gets a decade of subsidies to adjust. The government gets credit for both ending native logging and supporting forestry workers.

Everyone wins except the actual forest (which spends 18 months being logged while Labor congratulates itself on reform) and the taxpayer, who funded the industry’s transition away from practices that should never have been legal in the first place.

And even after the 18-month sunset? You can still destroy forests. Just use the “biodiversity offset” mechanism. Yes. Developers can pay to restore habitat elsewhere instead of protecting it in situ. It’s a proven dud. This already produces dismal results in NSW, where research shows the system creates “time lags in responding to environmental impacts” and reduces “the likelihood that such responses will replace like with like.” One audit reveals that one in four high-impact approvals failed. It would take over a century for “averted losses” to hit no net loss. Federal law now mandates this “pay to destroy,” complete with a “net gain” Restoration Contributions Holder that no Australian market has ever delivered. Offsets often land in hotter, drier zones unfit for target species; climate risk ignored.

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Damage during “protection”:

• 18 months: State plans harvest 20,000+ hectares native forest yearly (pre-2025 volumes), erasing glider habitat, old-growth, threatened owls.
• Offsets: “Replacements” lag decades, fail 25%+ on delivery, lock in net loss amid warming.
• Fossils: 42 projects greenlit, 13+ million tonnes direct emissions since 2022; escalating disasters that shred reefs, flood towns, torch bush.

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The Mechanics: How Capture Actually Works

Let’s follow the machinery, because this is how policy capture operates in practice, not through corruption or conspiracy, but through the mundane mechanics of political calculation.

Environment Minister Murray Watt was instructed by Albanese to secure Senate passage, through either the Greens or the Coalition. The mining industry, Queensland’s fossil fuel government, and agricultural lobbies lobbied hard for Coalition support. That would have meant even weaker protections: full fast-tracking for coal and gas, no constraints on Regional Forestry Agreements, broader ministerial discretion.

Albanese chose the Greens. Not because he wanted strong environmental law. Because the Greens’ demands were politically cheaper than what the Coalition wanted. The Coalition, on some kind of high with their recent victory over Net Zero targets, wanted carte blanche for resource extraction. The Greens wanted climate considerations and forest protections.

Labor chose the option that looked better publicly while keeping the fundamental machinery functional.

The superbly named Queensland Mines Minister Dale Last, a Bjelke-Petersen era throwback, (a fossil speaking for fossils) argues excluding coal and gas from streamlined assessments would “put Queensland jobs at risk” and “damage investor confidence.” He urges Watt not to be “held to ransom by the Australian Greens, whose extreme anti-resources agenda puts at risk the well-paid resource jobs.” That’s how capture talks. The industry doesn’t say it lost. It says it made sacrifices for Australian workers. Losing 30-day approvals becomes a catastrophe for employment; even though renewables create three times more jobs per dollar invested than fossils, with solar and wind surging past coal.

The “jobs” argument is a furphy. But it works on governments captured by the industries making it. The true picture is far too nuanced for our daily press. The Australia Institute, for example, has critiqued Queensland mining claims, particularly around employment and economic impacts. A 2022 report analyzed the mining boom, finding proposed projects could create about 39,668 direct jobs but destroy nearly 20,000 in other sectors like manufacturing, yielding a net positive yet limited overall gain. It argues industry figures often overlook these offsets, inflating mining’s net employment benefits

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What Corporate Capture Looks Like In Practice

You want to see policy capture? Listen to the Minerals Council of Australia. Chief Executive Tania Constable calls the deal “inferior and disappointing.” The Business Council of Australia argues the bills shouldn’t commence until at least one major state has been accredited for streamlined approvals, meaning the reforms can’t start until states prove they’ll rubber-stamp projects quickly enough.

This hand-brake tactic is revealing. Industry isn’t happy because reforms might actually slow approvals. But they’re not threatening to leave Australia. They’re not pulling investment. They’re negotiating for better implementation. Because they know they’re still winning.

Compare that to environmental organisations. The Environmental Defenders Office says the reforms “fall short of fixing a failing Act.” The Australian Conservation Foundation warns of “weak laws” putting “forests under a bulldozer.” The Climate Council says the reforms “do not address the biggest threat to Australia’s environment: climate change.”

IIndustry complains about process. Environmental organisations warn about outcomes. That tells you who’s winning.

Amazing as it may seem, this isn’t failure. This is the system working exactly as designed. The Greens extracted what they could within a political architecture built to prioritise resource extraction over environmental protection. Labor delivered what their political economy allows: reforms that look serious enough to claim environmental credentials while keeping the fundamental machinery of degradation humming along. The mining industry got to complain publicly (which makes the government look tough on big business) while securing the only thing that actually matters to them: continued approval authority for new coal and gas projects.

Everyone played their role perfectly. The Greens can tell their voters they constrained fossil fuels and saved forests. Labor can tell theirs they passed historic environmental reform. The mining lobby can tell shareholders the fundamentals remain sound. And in 18 months, when the native forest logging sunset kicks in and developers are paying offset fees to clear habitat somewhere else, we’ll all pretend this represented genuine environmental commitment rather than what it actually is: the managed decline of Australia’s environment, underwritten by taxpayers, celebrated by politicians, and dressed up in the language of conservation.

That’s not cynicism. That’s just paying attention to what actually happened versus what everyone’s claiming happened. And the gap between those two things? That’s where Australia’s environment goes to die, slowly enough yet oh so quickly that most people won’t notice until it’s too late to matter.

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To be continued in Part Three: The Climate Silence and What Genuine Commitment Would Look Like…