Dear Editor,
It is difficult to understand the motivation and agenda of Federal Environment and Water Minister Tanya Plibersek.
If her goal is to effectively lead our nation forward with best decision-making on issues within her portfolio it would be impossible to give a pass mark.
Even Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has had to intervene, halting a deal Plibersek had negotiated with the Greens to establish a Federal Environment Protection Agency, which I am sure would have further fuelled the rivalry between the PM and a colleague who appears to want his job.
Plibersek says the environment will be a major issue at next year’s election, and has made particular reference to urban marginal seats.
One could therefore draw the conclusion that her decisions are based on possible reactions of voters in Melbourne and Sydney.
Apart from the embarrassing aforementioned EPA, she has Tasmanian salmon farmers and the plethora of jobs relying on the industry on tenterhooks.
It seems their futures could be determined not by industry viability and environmental standards, but how they are perceived in city marginal seats.
Likewise, her 11th hour decision to block construction of the billion-dollar Blayney gold mine, despite some experts debunking key Aboriginal heritage claims, wreaks of placing environmental city votes ahead of regional jobs and national prosperity.
Her other responsibility is the complex area of water policy.
Politics has long played an inflated role that continues to inhibit best-practice water management, and if anything this has become more pronounced under the current Minister’s watch.
For political purposes she spruiks that only two of the 450 gigalitres of environmental water had been recovered when she took office.
But she fails to mention that more than 4000 gigalitres of environmental water has been recovered from other programs, and refuses to acknowledge that her insistence on additional water buybacks will cost more regional jobs and adversely impact towns and communities.
This has been done despite government data showing buybacks have already cost more than 3000 regional jobs.
In effect, Minister Plibersek is exacerbating the cost of living crisis and forcing even more people out of work, in this instance to placate voters in South Australian marginal seats and, again, appease city-based environmental groups.
There’s a certain irony in having a minister who has lived almost her entire life in the most environmentally degraded part of Australia (ie. Sydney), destroying livelihoods of those outside her city boundaries to protect a voter base which is high on ideology but limited in knowledge of the broader national environment and how it needs to be managed in a sustainable way.
Yours etc.
Sue Braybon
Tocumwal