Jesting on the environment: Australian mining gets a present

Mining magnates seem to have it all. Far more significant than royalty, such figures are the unelected captains of industry who know that governments will do whatever they can to accommodate their wishes and whims. True, the official rhetoric might sometimes be sharp and seemingly at odds, especially when it comes to that great irritation known as climate change, but the business of such countries as Australia is mining, and so it remains.

For that reason, the portfolio of Environment Minister has been a misnomer, hovering between invisible non-entity and irritating court jester. Mimicking those climate change conferences that take place in oil and gas producing states, such an official's role is to manage continuing mine approvals and their extensions while proclaiming the march of renewable sources of energy toward a decarbonised economy.

Australia's current Environment Minister, Tanya Plibersek, has gone the way of others, slipping in a few more mining approvals before the festive season in the hope that few would notice. The manoeuvre only makes sense by understanding that an Australian environment minister tends to be fossil fuel's closeted defender in government, the emissions protector at the cabinet meeting, the shield to respectable polluting. Those appointed to that role know the prime minister thinks little of them. The minister, in turn, also knows that the machinery at the disposal of the office is about as impressive as the country's rickety broadband system.

What makes Plibersek's behaviour particularly galling of late is her willingness to jest more than usual. This may have been aggravated by last month's personal intervention by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to sink a deal she personally brokered with the Greens and independent Senator David Pocock to create a federal environment protection agency.

In a late November press release, we have her trumpeting Australia's move "from the margins of international environmental leadership – right to the front." (Front of whom and what, one asks?) There are party political statements aplenty, the trimming of superfluity. The Albanese government was "helping nature thrive." Greater protections were being afforded the environment. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework had been agreed upon.

Plibersek's inner jester was again manifest on December 19, posting on the X platform that the Labor government was "turning Australia into a renewable superpower." What really suggested that the minister had taken leave of her senses was another post mocking former Liberal Prime Minister Tony Abbott, standing beside the current Opposition Leader, Peter Dutton, in a 2014 shot with this disciplinary caption: "It's 2014. These guys approved 8 new coal mines and were laughing about climate change." She goes on to "fast forward" matters a decade. "In 2024, Labor has approved 0 new coal mines."

This was a jest with little purchase. For one, Plibersek had approved three coal mine expansions in September this year, a move she suggested in lawyerly fashion could not be regarded as "new projects" so much as extensions. These decisions, she justified curtly, had been made "in accordance with the facts and the national environment law." The Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) preferred to remind her that the three projects, all based in New South Wales, would generate over 1.3 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions in the course of their operation.

These extensions, it is also worth considering, are not recommended by the International Energy Agency if global warming is to be limited to the magic figure of 1.5°C. In its 2021 report, the agency envisages a "Net-Zero Emissions Scenario (NZE) by 2050" in which fossil fuel use will fall "drastically". There would be no need either for new oil and natural gas fields beyond current approvals, or new coal mines or mine extensions. Dare one but dream.

What made matters even worse was that December 19 was a day that saw the approval of three mining projects: the Caval Ridge Horse Pit Extension at the Bowen Basin in Queensland; the Lake Vermont Meadowbrook Coal Mine Project, also in Queensland; and the New South Wales Boggabri Coal Mine, given a State Significant Development (SSD) status.

The measure enraged the Australia Institute think tank sufficiently to encourage the start of a glum petition. "While our leaders claim that Australia is on track to meet its climate targets of 43% emissions reduction by 2030, and net zero by 2050, Australia Institute research shows that when land sector emissions are removed from the modelling, Australia's emissions are actually increasing."

In a media release, the institute pointed out that the three mines, in the current state of operation, "were already so large that they could almost cover greater Sydney, or most Australian cities." The body's research director, Rod Campbell, found it all distasteful. "Putting this out just before Christmas is a classic 'taking out the trash' tactic. While Australians are trying to enjoy the end of the year, the Minister is doing the bidding of multinational coal companies."

The Climate Council was also baffled. Climate Councillor Lesley Hughes, with mighty authority, condemned the decision. "Our atmosphere doesn't care if this coal is for steel or power – it's all heating our planet and driving climate pollution. Burning coal fuels the climate crisis, worsening bushfires, floods and heatwaves that devastate our communities. This decision flies in the face of science, common sense, global responsibility and our duty to protect our kids' future."

Minister Plibersek is unlikely to be ignorant of any of this. But like her predecessors, she conducts policy within a cage of constraint, a hamstrung clerk bound by a limited brief. When so stifled and confined, the options narrow: to vanish, or become a jester. And jester she has become.