A National Environment Test: How do Australian politicians score?

Why are these five tests so critical? Because the way in which we look after our air, water, plants and animals has never been so downright bad. Consider the following evidence.

Per capita we are the highest greenhouse polluters in the world.

The CSIRO tells us that climate chaos from greenhouse pollution will hurt Australia as much as anywhere else on the planet, with even more intense droughts, floods and storms, and more days of high bushfire risk.

Our rivers are in dire health. Without more water, up to half the native fish species in the Murray, the greatest river system in Australia, are at risk and just about all the mighty river redgums downstream of Mildura will be lost.

Per capita we use more water than on any continent despite inhabiting the driest continent after Antarctica - a hard place to get a drink.

One third of the planet's recent mammals extinctions are Australian animals we'll never see again, making our record in this area the worst in the world.

This national environmental crisis is a social and economic crisis too. Greenhouse pollution and the climate chaos it causes will worsen asthma, increase mosquito-borne diseases, lead to higher insurance premiums and put further stress on our farmers. Ours is a dirty, nineteenth-century economy, wasting energy and water and producing huge amounts of greenhouse pollution.

Salinity from our outdated land and water usage practices is poisoning drinking water, knocking out farms and ruining buildings, roads and pipe networks. $1.2 billion of agricultural production is lost annually due to land degradation. The Prime Minister's own advisers estimate the annual repair bill at $2 billion to $6 billion - a cost all Australians have to bear.

We could be denying our kids, and their kids, natural assets like the Great Barrier Reef and Kakadu that bring billions of tourism dollars.

And yet a crisis like this is an opportunity to find solutions and benefit from innovative action.

For instance, there's a significant proportion of Australian businesses that see opportunities in the international market under the regulations of the Kyoto Protocol. Like us, they can't see the sense in the government's goal of achieving the Kyoto target but excluding Australia from that market by refusing to ratify the protocol. Renewable energy is one of the fastest growing job generators around and the global clean and energy efficiency market is estimated to be worth billions of dollars over the next few years.

In water, moving from wastefulness to sustainable use won't only save our rivers, it can drive the development of new and globally marketable, water efficiency technologies.