Federal environmental law in Australia
Abstract
Contemporary Australian environmental law is commonly viewed by the nations' leaders as representing "best practice" environmental regulation. Many Australians consider Australia an environmental policy world leader. Others have been much less sanguine in their assessment. In a recent provocative text, for instance, two prominent academics assert that "not only is the hold of environmental considerations in Australian politics more precarious [than they have ever been], but determined attempts have been and continue to be made by elected representatives to ignore and obliterate them". The Australian Conservation Foundation, Australia's largest environmental nongovernmental organization, has also been highly critical of what it considers recent retrograde environmental law "reforms". The truth, as usual, probably lies between these two extremes. Australia, like a number of developed, western democracies, finds itself at an environmental cross-roads. Over the past three years the Federal Commonwealth Government has undertaken the first major revision of national environmental laws since their inception in the early 1970s. The revision is far from complete, but the central premise behind the current conservative Coalition Government (comprised of the Liberal Party and National Party) appears to be a determined move to a devolution of regulatory responsibility, with an attendant increase in of the principle of subsidiary and self-regulation. A move that reflects trends in international development of a “second generation” of environmental law and regulation.