00:00 It started in July 2022, so a couple of years ago now. A small environment group called
00:06 the Environment Council of Central Queensland, backed up by Environment Justice Australia,
00:12 a group of lawyers, made what's called a formal reconsideration request to the Environment
00:17 Minister about 19 coal and gas projects. So what that means is, under the federal environment
00:23 laws, there's this possibility for people, anybody in fact, to formally request that
00:30 the Environment Minister reconsider a decision. And so in this case it wasn't about decisions
00:35 about whether or not those coal or gas projects should be approved. They hadn't yet been approved,
00:40 but a series of earlier decisions had been made, and specifically the decisions that
00:44 had been made were about what she would consider when she decided to approve or not approve
00:49 those coal and gas projects. And of key importance to this case was that that decision did not
00:56 include considering the impacts of climate change on what are called matters of national
01:01 environmental significance, so things like the Great Barrier Reef, endangered plants
01:05 and animals. So she was going to consider whether or not to approve these projects and
01:08 not consider that, and this group said, look, there's substantial new information that shows
01:14 that really climate change through these mines will have an impact on those things and you
01:19 need to consider that. And so they made that request, the Minister declined, said that
01:28 this was not something that she needed to do, and then it went to court. What was really
01:32 interesting in the court was that a lot of stuff was actually agreed to between both
01:36 the Minister and the environmentalists. So she accepted that there was substantial new
01:42 information about this and in fact even that the greenhouse gas emissions from these projects
01:47 would affect negatively these matters of national environmental significance like the Great
01:51 Barrier Reef. But what she argued was on technical grounds, basically, that those impacts wouldn't
01:58 be substantial under the key technical definition under the law, and in particular that they
02:05 wouldn't be direct. And so basically the idea is that the emissions from, say, coal mining
02:11 have such an indirect impact on the Great Barrier Reef that under the law they didn't
02:16 count as an impact. And the court agreed with that in the end, initially in the first verdict
02:23 under one judge last year and now by the full bench of the Federal Court. In the short term
02:27 the kind of obvious immediate implications are that everything proceeds as they were
02:31 going to anyway. The Minister will now consider whether or not to approve these projects and
02:36 won't need to consider whether or not greenhouse gas emissions from them will impact things
02:39 like the Great Barrier Reef. But I suppose more broadly there is this very widespread
02:44 and bipartisan agreement in Parliament even that our national environment laws are not
02:49 fit for purpose. And now what was interesting in this judgment was that the full bench of
02:53 the Federal Court actually made a comment in that regard, I'll just quote a tiny bit
02:57 of it. They said, "Notwithstanding our conclusions on the grounds of appeal, the arguments on
03:02 this appeal do underscore the ill-suitedness of the present legislative scheme to the assessment
03:08 of environmental threats such as climate change." And so this is the full bench of the Federal
03:12 Court kind of saying what a lot of other people are saying as well. So I think we've just
03:16 seen recently that the Labor Party, the government, has decided to put off indefinitely rewriting
03:22 our national environment laws, something they had promised to do this year. And so I think
03:25 this will add further impetus to calls for those laws to be updated.
03:30 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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