The hand-wringing and manufactured shock at the State of the Environment Report released today, as after the release of previous similar national and global summaries of the calamity, will once again quickly fade into token action and general dismissiveness, Bob Brown said today.

This is not a failure of the last decade of government. It is a failure of the last century of government, speckled with a few exceptional phases. The last thirty years have seen a parade of environmental recklessness and bloody-mindedness, inescapably tied to corporate capture, including:

• the Keating government’s meek cave-in to the 300 log trucks which illegally blockaded Parliament House in 1995
• PM Howard’s consequent washing of federal hands for the nation’s heirloom forests and wildlife habitat when he signed Regional Forest Agreements with the states in 1997-2001.
• indifference by Labor and the Coalition to repeated calls for climate and biodiversity action by scientists, including more than 100 Nobel laureates in 1993.
• the response to such calls being to increase fossil fuel extraction and forest and woodland destruction
• the failure of governments to give Aboriginal people a veto over mining and other destructive incursions on their land
• the absurdity of rebuffing international attempts to raise Australia’s performance by, for example, declaring the Great Barrier Reef ‘endangered’ as it so obviously is
• the new rush by Labor and Coalition governments to criminalise peaceful environmental protesters as the real villains of our times
• the relegation of World Heritage nominations to the states
• the promoting and subsidising of coal mines, gas fracking and native forest logging, effectively having the public pay for the environmental degradation this report so meekly brings forward.