Kate Crowley

Effective Environmental Federalism?: Australia's Natural Heritage Trust

This paper examines effective federalism in relation to the Natural Heritage Trust (NHT), now a AU

Is Australia Faking It? The Kyoto Protocol and the Greenhouse Policy Challenge

2.5 billion environmental policy initiative, and Australias largest ever single environmental spending programme. In the absence of any other policy reviews or critiques, this paper is a descriptive and analytical piece, outlining and evaluating the NHTs administration, accountability measures and ecological outcomes against the goals of effective federalism. Effective federalism involves the national government seeking more efficient and effective delivery of environmental outcomes while revitalizing its partnerships with state and local governments to protect the environment. Both this term and the NHT are initiatives of the conservative national coalition government (which has been in office now since 1996) and have been implemented by its Environment Minister, Senator Hill. For the benefit of international readers, this paper places effective federalism in its historical context, and in the context of very familiar tensions for and against the devolution of environmental governance. It finds effective federalism to be an ambitious aim, indeed more so than the NHTs legislative goals of generating environmental investment and raising community awareness about the need for ecological sustainability. Copyright

Jobs and environment: the “double dividend” of ecological modernisation?

While Australia has signed both the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, it has failed to ratify the latter. It is nevertheless committed to meeting its 8 Kyoto target for greenhouse gas emissions, and argues that it is on track to doing so. This paper examines Australias non-ratification politics and greenhouse policy efforts in an attempt to explain its contrary position of resisting Kyoto, yet embracing and pursuing its emission reduction targets. Australias behavior as a carbon-intensive nation is highly significant in the global context, and this paper focuses on the domestic factors of interests, ideas and institutions, while also considering international factors in trying to explain Australias non-ratification of Kyoto and climate change policy development. It finds that while ideas and institutions have been modifying influences in the domestic context, political and economic interests have dominated Australias greenhouse policy.

Lake Pedder's Loss and Failed Restoration: Ecological Politics Meets Liberal Democracy in Tasmania

This paper reviews the emergent literature on ecological modernisation and considers its theoretical utility in terms of assessing environmental employment opportunities in Australia. It explores the potential for ecologically modernist policy to offer a way beyond “jobs versus environment” obstacles to greener employment. The future development of post industrial economies is said by ecological modernists to depend upon an ability to produce high value, high quality products with stringent enforcement standards. In these terms, environmental amenity becomes a superior good, and environmental protection not an economic burden, but an opportunity for enhanced growth and job creation. The employment impact of such claims is examined in the Australian context.

The Tasmanian state election 1996: Green power and hung parliaments

The flooding of Lake Pedder in South West Tasmania for hydro-electricity in the early 1970s is recognised as one of the worlds great ecological tragedies. The hope for its restoration, long held by some, has been given impetus by the activities of Pedder 2000, a nation-wide restoration lobby group founded in 1994. The legitimacy, feasibility and desirability of Pedders restoration has been acknowledged, if not endorsed, by a recent federal inquiry. Restoration proponents see Pedders recovery not only as a means of making amends for past follies, but as a new millennium project that offers hope to future generations. This paper reviews Pedders inundation and the efforts towards its recovery, and finds little support for restoration in the absence of compelling economic and political benefit. This is cause to reflect, it is argued, upon the difficulties that ecological politics has encountered within Tasmania that saw Lake Pedder dammed in the first place.

Environmental employment opportunities: How green are Australia's green job credentials?

As expected, the 1996 Tasmanian state election has delivered a hung Parliament. The incumbent Liberals retain government although now in minority. Labor is languishing in opposition, and will do so for as long as it refuses to deal with the Greens. The Greens have sustained a slight loss in support, but have achieved their goal of regaining the balance of power that they lost in 1991 after briefly supporting a Labor minority government. But the circumstances by which the Greens now hold the balance of power are significantly different than in 1989 - as is the margin by which they hold it. In 1989, there was a positive choice made by 17.1% of the state population, fuelled by the controversial Wesley Vale pulp mill dispute, to displace the incumbent government and to vote green. The ranks of the Green Independents in the 35-member House of Assembly swelled from two to five, causing the Liberals to lose office and the further erosion of Labors already low support base.

So close, and yet so far? The Tasmanian Greens and the 2006 state election

This article defines the character of the green jobs agenda in Australia, identifying the nature of the policy response to environmental employment demands during the period of the recent federal Labor government.1 Drawing upon ecopolitical characterisations of the diverse ’shades of green’, it argues that the acceptability of green job proposals in the Australian context has varied to the extent of their compatibility with economic growth objectives. Australias environmental employment credentials have rested upon reactive and narrowly defined notions of ‘green jobs’. Three ‘waves’ of official environmental employment initiatives are identified, (ecological restoration, green jobs in industry, and employment brokering), and are shown to be couched in rhetoric asserting resource dependency and economic growth. Ecological modernisation is considered to offer a way beyond the ‘jobs versus environment’ impasse that has prevented a bona fide greening of employment in Australia. It would see the economy‐envir...

Delivering Public Services: Locality, Learning and Reciprocity in Place Based Practice

Australia’s relatively wild island state, Tasmania, was described two decades ago as a crucible of environmental conflict, providing in microcosm ‘a taste of the likely shape of politics elsewhere in the world should the green agenda reach the political frontline’ (Hay and Haward 1988, p. 435). In the 25 years since the Greens were first represented in the Tasmanian parliament, the House of Assembly’s preferential proportional electoral system (Mackerras 1995)1 has ensured their consistent presence (see Table 1). Since then, they have supported two minority governments, one Labor (1989–91) and one Liberal (1996–8) (Crowley 2003a). A key issue dominating the 2006 state election was whether the Greens would again assume the balance of power. The electoral system changed in 1998 when the Liberal minority government, as one of its last acts, supported the Labor opposition’s amendment to the Parliamentary Reform Act (1998) which raised the quota for election of a member of the House of Assembly (MHA) from 12.5% to 16.7%. The impact on green parliamentary representation was immediate. At the 1998 election, under the new quota, the Greens’ 10.2% of the state vote delivered only one seat (to its leader, Peg Putt) instead of the four seats that would have been won under the old quota (Crowley 1999). The reform not only raised the electoral quota, but cut the numbers in the Lower House from 35 to 25 members, leaving the government and opposition severely benches depleted. At the 2002 state election, the Greens, following Putt’s effective representation, were rewarded with a record 18.1% vote that returned four members.

Values and the state in natural resource management: The Mt Wellington skyway dispute, Hobart, Tasmania

Policymakers across myriad jurisdictions are grappling with the challenge of complex policy problems. Multi-faceted, complex, and seemingly intractable, ‘wicked’ problems have exhausted the repertoire of the standard policy approaches. In response, governments are increasingly looking for new options, and one approach that has gained significant scholarly interest, along with increasing attention from practitioners, is ‘place-based’ solutions. This paper surveys conceptual aspects of this approach. It describes practices in comparable jurisdictions – the United Kingdom, the EU, and the United States. And it explores efforts over the past decade to ‘localise’ Indigenous services. It sketches the governance challenge in migrating from top-down or principal-agent arrangements towards place-based practice. The paper concludes that many of the building blocks for this shift already exist but that these need to be re-oriented around ‘learning’. Funding and other administrative protocols may also ultimately need to be redefined.

Nature: Reinvention, restoration or preservation?

Abstract This article presents a study of land‐use politics at the local level in Hobart, capital of the small island state of Tasmania. It is concerned with the politics of local place in the Mt Wellington Skyway cable car dispute and the tactics employed by the state government, in contravention of sustainability principles, to prioritise development over public concern for a local environment. The dispute is reviewed in terms of ideological contention, planning and decision making, and the role of the state in facilitating development. It is found to be characteristically Tasmanian in terms of state legislative support for the project and attitudes in the local community and local government polarised firmly against it. The management of the Mt Wellington Range itself is found to have been hindered by a history of non‐decision making and neglect of intrinsic natural values, and the management of the Skyway approval process to have been expediently driven by utilitarian concerns. The article closely scr...