2014-06-13
Senator Larissa Waters
THE ANNUAL UNESCO World Heritage Committee meeting can be an exciting time for anyone who loves this planet's animals, plants and precious places.
A couple of years ago, at the 2011 World Heritage Committee meeting, Western Australia's Ningaloo Coast was added to the World Heritage list.
Divers, tourists, greenies, locals and people everywhere celebrated the well-deserved accolade for this magical part of Australia where hundreds of whale sharks converge every year to coincide with mass coral spawning events.
Sadly this year's meeting, which starts on Monday in Doha, Qatar, is shaping up to be very different story and it could actually prove quite an embarrassing affair for Australia.
Firstly, the Australian Government is requesting that the World Heritage Committee remove World Heritage protection from ancient forests in Tasmania so that they can be logged.
The unprecedented request, from Tony "we have too much locked-up forest" Abbott, was met with public condemnation from advisors to the Committee.
The Committee's draft decision, released in May, indicates that our Prime Minister's short-sighted, request to let some of the world's oldest trees be logged will be firmly refused at next week's meeting.
Nonetheless, the discussion will shine an international spotlight on the glaring anti-environment agenda of the Abbott Government.
Secondly, in another cringe-worthy moment for Australia, the Committee will consider downgrading the Great Barrier Reef's World Heritage status.
The World Heritage Committee will deliberate whether to adopt its draft — and perhaps final — warning about the Great Barrier Reef being be added to the list of World Heritage sites "In Danger", after three years of similar warnings.
Last year, the Committee expressed serious concern over the level of coastal development our Reef is enduring and gave Australia one more year to pick up its act and save the Reef from an In Danger listing.
In that time, the Abbott Government has approved the world's largest coal port on the Reef's coast, allowing three million cubic metres of dredge spoil to be dumped in the Reef's World Heritage waters.
The Abbott Government has also ticked off on massive coal mines in the Galilee Basin for Gina Rinehart and Clive Palmer, which would exacerbate climate change and see more than one ship an hour export coal through our Reef, increasing the risk of strikes, accidents and oil spills.
What's more, Tony Abbott plans to give Campbell Newman total control over approving more developments like these in the future, by eroding federal environmental approval responsibilities that have been in place for decades.
Tony Abbott seems deaf to UNESCO's continual warnings and instead is letting the Reef be treated as a dump ground for dredged up sludge and a shipping super highway for the big mining companies.
In doing so, he is risking an In Danger listing for our Reef. This would be a disaster for our Reef's $6 billion tourism industry, which employs more than 50,000 people.
An In Danger listing would not only undermine the Reef's status as a tourism mecca but it would go down in Australian history as an international disgrace.
Almost all countries with an In Danger listing are struggling with conflict or poverty, such as Yemen, the Congo, Ethiopia and Afghanistan.
EXPLAINER: WHY IS WORLD HERITAGE IMPORTANT?
With World Heritage listing in the headlines this week, it is time to look at what World Heritage listing actually means.
As a wealthy, peaceful nation with a bounty of unique natural beauty, Australia should be a global leader in conservation, and yet we have our own government requesting that World Heritage protection be removed from our ancient forests and we're risking and In Danger listing for one of the seven natural wonders of the world — our Great Barrier Reef.
We should be taking steps forward, not giant leaps backward. But our walk of shame continues — Australia has also missed the chance to secure a new World Heritage area at this year's meeting.
Our stunning Cape York, home to some of the world's last free flowing rivers and ancient Aboriginal rock art, is certainly worthy of World Heritage status.
Yet the previous Labor government missed the deadline for nomination last year, and earlier this year the Abbott Government again missed that annual deadline.
Now the Abbott Government has stalled the nomination process by starving it of resources and adequate staff numbers. This goes against the wishes of many traditional owners to protect their country from big mining.
While the government slows the nomination, the big mining companies are circling Cape York, getting ready to strip mine away the very values that make it worthy of a nomination.
It's clear that political will is holding Australia back from meeting its international responsibilities as a steward of some of the world's most precious places.
We could have been heading into this year's meeting with a comprehensive nomination for Cape York and proof that the Committee's recommendations to save the Reef had been followed.
Instead, thanks to the Abbott Government, our delegation has no Cape York nomination but instead a sorry list of attacks on the Great Barrier Reef and a request to remove World Heritage protection for some of the world's oldest trees.
We can only hope that the international disgust this will provoke, combined with the community outrage at Tony Abbott's continual attacks to the environment, will finally shake this government into fixing up some of the damage it's already managed to inflict in just nine months.
Senator Larissa Waters is the Australian Greens environment spokesperson.
This article was originally published at ABC Environment.