By Francesca Davis
On February 16, the Australian ran a "scoop" on the Coalition government's allocation of most of the funds from the National Heritage Fund to its own electorates.
The fund was never going to solve Australia's environmental problems; it was always going to be a political slush fund for the Coalition. As a senior government adviser commented in October 1996, Coalition MPs openly joked behind closed doors about the fund, admitting that, in its current form or size, it could not make any serious impact on the nation's land degradation, ailing rivers or loss of biodiversity.
As the same adviser stated, the fund was invented overnight to soften public reaction against the planned sale of one-third of Telstra.
By tying environmental funding to the sale of a public asset, the community was blackmailed into believing the only way of "saving" the environment was the Telstra sale. Even establishment media like the Australian admitted at the time that the trust "was in danger of becoming a cynical exercise in pork-barrel politics".
In an election year, it is hardly surprising that the Coalition is now rating the urgency of environmental problems according to their location in a Coalition electorate.
The real outrage lies not so much in the disproportionate distribution of funds according to party-held electorates, but in the token nature of the fund and its dubious assessment of environmental priorities.
As Friends of the Earth (FoE) and Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly pointed out in 1996, environmental sustainability demands a long-term commitment to putting people's needs before profits, and should be funded from consolidated revenue.
Although the $1.25 billion fund was initially seen by some environmental peak bodies, such as the Australian Conservation Foundation, as a positive gesture, its real role has been to hide the transfer of many key environmental programs from consolidated revenue to short-term funding. Once the fund is depleted, it's unclear what will happen to the programs.
Moreover, according to FoE, the states are taking advantage of commonwealth funding to reduce their own commitment to solving environmental problems.
If there has been political rorting, the Coalition has got away with it because decisions about environmental priorities have been left to a board composed of environment minister Robert Hill and primary industries minister John Anderson.
The board's rejection without reason of applications that have been recommended by regional assessment panels and state governments demonstrates the trust's lack of accountability.
No explanation has been given, for example, why the Hawkesbury-Nepean project had its funds cut in favour of other projects regarded by regional and state assessors as less important.
Last year, the National Audit Office noted that the federal government could not give details on the environmental programs on which it had spent $400 million since 1993. There are now fears that the National Heritage Trust may have simply become a land management program.
The Coalition's priorities are pretty clear, and the environment is definitely not at the top of the list. But neither is it for Labor, as shown by the party's opposition to binding greenhouse gas reduction targets and its uranium policy, which does not stop new mines.
And just in case you were wondering, those groups which have been vocal in their opposition to the Coalition — such as the Cairns and Far North Environment Centre, the North Queensland Conservation Council (both of which are involved in the Hinchinbrook campaign) and FoE (which opposed the National Heritage Trust) — no longer receive funding under the grants to voluntary conservation organisations program.