The Tarkine wilderness in Tasmania. Credit:Grant Wells Burke also faces a decision on the future of north-west Tasmania's Tarkine region - the largest rainforest-dominated slice of wilderness in Australia. Also on the Apple Isle, he is managing a fresh but still fragile agreement between greenies and loggers to protect 500,000 hectares of some of the country's most striking native forest. And Burke still has to nail down what is promised to be the world's largest network of marine reserves around Australia's coastline. He has declared 2.3 million square kilometres of new reserves, but the management plan still needs to pass Parliament - far from certain given a hostile opposition. ''I have strategically timed things poorly enough that I have pretty much every major decision I have got to make coming up in a few weeks,'' Burke says as the boat bounces across the open water this month. ''Just to get an agreement on Murray-Darling would have been fairly extraordinary on its own. But we have had the chance to do more so I have pushed the ambitions and I have pushed the timelines and so if we can bring it all together then it will be a very rare term in environmental protection, this one.'' Don Henry, chief executive of the Australian Conservation Foundation, says Burke already has some achievements tucked under his belt - a national heritage nomination for the West Kimberley is one - but the big calls are still in front of him.

''The proof is going to be in the quality of the decisions that come out of government and the Parliament on the big, crucial, national issues that are on the minister's plate,'' Henry says. SINCE coming to the portfolio after the 2010 election, Burke has made much of his teenage environmental interests. In the 1980s he joined the Wilderness Society spurred by the campaign to save the Daintree rainforest. Soon after, he was signed up to the Labor Party as a 16-year-old by Morris Iemma, joining the New South Wales Right of the party. Burke says he was frustrated that the Wilderness Society had him ''writing letters and turning up to different things and I thought I wanted to go somewhere where I could really make a difference''. ''So I turned up to my branch meeting and the big issue was there were cracks in the concrete footpaths and grass was growing up between them and it was a danger to elderly people in wet weather. But Morris talked me into coming back.'' Burke is a man of ambition. It is often said one of his personal goals is to be prime minister. ''It is part of my cunning 70-year plan,'' he says with a laugh when asked. So is that a no?

''Oh, well, I am only 43. I have seen plenty of really good careers killed by impatience. I don't intend to be one of them,'' he says. ''There is no way in the world that I would be the best person on our side to lead the show at the moment. Whether that is the case in years to come, who knows.'' In an earlier life, Burke was a champion debater, leader of Australia's anti-euthanasia movement, and co-founder of a successful training company. He worked on the staff of Labor powerbroker Graham Richardson and was an organiser for the Shop Distributive and Allied Employees Association, the backbone of Labor's Catholic Right. After a short stint in the NSW Parliament he was elected to represent the federal seat of Watson in 2004, and soon took on the small business and the immigration portfolios in opposition. When Labor took power in 2007, he became minister for agriculture, fisheries and forestry. During that time he oversaw reforms of drought payments and the wheat market, and drove a plan to ban the importation of illegally logged timber that finally passed Parliament this week. As forestry minister - much to the chagrin of conservationists - he also vocally backed timber company Gunns' highly controversial, and ultimately doomed, proposal to build a pulp mill in the Tamar Valley outside Launceston. Behind the scenes he successfully opposed mooted reforms to the Regional Forestry Agreements overseeing logging practice across the country.

Under Julia Gillard's prime ministership, he shifted from being the man responsible for overseeing primary industries to the custodian of the environment. Soon after the move, he gave a speech outlining his vision for Australia's natural wilderness. The centrepiece was protection of iconic sites in the four corners of the continent: Tasmania's forests, Cape York, the Kimberley and the oceans of the south-west and Coral Sea. In between, he would encourage the creation of ''wildlife corridors'' to give threatened species a path to move between public and private land. Burke tells Fairfax his goal is to return to ''first principles'' - a favourite phrase of his. He says where old environmental debates, such as the famous 1980s battle over the Franklin River, were in response to fights over development, he wants the focus to shift to the environmental jewels that deserve protection regardless of whether they are under pressure. He says there is ''an intrinsic value'' in having some places kept for nature alone - a point lost in recent years during the bitter debate over carbon pricing. ''We have tended to have forgotten that the fact something is simply an incredibly beautiful place can be reason in itself for protecting it,'' Burke says.

''And I hear people often say, well, do you have science to back this up? You'd be hard pressed to find science - your normal biodiversity science - that said we had to protect Uluru. But you have to protect it.'' The Burke legacy is not short of doubters. Conservationists are livid at his plans to change national environmental laws to hand decisions on new major developments such as mines and pulp mills to the states. Environmental law expert Professor Tim Bonyhady, from the Australian National University, says that under Labor, the Commonwealth is proposing that it disengage from environment decision-making. He says the reforms could be very damaging, particularly when states such as Queensland appear so set on resource development. ''It seems to me that Burke is much more interested in the appearance of the Commonwealth protecting Australia's environment, than actually protecting it,'' Bonyhady says. Burke defends the reforms - which will be hammered out by the Council of Australia Governments next month - saying the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act had expanded well beyond what had been anticipated when it was introduced in 1999. Ways of streamlining decisions with state laws have to be found, so long as there is the same environmental outcome, he says.

Burke has also stalled on a promise to give the Commonwealth more power to block new mining, logging, cattle grazing and land clearing in national parks. He says: ''I haven't progressed it, but nor have I withdrawn it.'' On Burke's watch, the government is also facing an investigation by the UN's World Heritage Council about development threats to the Great Barrier Reef. Burke's first major decision as environment minister was to approve two massive gas projects in Gladstone - with a number of conditions - significantly adding to the UN's concern. His immediate predecessor, Peter Garrett, is understood to have considered blocking one or both of the projects. Burke says he does not know what Garrett planned to do and remains comfortable with his decisions. Since the UN investigation started he has ordered a strategic assessment of the reef and adjacent coast to determine what should be protected and where development be allowed. Another sore spot for conservationists is national heritage protection for the Tarkine. A leaked report by the National Heritage Council last year recommended extensive protection for the region. Burke responded by ordering another review. At the same time, a number of mining proposals are on the table for the wilderness - with the backing of the powerful Australian Workers Union - and Burke has been accused of stalling on protection to get the projects through.

Burke says the fate of the Tarkine should be resolved soon. But he says having visited the area this year, his take on it has changed markedly. ''I went from a view that we are talking about a place that is quite pristine to a view that we are talking about a place that is very, very mixed,'' he says. ''Some of it was magnificently pristine, but the diversity of the Tarkine and the areas of very, very heavy industry that have been there for some time were not what I expected to see.'' While there is heat elsewhere, nowhere is Burke's legacy more on the line than the Murray-Darling. After five years and $10 billion worth of inducements, Burke has signed off on a plan to return 2750 billion litres of water to the river environment. The government has also committed another $1.8 billion to try to recover an extra 450 billion litres by 2024 by improving on-farm irrigation systems. Again, the basin plan has prominent critics. Peter Cosier, from the respected Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, says the amount of water to be recovered is scientifically insufficient to meet the minimum needs of a healthy working river. He says it is inconceivable that a government cannot fix a river with $10 billion of taxpayers' money on the table.

In Cosier's view, the Murray-Darling plan and the environment law reforms are symptomatic of a government more interested in cutting deals than staring down vested interests to deliver good public policy. But Burke says he is not about to put anything off. ''In trying to get through your agenda in time you will very often have both sides of the debate agreeing delay is the option they want to take. And I think that it would be quite easy to keep the different sides of the debate marginally happy and actually achieve nothing.'' He won't, he says. After clearing the big decisions, he wants to focus more on landscape management, including addressing the devastating impact of feral species. He expresses regret he has been unable to advance the development of wildlife corridors more quickly. As the boat moves further into the never ending wetlands of Aurukun, he says: ''If you take everything right back to original motivations about why you want to be in politics in the first place, then you want to be in the decision-making role. You get involved in politics … to make changes real. It is the attempt to move beyond giving your political view over a cup of coffee and actually making them happen.''