Some of Australia’s favourite birds are threatened with extinction and Australia’s environmental laws are failing to protect them, a new report by BirdLife Australia has found.



The report identified in the existing laws a slew of loopholes, exemptions, omissions and discretionary powers open to politicisation, each of which have been exploited to allow the decline of birds including the Carnaby’s black cockatoo, the swift parrot and the southern black-throated finch.

“The Turnbull government must urgently reform our national environment laws and ensure they are properly upheld,” said Jenny Lau, BirdLife Australia’s acting head of conservation.

The report attempts to build a case for what the Australian Panel of Experts on Environmental Law, working in conjunction with the Places You Love Alliance, called a blueprint for the next generation of environmental laws.

That blueprint called for national oversight to be expanded to cover land clearing, impacts on climate change and protected areas, as well as the establishment of a national sustainability commission, which would have real power to manage cumulative impacts on the environment that are often not considered over hundreds of individual decisions.

The spectacular Carnaby’s black cockatoo in Western Australia illustrates the way ministerial discretion opens the way for politicisation, the report said.

Despite being listed as endangered under federal environment law, its population has declined by between 5% and 11% each year since 2010. Pine plantations have become an important habitat for the bird but those are being harvested, without replacement, at a rate of 1,000 hectares per year since 2004. The plantation has declined from 23,000 ha at one point to 7,000 ha today, the report said.

Swift parrot pairs now number less than 1,000 in the wild. Photograph: Chris Tzaros

BirdLife Australia said it had written to state and federal environment ministers requesting that “harvesting without replacement” of those plantations be considered a “controlled action”, and therefore subject to federal environmental assessment. Although the federal minister has the power to determine it as a “controlled action,” BirdLife said that hasn’t happened, showing the system is vulnerable to politicisation.

Meanwhile, exemptions and loopholes to federal environment law have meant it isn’t able to protect the critically endangered swift parrot, which now numbers fewer than 1,000 pairs in the wild.

Regional forest agreements are 20-year plans that allow the logging industry to harvest trees from native forests, and exempt the actions from restrictions in federal environmental law. As some of them are expiring, they have either been, or are in the process of being, rolled over for another 20 years.

The report said that despite the swift parrot being determined a “priority species” in some RFAs, its habitat has been routinely felled in native forests over the past 20 years.

Cumulative impacts fail to be properly considered by existing environmental law too, the report said. The black-throated finch, despite being extinct in NSW and endangered under federal environmental law, has had its occurrence contract by 80% in the past 30 years.

The report said that has occurred through hundreds of small developments, each of which has a relatively small impact but is cumulatively threatening the species with extinction. It notes 772 projects that overlap on black-throated finch habitat have been referred for assessment under federal environmental law, but for the majority of those it was determined they could go ahead without federal assessment.

“Most of those applications were approved without consideration of the cumulative impacts on our finches,” said Lau. “Decisions to approve developments that destroy habitat are being made in isolation from one another and as a result the southern black-throated finch is now headed for extinction.”



For other species, especially those that only exist on islands – such as the King Island scrubtit and the King Island brown thornbill – there is no government agency tasked with collecting adequate information about the species in order to protect it.

In many other cases, threatened species are not having recovery plans established for them – something that was legally required to be created until an amendment to the law in 2007. BirdLife Australia analysis found that of the 67 nationally listed endangered and critically endangered birds, only 15 are covered by up-to-date recovery plans.

The opposition environment spokesman, Tony Burke, has said the push to introduce national laws would be considered at the ALP conference this year, and he was consulting about updating the act.

Burke told the Guardian this week that existing laws need to be properly applied to protect threatened species.

“You can’t protect species without protecting habitat. That means using a series of powers available under law,” Burke said.

“One of the principle challenges when we have conservative governments in power is the section of the EPBC Act that deals with approvals are the only sections they are committed to. That leads down a pathway of offsets where the habitat is somewhere between 20 and 80 years away, protected areas which go backwards and conservation outcomes screech to a halt.”

The office of the minister for energy and the environment, Josh Frydenberg, has been contacted for comment but he has previously said the existing act continues to be the best mechanism for the federal government to protect the most important and sensitive matters.

The report is being released ahead of a symposium called Better Laws for a Better Planet, hosted by a number of groups including the Australian Panel of Experts on Environmental Law and the IUCN National Committee Australia, on 27 March in Canberra.

