The Greens have dropped their demand for a climate trigger to be incorporated in the government’s stalled Nature Positive legislation, indicating they are now prepared to pass the bills in return for an Australia-wide ban on native forest logging alone.
The party has previously refused to support Labor’s legislation, insisting that both a climate trigger and a forest-logging ban must be included.
But in the lead-up to the final parliamentary sitting week of the year – and after faring worse than they anticipated in the Australian Capital Territory and Queensland elections – the Greens’ key Senate negotiators are to announce a compromise position to try to restart negotiations with the government.
With the Coalition and some crossbenchers continuing to oppose them, the government cannot get the bills passed without Greens support.
The Greens Senate leader, Sarah Hanson-Young, accused the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, of bowing to pressure from the resources sector in his refusal to countenance a climate trigger.
“The PM might not be willing to budge but the Greens are if it’s in the best interests of our environment,” Hanson-Young told Guardian Australia. “For this reason, we have offered the Albanese government passage of their Nature Positive bills in return for real action to save our native forests and critical habitat.”
The three Nature Positive bills would create an environmental protection authority and a data-gathering body, and increase penalties and enforcement powers under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.
The Greens offer represents the second concession on stalled legislation from the party in less than a week.
On Friday it watered down its demands on one of two blocked housing bills – the government’s Help to Buy legislation – dropping its insistence that the government end negative gearing and capital gains tax concessions, which it has said it will not do.
Instead, the Greens submitted an amended request list, seeking funding for 25,000 more social and affordable homes, tweaks to how repayments would be made under the proposed shared-equity scheme and more homes to be available under the other blocked program, Build to Rent.
Before the Greens’ revised Nature Positive offer, the government had refused to budge on either of its original demands.
The party is still demanding a ban on logging, which the Greens forests spokesperson, Senator Nick McKim, said had “allowed the loggers to trash nature and destroy threatened species’ habitats for far too long”.
But with Albanese focused on next year’s election and especially on maintaining electoral support in Western Australia – where the government has already announced a native-forest logging ban – the party hopes its climate-trigger concession will be enough to secure a deal.
“Closing the legal loopholes that allow large-scale native forest logging and land clearing to go unassessed will have tangible impacts for the protection of critical habitat in Tasmania, NSW, and northern Australia, where deforestation is out of control,” Hanson-Young said.
“We have shifted our position here in order to get an outcome for the environment and the prime minister should do the same. If he does, we can pass these laws this fortnight. Without closing these logging loopholes, the bills as drafted are useless for the environment and will fast-track destruction.”
Peak business groups, especially in the resources sector, strongly oppose inserting a climate trigger, which would subject future development projects to federal assessments and approval if they would have a high climate impact.
At the Minerals Council of Australia’s annual conference in September, the environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, appeared to leave open the possibility, after the council’s chief executive, Tanya Constable, asked her to rule it out.
“At this stage I’ve got to be clear, we are in intense negotiations right across the parliament,” Plibersek said at the time. I’m not going to pretend to you that there’s no discussion of climate considerations as part of that negotiation. I’m not going to pretend that.”
Within days, Albanese ruled it out.
