Last week, Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk announced $5 million for new floating plastic reefs, set to be unveiled on the Gold Coast by 2021.
While the plastic reefs are really just a gimmick for the local council to drum up tourism, the irony of Palaszczuk throwing money at fake reefs wasn’t exactly lost on anyone tracking the death of the real Great Barrier Reef.
So what else has Australia thrown money at other than actually combating climate change?
Great big fans along the Great Barrier Reef
One idea for combating coral bleaching came a few years ago: gigantic fans. Proposed by Malcolm Turnbull, they were to be parked along the Great Barrier Reef with the intent of cooling down the water.
Bleach-resistant super coral
Less obviously stupid is the idea of growing bleach-resistant coral, backed by actual scientists but readily taken up by politicians with little will to tackle the most cost-effective solution to bleaching.
While it’s far from impossible, growing super coral is wildly more expensive than decarbonisation. Acclaimed reef scientists Terry Hughes puts the cost of regrowing Great Barrier Reef coral killed in 2016/17 at somewhere around one trillion dollars.
For more costly, if theoretically helpful solutions, see: fake forests, sunlight-reflecting particles, Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison’s magic dirt fund.
The Great Barrier Reef Foundation
Remember this? Almost half-a-billion dollars for a “charity” linked to fossil fuel donors to the Coalition? An organisation that was given only the vaguest of “management” goals, and money that a Senate committee would later called on the government to try and get back.
What ever happened to that?
Dancing with (sea) snakes?
How good is self regulation? When the Commonwealth and Queensland governments were pulled up by a UNESCO threat to declare the Great Barrier Reef a ‘World Heritage Area In Danger’ a brief panic broke out. The Port of Townsville was midway through a development application for a massive dredge and reclaim project which proposed to dump millions of tonnes of spoil into Cleveland Bay – a project that would guarantee the demise of inshore reefs in the central section of the marine park. A similar project was under consideration at Adani’s Abbot Point coal loader – and already supported by then-federal environment minister Hunt and the local member George Christensen.
After a double backflip with pike, Hunt and Christensen changed their minds and ordered the Queensland government to change its practices so that sea dumping of capital dredge spoil would be outlawed, even if maintenance dredging continued to sea dump. Under new Queensland legislation, only four strategic GBR ports would be allowed to dredge and reclaim and none would sea dump. However, since the Townsville port’s old application was still on foot, the Q government allowed them to radically change their dredging plan to further widen and deepen the 14 kilometre access channel and almost double the size of the reclaimed seabed while at the same time avoiding the restrictive new legislation that would compel compliance with new environmental guidelines. Without so much as a business plan or even a basic cost/benefit analysis, the Port of Townsville is heading for a last-ditch expansion even as its biggest single user, Clive Palmer’s Queensland NIckel, languishes in prehistoric desolation.
If the $1.3 billion port expansion with 152 hectares of new portside wharf space is ever completed, who will use it? Well blow me down if there aren’t Labor Party aligned coal miners in the north Galilee Basin next to the Mount Isa to Townsville railway link lining up to help themselves to a fully taxpayer funded rail link and coal loading port being prepared for them. Guildford Coal, now known as TerraCom, has tenements near Hughenden and Pentland (look it up) and already have an MOU with the Townsville port to ship coal out of Townsville. The Queensland government has, this year – just since the election, splurged $500 million on repair and upgrade works on the railway. Other nearby miners have already indicated their interest in competing with Adani by using a Townsville coal loader. So how is it that years-old intentions to upgrade protections to the GBR by reducing impacts from port development is actually delivering more dredging, increased maintenance dredging and sea dumping and now what looks like taxpayer funded coal export facilities smack in the middle of the most environmentally sensitive, cyclone exposed shallow water bay in the GBR. How good is self regulation when governments do whatever they like, even when they know it will cause even more damage to the GBR and undermine Australia’s obligations to reduce emissions and phase out coal mining?