On July 16, the new federal Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPDC) Act came into force, the most sweeping rewrite of Australia's environmental laws in a quarter of a century. Taken together with similar legislation passed by state and federal governments over the last several years, it gives anti-growth bureaucrats extraordinary new powers to make life and death decisions over industry and agriculture.

The new act, and related measures, are the product of seemingly diverse bedfellows: the "right wing", free market mafia based in multinational corporation-funded think tanks, the National Farmers Federation (NFF), and the federal Treasury, in alliance with the "left-wing" Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), the premier environmentalist lobby in the country. However, such an alliance is not as strange as it seems, since both lobbies were organized by the British Crown: the right wing think tanks and the NFF by the Crown's Mont Pelerin Society, and the ACF by Prince Philip personally, which he established as a branch of his World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), following his royal tour of Australia in 1962. In fact, one of the main motivations for the new EPDC Act was the 1997 Kyoto, Japan conference based on the "global warming" hoax pushed by the WWF and its progeny, which set "guidelines" for how much "greenhouse gas" could be emitted by each country in any given year. Australia agreed to slash greenhouse gas emissions from the 1997 level of 43% above 1990 levels (the arbitrary date set at Kyoto), to only 8% above by 2010, a goal, which, if met, will devastate Australia's economy.

The premise of the EPDC is "to promote ecologically sustainable development through the conservation and ecologically sustainable use of natural resources". It contains sweeping provisions to "protect native species", to set up an "Australian Whale Sanctuary", to set up new nature parks and reserves, and to do whatever is deemed necessary to "promote off-reserve conservation measures", i.e. to intervene anywhere to do almost anything. In passing this bill, the federal government has usurped the previously-existing rights of states to control economic development within their borders. It is estimated, for instance, that 20,000 separate projects in the state of Queensland alone, will come under the bill's provisions.

The bill particularly targets large projects, such as any development emitting more than 500,000 tons of greenhouse gases per year (such as natural gas fired power plants, underground coal mining, large chemical and cement plants, etc). A key factor in the recent decision of the steel and natural resources giant, BHP, to close down its steelmaking operations in the city of Newcastle, New South Wales, for instance, was the looming prospect of the huge costs of trying to meet the post-Kyoto emissions standards. The EPDC additionally stops any "nuclear actions" which allegedly are "likely to have a significant impact on the environment", i.e anything at all to do with nuclear energy. It also provides multimillion dollar penalties for violations of any portion of the act.

Some, though not all of Australia's six states are marching in lockstep with the federal government's green fascist measures. The Labor Party government of New South Wales, for instance, has just created 180 new parks, such that the "protected areas" of the state now total 7% of its entire area, and has introduced stringent new "water conservation" measures, under which farmers are charged exorbitant rates for water, and are not even allowed to use the rainwater falling on their own properties. Not to be outdone, the Liberal Party opposition's environmental spokesman, Peta Seaton, has just issued a call to increase the protected areas to 20% of the entire state! In Queensland, the Labor government has introduced legislation to stop farmers from clearing brush off their own land.

And, it looks like even worse is to come. The NFF and the ACF commissioned a recent report on what expected "environmental costs" might be over the next decade, which found that a capital investment of an astounding $60 billion would be required for all sorts of environmental scams. And, while the federal government has drastically slashed funding for health care, for universities, for welfare payments and most other crucial social services, the Treasury's top bureaucrat, the fanatic free marketeer and notorious budget-slasher, Ted Evans, gave a speech at the Conference of Economists in Queensland in early July, in which he announced, to the astonishment of many, that, in a dramatic new turn, the federal government would be pouring billions into the environment in coming years, to "maintain the quality of our land, the quality of our air." Said Evans, ominously, "Greenhouse is an element of that, but one element, and it may not even be the most significant element."