Ken Henry’s environmental warnings are arguably more dire, more imminent, more urgent, more troublesome and a great deal less hypothetical than the need to address a gradually shifting tax base.
When former Treasury secretary Ken Henry appeared on the ABC’s Radio National last week, he sparked a fresh discussion, albeit shortlived, about tax reform.Henry used the term “intergenerational tragedy”
This particular development application was granted in 1983, when it was legal to pump raw sewage into Bondi Beach. It was predictably scathing in concluding the act “is not meeting its primary purpose of maintaining a healthy, productive and resilient environment, and is never likely to do so”.“Clearing of native vegetation, intensifying land use, a growing population and associated infrastructure development has led to the destruction, alteration and fragmentation of habitat across the state,” it says.
“The first and most important thing is that, if the environment is going to have a chance, then environmental considerations have to have primacy in policy thinking,” Henry said.“It’s not going to be any good in the future to say, well, the environment is nice to have, but really we’ve got to focus on investment here, or a residential development there, or a mining project here, or continuing to log native forest over there – that those things are more important than the environment.