JACQUELINE MALEY: Tanya, welcome to the podcast. It is such a pleasure to have you on.

TANYA PLIBERSEK, MINISTER FOR THE ENVIRONMENT AND WATER: It’s so lovely of you to ask me.

MALEY: Minister, it has been a very bruising week in Parliament House with yet more angry debate about the Brittany Higgins rape allegation and who knew what when. On Wednesday night Senator Lidia Thorpe made an allegation of harassment against Liberal Senator David Van, and then by Thursday Opposition Leader Peter Dutton had ejected Senator Van from the Liberal Party room after Dutton said that he’d heard further allegations in relation to Senator Van. It’s all pretty grubby and it’s a bit confusing for the general viewer. Do you have any general comments on the week that was?

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Yeah, I think I will keep my comments general, but it does show that Parliament House is not immune from sexual harassment and even sexual assault allegations in the workplace. And it is why it’s so important that we fully implement the recommendations made by Kate Jenkins when she did her review into the culture here in Parliament House. It’s important that we implement the recommendations of Stephanie Foster that also had a look at some of the issues here in Parliament House. And more broadly it’s why we need to fully implement Kate Jenkins Respect@Work Report so that every workplace is safe.

I mean, it is really shocking that about half of Australian women over their lifetime experience sexual harassment in the workplace. In the Jenkins review here in Parliament House, 40 percent of women who were interviewed said they’d experienced sexual harassment at work. Of course it’s just not good enough, and we have to have systemic approaches that make it clear that any sexual harassment or more serious things like sexual assault will not be tolerated. That full consequences will be faced by anybody who engages in that sort of behaviour. And that people have somewhere to turn, that there is somewhere you can go to make a complaint and get the support you need to see that complaint through.

DAVID CROWE: Do you feel like Parliament is any better or is getting better? Because for me, reporting on this week and being in this building, it feels like we’ve all been dragged back to 2021 and nothing’s changed, nothing’s any better. How does it feel to you being in the building this week?

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: I feel really sad about it, actually, David, because I – you know, I’ve been working here for a long time and a lot of my life and my career has been spent trying to make the country safer for women and kids, trying to make this a safer workplace for the next generation of fantastic young women who come here to work in the press gallery, in our offices, in the Parliament, in the committee system, in the library, wherever. And it does feel frustrating that we haven’t achieved more - and especially when we’ve had the Jenkins review and we’ve got, I guess, a framework for it.

It's hard to feel good at the end of this parliamentary week because of the way the debate has been going. But at the very least I would say the big breakthrough has been that we’re talking about this stuff now and we have formal systems in place for complaints to be made and investigated and all of the employers in the place have been made really aware of our obligation to provide a safe workplace for our staff. So there have been steps forward, but the end of the week that we’ve had, it doesn’t feel great, that’s for sure.

MALEY: And Minister, how do you think the events of this week reflect on parliament as a whole for the sort of general viewer? The general public will be looking on with sort of thinly veiled disgust, won’t they, just in despair?

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, I think, once again, we’re having a debate that misses the real core of the issue here. There is an outrage at the centre of all of this. That outrage is that right now one in every five Australian women over the age of 15 has been sexually assaulted. One-fifth of Australian women have been sexually assaulted. A third have experienced domestic violence. Thirteen percent of sexual assault victims have the confidence in our justice system to report it to the police. It’s not the police’s fault - I know that they want to get rapists off the street. But we have a justice system that is stacked against victims of sexual assault. And anybody who has seen it up close, been through the court system, supported someone who’s gone through the court system will know that it is slow, that it is heartbreaking, that it’s retraumatising, it’s revictimizing. And after all of that, an estimated 3 percent of cases end in a guilty conviction.

And you know, the thing that I guess I find most distressing about this is the numbers are all going the wrong way. In fact, this is one of the very few types of crime where the incidence is increasing. And the – 10 years in a row the ABS has shown incidence of sexual assault has increased. What are we doing wrong? Like, for 30 years of my professional life I have been working to try and make this country safer for women and children. And we had the first national plan on violence against women and children, that was my work in the Rudd government. We set up 1800 RESPECT, we did a bunch of things. It hasn’t changed the incidence of sexual assault. It breaks my heart that all of the efforts that so many of us have made for such a long time have not shifted the dial on this.

MALEY: Minister, I know that’s a subject you’re really passionate about. I know it’s actually quite personal for you. So thank you for those remarks.

We want to move now to your portfolio, which is the environment portfolio obviously – environment and water. Last month the Climate Council criticised you for giving the green light to the Isaac River coal mine in Queensland’s Bowen Basin. Many people would expect the environment minister to stop new coal mines, not let them go ahead. Why did you approve that mine and others?

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, because there’s no legal basis to reject every coal mine and every gas project, as some people would have me do. And I think the important thing here is that we are moving forward to a future with net zero carbon emissions in Australia. We’ve legislated that. We’ve got our 43 percent emissions reduction target by 2035. We are building renewable energy projects faster than ever before in Australian history. I’ve doubled the approvals of renewable energy projects. We’ve got thousands of kilometres of transmission lines that we need to get built so that we can take that renewable energy and put it into people’s homes and businesses so that we can meet our 82 percent renewable energy target by 2030.

We are massively transforming our economy with investment in green hydrogen, investment in electrifying people’s homes and businesses. That is the big and systemic change that we need. And we’re a hundred percent committed to it.

And on the issue of our environmental protection laws, we’re also going through a really substantial rewriting of our Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act so that it is nature positive. For years all our environmental laws have done is preside over the slow decline of nature. We’ve got to arrest that and turn it around, and I’m determined to do that.

MALEY: Minister, you’ve just mentioned that legislation which, for the benefit of listeners, is sort of the main legislation that governs major project approvals. You’ve said that you want to overhaul it. What’s your sort of brief message to Australians about why that law needs to be fixed and what needs to be done to it?

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Yeah, well the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act has been around pretty much unchanged for a couple of decades and it doesn’t make anyone happy. It certainly is frequently criticised by business as being slow and cumbersome, but it’s also without doubt allowed the destruction of our natural environment. And we see the number of threatened species we have, the number of plants and animals that are becoming endangered, the number of threatened ecological communities, the protections under the act have no – there’s no improvement of nature or really genuine protection of nature in the legislation.

The way I’m thinking about the laws is they need to be nature positive. So at the moment, for example, one of the most frequently criticised parts of our environmental law is the system for offsets. You say, “I’m building this project here. There’s a bit of swamp here with glossy black cockatoos. I need to bulldoze that swamp for that project to go ahead.” And what the law says is, “Okay, you can bulldoze that swamp. You need to find me another bit of swamp with some glossy black cockatoos on it and protect that and then you’ll be all right; you’ll be able to bulldoze the first bit.” But you’ve still gone from having two bits of swamp with glossy black cockatoos to one bit of swamp with glossy black cockatoos. The environmental offset system is not working. And, by the way, quite often they never check that you’ve actually protected that bit of swamp with the glossy black cockatoos on it.

So we need to make sure that our laws are working to protect the habitat, the species that are precious. There are some places we just shouldn’t be building. There are some projects that should just not go ahead – they’re in the wrong spot, it’s the wrong projects, it’s too bad for nature. Then there’s some areas that are a better bet for development. There’s existing developments of a similar type, they’re not in ecologically significant places. We need to speed up what we’re doing in those areas. We want faster rollout of renewable projects or housing projects or whatever the project is in an area that’s not sensitive.

And then in the middle we have to have sensible approaches that protect and preserve nature. So it is a really big project of rewriting our reforms, and what I’m trying to do, of course, is keep the major environmental groups and the major business groups working as cooperatively as possible. The more agreement we can have about a sensible way forward the better for nature and the better for our economy.

CROWE: There are a couple of sort of major concerns out there about changing this environmental law. One is the idea that this will streamline everything, and to some people streamline sounds bad because it means faster decisions to do some destruction to the environment. So that’s one thing I’d be interested in your view on.

The other thing, of course, is that the Greens want a climate trigger in this law. So they want a part of this law that says if it’s going to increase emissions, that can be grounds for stopping something. Now, are you open to that given the importance of climate change to this government?

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, two things: I know that streamlining makes – the word makes people nervous, and there’s good reason for that because when Professor Graeme Samuel did the review of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act he came up with all these suggestions, including ways of streamlining approvals. The previous government just grabbed at those faster decisions with none of the balancing environmental protections. 

The biggest impact we’re going to have on the speed and the decision-making process is actually by doing much better regional planning so we know ahead of time and can say to proponents, “Don’t even bother giving a submission to develop this thing in this place because it’s not likely to go ahead. That environment is too sensitive.” That actually speeds up decision-making as well. So I think we can do both. I think we can absolutely better protect nature and give faster and clearer and high-integrity decisions.

And, of course, we’re setting up our independent Environment Protection Australia, the first time Australia will have an EPA, a national EPA. And we’re setting up Environment Information Australia, which will be the sort of data engine of these faster, clearer decisions.

The second thing about the climate trigger, we actually have laws that deal with carbon dioxide and similar greenhouse gases. We’re not going to have a second set of laws in the environment laws that deal with the same issue. So big projects in Australia are subject to the safeguard mechanism. They have to account for their emissions. They have to show how they’re going to get their emissions down. That’s the appropriate way of handling that.

CROWE: And so you think the safeguard mechanism stops dud projects or projects that would be bad or would put a price mechanism on them?

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, I think it is designed to make sure that project proponents have a way of getting their carbon emissions down. And I think it does make proponents think about more marginal projects, for sure, yes.

MALEY: Minister, I suppose at the heart of all these questions is the tension that you face between the economic benefit of certain projects and the emissions that those projects might produce. And you would know better than anyone that report after report after report comes out every day or every week it seems, saying that we need to stop using fossil fuels right now in order to reduce emissions and stay below 3 degrees of warming globally - at which point life on the planet would become disastrous. How do you square off that knowledge, which you would know better than anyone, against your approval on the other hand of these fossil fuel projects?

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, we’re getting to 82 percent renewable energy in 82 months. This is the biggest transformation of our economy in living memory. And I think it’s really – it’s really important to bear that in mind. We’ve got a really clear, huge task of transformation ahead of us. We’re making enormous investments in green hydrogen. We will be exporting renewable energy and goods like green steel, green aluminium, green cement, green industrial chemicals in coming years. We are making that transformation right now in a – at a scale and at a pace that was not imaginable just a few years ago. The previous government had 22 energy policies; they never landed one of them.

I really don’t think you can ignore the scale and pace of that change. Do we need some gas in the transition? Of course we do. I just think it’s unrealistic to imagine that we make this switch overnight. But we’re going as fast and as big as we can with the change.

MALEY: Okay. We just want to move away quickly from your portfolio, Ms Plibersek, while we have you. There is a relatively new biography of you out in bookstores. Don’t know if you’ve read it or not. It’s by Margaret Simons. It’s called Tanya Plibersek, On Her Own Terms. We just wanted to ask you what is it like –

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, it wasn’t really on my own terms, was it?

MALEY: You’ve got a quibble with the title there. Did you want that biography written? Did you talk to your biographer, and what was that experience like?

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: No, it was excruciating. It was – I mean, Margaret Simons is a very nice person who’s done a very professional job. But it’s an excruciating experience. It’s like I’m sort of Lisa Simpson, like having my homework marked. And having someone I didn’t know at all before she said to me, “I’m writing a book about you whether you look it or not,” having someone go through my life, talk to my old teachers, talk to kids I haven’t seen since I was in primary school, talk to - you know, it’s a bit excruciating to be honest. So, anyway.

MALEY: We’ll put that on the cover as a cover quote.

CROWE: Excruciating.

MALEY: Excruciating. Margaret Simons, of course, is a great journalist. I’m sure it’s a great book.

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Actually, you know the bit that is nice about it? The first sort of couple of chapters, I guess, are about my parents’ journey to Australia. And I’m really glad that my kids and grandkids will have a thoroughly, you know, properly, thoroughly done account of my parents’ just extraordinary journey. Like, them and the generation of post-war migrants from Europe and how hard their lives were and the sacrifices they made. I think that’s – to be honest, I think that’s a story really worth telling.

CROWE: The arrival of the biography had me thinking about one question I’ve always wanted to ask you, which is: you were the Labor shadow minister for women before the election. After the election things changed, there was a need for a reshuffle. Anthony Albanese didn’t keep you at Minister for Women. How have you felt about that? Because I know that you’d put a lot of work into that portfolio in opposition.

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: I love the portfolio, and I had it also when we were in government last time and got to do some great things with the first national plan on violence against women and so on. But, you know, Katy Gallagher is a fantastic person to do the job, and she’s done a brilliant job with the portfolio. She’s made some really substantial changes and, I’m proud of the job she’s done. I’m proud to be part of a government with her.

We’ve also got all these other ministers doing really good things in women’s policy. So Amanda Rishworth is playing a really good role in the violence against women stuff and Anne Aly is doing great work in early childhood education and care, and Anika Wells has got, obviously well over 80 percent of the staff in aged care are female, so the big aged care pay package has made a huge difference to the gender pay gap and the circumstances of women working in aged care – generally underpaid and overworked.

So we’ve got, not just Katy doing a brilliant job, but a whole team of people that are making a huge difference to women’s lives in Australia. Extra paid parental leave, legislating 10 days paid domestic violence leave, these are big, important changes.

CROWE: Another thing that came out of the launch of the biography was when you made a comment about leadership because you made the point that in 2019 you believed you could have become Labor leader. There were reasons why you didn’t run at that time. Did you get a lot of blowback from making that public remark, because it was seen as a reflection on, I guess, the current leader, the Prime Minister. Do you see yourself as leadership material still?

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: I didn’t make a comment – I answered a question. And, no, I didn’t get blowback for it, and it’s all ancient history, so.

MALEY: The last part of the question was: do you still see yourself as leadership material?

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: It’s all ancient history. I’m very much enjoying my job as Environment Minister. And I really do – this is actually quite a fundamental thing about the type of person you are, right? I really believe that gratitude and happiness are completely linked. And when I was growing up if someone had told me that I would one day be a member of parliament I would have just thought that is impossible for a kid like me with my background, no way will that ever happen. Every single day that I have spent doing my job as the member for Sydney I have considered an honour, and I still think that. Being a shadow minister or a minister, being the Deputy Leader of the Labor Party for six years, all of that has just been an added bonus and more than I ever expected from my life. So there’s no way I’m wandering around like – what did Malcolm Turnbull call them – a miserable ghost complaining about what never was. No way. No way.

MALEY: Minister, I’m glad you ended with gratitude – brought a little bit of Oprah Winfrey to our podcast. But in all seriousness, we’ll feel grateful to –

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: And here, everybody, is your car!

MALEY: Everyone gets a car! No, we feel really thankful for you for making time for us on Inside Politics. You’ve been our first celebrity guest, unless you count Shane Wright, and a lot of people don’t count Shane Wright as a celebrity. So we really thank you, and it’s nice of you to make time.

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, I’m very honoured to be asked. And I don’t think I really count as a celebrity either, so you’re still waiting for your first celebrity guest. I’m your first political guest, perhaps. How’s that? We’ll go with that.

MALEY: Okay, we’ll go with that.

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: All right. Thanks both of you.

MALEY: Thanks so much.

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Nice to talk.

CROWE: Thanks a lot.