Progress toward outcome 1: protecting the environment

Climate change

• At the inaugural meeting in Sydney in January 2006 the six founding members of the Asia–Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate—Australia, China, India, Japan, the Republic of Korea and the United States—agreed on a new model for international climate change and energy collaboration to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
• Australia’s National Greenhouse Accounts show that Australia is on track to meet its internationally agreed target of 108 per cent of 1990 greenhouse gas emissions despite strong growth in energy consumption.

Land and inland waters

• Following Natural Heritage Trust funding, environmental flows to the River Murray system allowed Nankeen night herons to breed in the Barmah Forest for the first time in 40 years, and silver perch to successfully spawn. Vegetation communities, including river red gums, also responded well to the additional water. The department is helping to fund infrastructure to deliver water for wetlands and floodplains in Victoria and South Australia.
• Investments under the National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality and the Natural Heritage Trust are now driven by single regional plans managed by the 56 established regional bodies. The plans identify resource management and sustainable agriculture priorities in each region, covering close to the whole continent.
• A total of 1 750 community groups will share in over $55 million to undertake water saving projects under the Community Water Grants, part of the $2 billion Australian Government Water Fund. The projects are expected to save 18.5 billion litres of water annually across Australia.

Coasts and oceans

• The regional marine planning process was given a statutory base under section 176 of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999.
• The first integrated network of marine parks in Australia’s south-east was agreed when 13 new marine protected areas were announced for the south-east Marine Region. The network covers a total of 226 000 square kilometres. It will conserve representative marine ecosystems and biodiversity. Australia now has about one-third of the world’s marine protected areas, and is a world leader in marine environment conservation.

Heritage

• The Minister for the Environment and Heritage, Senator the Hon. Ian Campbell, agreed to new strategic directions for heritage, with three elements—enhancing the telling of stories about heritage, helping Australia’s heritage become more sustainable and amending the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 to focus more on outcomes and less on details of process.
• Twenty-one places were added to the National Heritage List. As at 30 June 2006, the list contained 31 places. Three places were added to the Commonwealth Heritage List, bringing the total to 339 places. The Australian Government nominated the Sydney Opera House to be inscribed on the World Heritage List.

Human settlements

• The minister announced the first four research hubs to receive funding under the $100 million Commonwealth Environment Research Facilities programme.
• The department registered 4 000 products under the new labelling scheme for water efficient products (Water Efficiency Labelling and Standards Scheme). The scheme will enable consumers to choose the most water efficient appliances and will encourage innovation by industry, leading to less wastage of precious water supplies.
• The department’s fuel quality sampling capability was increased enabling a record number of samples to be tested. Increased fuel sampling will lead to cleaner fuels and lower pollution emissions.
• Since the implementation of the Product Stewardship for Oil Programme four years ago, used oil recycling in Australia has increased by about 40 per cent. These efforts significantly reduce the amount of oil being dumped and polluting the environment.
• Plastic bag consumption in Australia has fallen by 34.2 per cent or over two billion bags over the last three years. This means fewer plastic bags are entering the waste stream and polluting the environment.
• The department continued to monitor the environmental impact of uranium mining in the Alligator River Region. No environmental impact as a result of mining has been detected in Kakadu National Park.

Progress toward outcome 2: advancing Australia’s Antarctic interests

• At the 58th annual International Whaling Commission meeting, Australia helped to defeat pro-whaling countries’ proposals to remove consideration of small cetaceans from the agenda, to introduce a mechanism for secret ballots, to increase commercial coastal whaling, and to abolish the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary.
• At the same meeting the Australian delegation successfully defended Australia’s resolution, put at last year’s meeting, to condemn so-called ‘scientific whaling’. Australia’s defence was supported by the Australian Antarctic Division’s scientific contributions to developing non-lethal whale research methods.

Managing the department

• A new comprehensive three-year collective agreement was negotiated with staff and unions, and new comprehensive Australian Workplace Agreements were developed for non-senior executive service staff. Both came into effect in August 2006.
• The department completed assessments of the Bureau of Meteorology, National Environment Protection Council Service Corporation, and the Director of National Parks against recommendations of the government’s Review of Corporate Governance of Statutory Authorities and Office Holders (the Uhrig Report). The governance arrangements for all of these entities were found to be generally consistent with the Uhrig Report.
• The department undertook a rigorous review of its formal outputs structure, reducing the number of outputs from 18 to seven to reflect the department’s services and broad environment management themes. The current outputs are climate change, land and inland water, coasts and oceans, heritage, human settlements, Antarctic policy and Antarctic science. The department reprioritised 2006–07 funding to ensure priority functions are properly resourced and to allow the department to respond to emerging issues.
• The department satisfactorily resolved all major findings arising from the 2004–05 and 2005–06 audits of financial statements by the Australian National Audit Office.