Louise is an award-winning advocate with 20 years’ experience encompassing climate, energy, forest protection, and law reform in the not-for-profit sector, and federal politics before joining The Australia Institute.
In August 2024, Doctors for the Environment Australia (DEA) delivered their verdict at Parliament House: fossil fuels are a health hazard. And yet Australia, one of the world's largest fossil fuel exporters, continues to greenlight new coal and gas projects while its own medical professionals sound the alarm.
The Safeguard Mechanism was designed to hold Australia's 200-plus largest industrial polluters to account. But as Australia Institute analysis demonstrates, instead of driving genuine emissions reductions, the Mechanism has become something closer to a very lucrative permission slip for fossil fuels to keep polluting and expanding.
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Premier Roger Cook wants Western Australians to believe the state is facing a looming gas crisis so severe that environmental protections, emissions targets, and community opposition must all give way to the urgent national interest of drilling more gas – and exporting it.
There is a bad habit in Australian politics: profits are privatised, risks are socialised, and taxpayers are left holding the bill. Tasmania's native forest logging sector has been a repeat offender and appears to refuse to change course.
There's a tell when a politician has been captured by an industry lobby. The language shifts. Well, the Albanese Government is repeating Big Gas talking points word for word. Except Australians aren't buying it.
Budgets are not communications exercises. They are statements of priorities, the most literal answer a government can give to the question: what do we value? Ask that of the 2026–27 federal budget, and the answer, for nature, for Australia's irreplaceable native species, for the ecosystems that took millions of years to evolve on this continent and exist nowhere else on Earth, is clear. Nature is not a priority.
Coming back from Santa Marta, where nations were planning a fossil fuel phase-out, to the Australia of new gas permits and Japan’s gas-fired diplomatic arm-twisting, is like stepping backward through the looking glass.
Here is a truth that those in power have never quite figured out how to deal with: change doesn't start at the top. It starts at the fringes. It starts with people who have the least and stand to lose the most. And eventually, it ends up in the halls of power.
Delegates from more than 50 countries arrived in Santa Marta already primed by disruption: higher prices, tighter supply chains and renewed volatility. Many arrived with scaled-back delegations, as the same fossil fuel-driven conflicts dominating the agenda constrained travel, strained government bandwidth, and diverted political attention at home. The result has been a notable hardening of tone and urgency. Fossil fuels are being recast not just as the cause of climate change, but as a systemic risk to economic and political stability.
At the First Conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels in Santa Marta, co-hosted by Colombia and the Netherlands, conversations are circling back to first principles — what the science says, and what it would mean to act accordingly.
