The federal budget is clear, nature is not a government priority

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.

The Biodiversity Council’s analysis of the budget papers found that just 0.06% of federal spending goes to on-ground biodiversity programs in 2026–27. That’s roughly one dollar in every $1,667 the government spends on the natural systems that underpin agriculture, tourism, water security…life. In a country with one of the worst extinction records in the world.

It gets worse from there. Funding for on-ground biodiversity programs is set to fall from $496 million this financial year to just $323 million by 2028–29. And it is being made while the government spends more than $215 million in 2026–27 alone to speed up development approvals that impact the environment – nicely reframed as ‘environmental approvals’. Kind of makes it sound like we’re approving the environment.

That is roughly half of everything being spent on actual biodiversity conservation, redirected not to protect nature but to make it faster and easier to sign off on projects that affect it.

The budget also allocates $153.5 million over four years to progress bilateral agreements through the reformed national nature laws aka the Environment Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act, that would hand environmental decision-making to state and territory governments, letting states greenlight mining, land clearing and energy projects under federal law, affecting critically endangered species, World Heritage areas and Ramsar wetlands.

Dr Kirsty Howey, Executive Director of the Environment Centre NT, has been clear about what that bilateral devolution of power means in practice. “This budget creates dangerous conditions for accelerating, rather than stopping, nature destruction,” she said. For good reason, communities have long opposed the handing of federal responsibility to state and territory governments that often show reckless disregard for nature. The NT Government can’t be trusted to protect world heritage places like Kakadu and Uluru.”

She is not alone. The Nature Conservation Council of NSW has called it a budget that makes it “easier to destroy, easier to pollute and easier to develop.” The Queensland Conservation Council has warned that the Great Barrier Reef and native forests deserve more than a “tick and flick” state approval process. Environment Victoria has pointed out that handing over federal EPBC Act powers will further entrench state failures to protect threatened forests and rivers.

This is not a partisan observation. It is a structural one. States and territories are often the key backers of the very projects they would be handed powers to assess. The conflict of interest is baked in, and this budget just funded it to the tune of $153.5 million.

The Australia Institute’s Leanne Minshull has done the broader accounting, and it is damning. Direct funding for environmental protection in this budget is just 0.3% of total budget expenses and then falls sharply across the forward estimates. Under the Rudd-Gillard governments, environment spending reached 1.1% of government expenses. Under this budget, it is less than a third of that. Which means every $100 of our tax dollars spent, only 30 cents goes toward protection for the environment.

The Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, the body responsible for enforcing Australia’s environmental laws, faces an 11% cut in departmental funding and a 21% reduction in administered spending. You cannot enforce laws without the resources to do it.

Meanwhile, the Biodiversity Council has separately found that the Australian Government provides $26 billion per year in financial support to activities that harm nature. Twenty-six billion dollars a year working against the systems this budget allocates $323 million, and falling, to protect.

Australia’s environmental laws are already failing. The EPBC Act has been criticised for years as chronically under-enforced and vulnerable to political pressure. This budget does not fix any of that. It reduces the resources available to enforce what already isn’t being enforced, and it accelerates approvals for what the law was theoretically meant to scrutinise.

The government will establish a new federal Environmental Protection Agency, which could be significant. But as the Biodiversity Council notes, investment in speeding up approvals has been “supercharged,” equivalent to half of all on-ground nature spending. A regulator without the resources or mandate to say no is not reform. It is branding.

Australia has more than 2,100 nationally threatened species. Its rate of mammal extinction is the highest in the world. The 2019–20 bushfires killed or displaced an estimated one to three billion native animals. These are not hypothetical future risks. They are the recent losses.

And this is the budget that follows them. The numbers, buried across page after page of portfolio budget statements most people will never read, have answered the question.

Nature isn’t a core Labor value.