Dear Prime Minister,

  

I am writing to you about the government’s proposed legislative reforms that will mandate that all environmental charities spend 25-50% of their funds on direct environmental remediation or lose their tax-free charity status. 

 

There are two aspects to environmental action: remediation and prevention.  While remediation is important, prevention is more so, because if we are able to prevent environmental damage happening in the first place remediation will be unnecessary – remediation indicates that damage has already occurred.  Preventing environmental damage is always preferable to repairing it.

 

Remediation is about work on the ground, while prevention is about instigating policy – two very different fields of operation.  Prevention is achieved through policy change and social change; it’s is about implementing ideas rather than physical actions on the ground.

 

There are many hands-on organisations, such as Landcare, and bush care organisations, that perform the function of remediation, and there are many activist organisations such as the Climate Council, Greenpeace, GetUp, Lock the Gate, the World Wildlife Fund, and the Australian Conservation Foundation that influence policy and society to protect the environment.  The processes of hands-on remediation, and prevention through influencing policy, are very different; therefore the organisations that perform them are very different, and it may be inappropriate for one organisation to perform both functions.  (Although, organisations that perform hands-on remediation should also be influencing policy, to maximize the effect of their efforts.)

 

It's important for activist organisations to be fully focused on the powerful and important process of influencing policy and society, and to not have their resources misdirected into activities that are not part of their purpose.  Activist organisations are neither set up nor equipped for remediation, and they leave it to the hands-on organisations that are. 

 

Australians don't financially support any of these organisations lightly – everyone could find another use for the money that they donate.  If activist organisations weren't important to Australians, and if Australians didn’t believe that what activist organisations do is necessary and important, then they wouldn’t make the donations that finance them, and activist organisation wouldn't exist.  The fact that activist organisations are successfully financed by personal donations indicates that Australians want the issues that these organisations are focused on resolved: these activist organisations represent the interests of Australians. 

 

 If Australians were more interested in the remediation outcomes that the government wants to impose on activist organisations then they would instead make their donations to the hands-on organisations that are already focussed on remediation.  Australians are voting with their donations for the outcomes that they want achieved.

 

For these reasons, it's inappropriate for the government to place conditions on activist organisations that will limit their ability to achieve the outcomes that Australians want.