A Very Sustainable Kind of Silence.

Every portfolio has a founding purpose, the thing it exists to do before it starts existing merely to be seen doing it. The Environment portfolio's founding purpose is not complicated. It is to notice when something is being destroyed, and to say so before the destroying is finished. Andrew Powell has held the title of Queensland's Minister for the Environment and Tourism since late 2024, and it is worth asking, calmly, what he has done with it.

The honest answer contains one entry. Queensland's second Conserved Area, 146 hectares of wetland at McCoys Creek on the Gold Coast, home to the tusked frog, the water mouse and the koala, secured jointly with the federal government and announced with the kind of pride that suggests someone in the department genuinely likes frogs. It is a real thing, done properly, and it deserves to be said plainly rather than buried under sarcasm. Australia's first council-managed Conserved Area is not nothing.

It is also, on the available evidence, close to everything. Ask what the minister has said about the two decisions that actually matter to the people who share his own electorate, and the record goes quiet in a very particular way.

Coochin Creek sits inside the seat of Glass House, which Powell represents, on the fringe of the Ramsar-listed Pumicestone Passage. Over the past year the Deputy Premier, Jarrod Bleijie, used his call-in powers, which remove the local council from the decision and remove any right of appeal, to approve first a 150-site tourist park there and then an adjoining 35,000 a day festival and exhibition site next door. Both went ahead against the explicit advice of the State Assessment and Referral Agency, which had found no overriding public need for either and had flagged the risk to the wetland in terms that were not particularly ambiguous. When a local outlet asked the Environment Minister's office for a view on any of this, in May this year, the reply was that the matter fell to the Deputy Premier. When the same outlet tried Powell's own electorate office, a few days later, the answer was the same, almost word for word. Two offices, one government, and not a single sentence on the wetland itself.

A few kilometres up the same catchment sits Halls Creek, thirty years a byword among Sunshine Coast councils for the one patch of ground that was never, under any circumstances, going to be developed. It is now being developed. Stockland calls it Aura South, 1,231 hectares earmarked for up to twelve thousand homes, and the state government has this year declared it a Priority Development Area, which is the polite administrative phrase for taking the decision away from the council that spent three decades saying no. Sunshine Coast Council's response was to note that it would be nice to have a seat at the table for the reshaping of its own region. On this one, the record shows no comment from the Environment Minister at all. Not a defence of the decision, not a concern about it. Simply nothing, which is its own kind of answer.

None of this occurs in a vacuum. Australia carries the worst mammal extinction record on the planet, a fact that governments of every stripe have learned to acknowledge in exactly the tone Powell used when declining to sign Queensland up to federal environment targets late last year, citing the cost to household budgets rather than the cost to habitat. It is a reasonable position for a minister worried about power bills. It becomes a more interesting position when the habitat in question is a Ramsar wetland fifteen minutes from his own electorate office, and the minister's contribution to the conversation is to forward the inquiry elsewhere.

Australia has spent a long time cultivating a certain reputation abroad, the nature documentary version of itself, all reef and rainforest and a koala on the tourism board's letterhead. The reality is that it holds the world's worst mammal extinction record of any country on the planet, and Southeast Queensland is currently offering a fairly precise scale model of how that happens. Not through a single dramatic act of vandalism, but through a sequence of individually defensible paperwork decisions, each one passing through an office whose job description suggests it would object. On the two occasions examined here, it didn't.

The tell is in the language. When Bleijie approved the Coochin Creek tourist park beside a Ramsar wetland, against his own agency's advice, he described it as unlocking new ecotourism opportunity. Aura South, twelve thousand rooftops on ground three councils in a row had ruled off limits, is marketed by its developer as one of the most sustainable communities in the country. A theme park adjacent to protected wetland gets called eco. A greenfield subdivision on a floodplain gets called sustainable. And on the two occasions this year when someone asked Queensland's Minister for the Environment what he made of any of it, his office's answer, both times, was to pass the question to somebody else.