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Music: “Insurrection”
Written by Pierre Chrétien
Performed by the Soul Jazz Orchestra
Courtesy of Do Right Music Inc.
23 September 2026
Glenn
Welcome to another episode of Why Can’t They Just, a podcast about politics, policy and getting stuff done. I’m Glenn Davidson and I’m a member of the Labor Party.
Janaline
I’m Janaline Oh, I’m also a member of the Labor Party. I’m a former diplomat and a climate, environment and anti-racism activist.
Luke
I’m Luke Robertson, a member of the Labor Party, as well as a conservation biology and environmental policy student.
Janaline
Before we start, I‘d like to acknowledge that we are all recording this on the unceded lands of First Nations people in Australia, recognising that sovereignty was never ceded, we pay our respects to their Elders, past and present, and we extend those respects to any First Nations listeners that we have today.
Glenn
Today we’re talking about a policy designed to address Australia’s contribution to what is an existential global challenge. Climate change is no longer a future risk, but a present global reality. The world has warmed by roughly 1.3 to 1.4 degrees Celsius above pre industrial levels, with rising temperatures contributing to more frequent and intense heat waves, wildfires, floods, droughts and other extreme weather events across many regions, including Australia. News reports are full of catastrophic and often unprecedented natural disasters and the pace of change is increasing. Time is not on our side.
And while the clean energy transition is accelerating with record growth in renewable energy and electrification in many economies, global greenhouse gas emissions remain high and are not falling fast enough to align with the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Governments, businesses and investors increasingly recognise that climate change is both an environmental and an economic challenge, and are changing their policy settings and behaviours accordingly. Yet while progress on decarbonisation is happening, the pace of emissions reduction is still insufficient to avoid increasingly severe climate impacts, which are happening sooner than predicted or expected. That brings us back to the main policy the Australian government has to reduce industrial greenhouse emissions from Australia’s largest industrial facilities.
Janaline, the safeguard mechanism was introduced by the Turnbull government in 2016 and modified by the Albanese government in 2023. But what is it, how does it work, and is it doing the job that it needs to do?
Janaline
Yeah, those are really big questions, Glenn. Ok, I’m going to try and tell a story about how policy gets made and unmade. So let’s start with the history.
The Rudd-Gillard-Rudd Labour governments between 2007 and 2013 introduced a price on carbon as one of their key legacy pieces. Tony Abbott, who was the then Liberal leader of the opposition, ran a whole election campaign against that price on carbon; won a very significant majority. One of the first things he did was to repeal that price on carbon.
Now the idea behind the price on carbon was that polluters would pay for their emissions and that would create an incentive for them to invest in less polluting technology and processes. Tony Abbott instead introduced a thing called the Emissions Reduction Fund, which kind of flipped that on its head. So instead of polluters paying to pollute, the government would pay polluters to stop polluting. Under this process, large emitters would have to report their emissions. They would be given notional baselines, and those baselines were set very, very high. They were essentially set with a view to never being reached.
When the Albanese government won election in 2022, essentially for political reasons, it rejected reintroducing the economy-wide price on carbon. It acknowledged that it had lost elections, some quite dramatically, on that policy and so it had no mandate.
So instead what it tried to do was to address climate change through various sector policies. So they invested very heavily in the electricity transition, which has been pretty successful: more than half of Australia’s electricity is now generated by renewables; this year, even in winter.
On the industrial side, it tried to adapt the Coalition’s policy, to re-flip it to become something a bit like a carbon price. Some of the features of the safeguard mechanism are: each facility has a baseline that declines over time. So each facility has to ensure each year it is emitting 5 per cent less than it was the year before.
It establishes a system where if a facility over performs on its baseline, in other words, it reduces emissions by more than it had to. It’s allowed to generate what are called safeguard mechanism credits, and it’s allowed to sell those to other facilities to help them meet their obligations. If a facility underperforms, then it has to buy credits, and it can either buy these safeguard mechanism credits or it can buy Australian Carbon Credit Units, or ACCUs, which are mostly generated from land carbon projects, so: soil carbon; forest projects; other land conservation projects.
One of the important things about having the ACUU system is to ensure that it’s very high integrity. And one of the things that the Albanese government did when it first came in, in 2022, was to commission a review into the system that made a number of recommendations, closed down a number of old methods for calculating ACCUs as not sufficiently high integrity. That is obviously important, because if you have low integrity ACCUs, then people are just buying cheap junk and emissions aren’t going down.
So the safeguard mechanism covers only the very largest industrial emitters in Australia. So facilities that emit more than 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year. The government looked at setting lower thresholds, and what it concluded was that if you lower the threshold, you capture a lot more companies and a lot more much smaller companies, which would place quite a significant administrative burden on those companies. And the emissions that would be saved would not be very significant. So these really, really big emitters really do account for a very, very large proportion of Australia’s emissions. They’re big enough to handle the administrative costs. So the government has targeted those through the safeguard mechanism.
Glenn
All right, so that sounds like quite a complex mechanism that’s had to be put in place really on the back of the opposition, the Abbott opposition and then the Abbott government ran to the whole idea of a price on carbon. So do we end up with a system now that is more complicated than it needs to be, and is it as effective as a carbon price would have been, or are we still behind the game, as it were?
Janaline
So I think the answer to that is yes, it is more complicated than it should be, and no, it is not as effective as a price on carbon.
Glenn
We are now three years down the track and operating in what is clearly a rapidly deteriorating global climate, so it is timely that the Government review the safeguard mechanism policy to assess whether it is still fit for purpose. The central question is whether this policy is changing corporate decisions and behaviours sufficiently to actually deliver emissions reductions at the pace required. Corporate planning and decisions need to determine whether they go for on site emissions reductions or whether they rely on the use of offsets.
Now, corporations will generally comply with government legislation and policy frameworks, but they do need certainty about what they are, so as to have confidence in their investment decisions. Similarly, any adjustment to the policy framework needs to maintain Australia’s reputation as a stable investment environment and its international competitiveness. And underlying all of this is ensuring that our industrial emissions fall quickly enough to align with national climate targets and growing international expectations for decarbonisation.
Janaline, is it time to adjust the policy settings? And if so, how do we do that in a way that addresses those complex and competing imperatives I just mentioned?
Janaline
The government says it is working, but I think there is a general sense that it’s not working as well as perhaps it needs to in order to meet the government’s targets. Initial legislation said there had to be a review in 2027, which of course is next year and the government has just launched a consultation on it.
So definitely it is time to review and not just because of the legislated requirement. The government says it is working: the so-called headroom has gone. So now the baselines are not set at an overly generous level. The safeguard mechanism has shown a reduction in emissions, but there also has been a very strong reliance on the surrender of credits to achieve that reduction. So about 59 per cent of the reduction, according to the Clean Energy Regulator, has been achieved through the surrender of credits rather than on site abatement.
So one of the questions in the government’s consultation paper is how to promote on site abatement. To be fair to the companies in the mechanism, there is a time lag for investment. One of the purposes of the safeguard mechanism was really to set an investment signal so that companies, when they were reviewing the next phase of investments, would opt for lower carbon alternatives to ensure that they reduce their emissions according to their safeguard obligations. You wouldn’t necessarily expect all of that to show up within three years.
But there is also a very strong argument to look at whether there are other policies that are potentially conflicting with the objectives of the safeguard mechanism, and also how to encourage facilities that have available options for low carbon technology to actually invest in those technologies.
One of the issues that I have with the safeguard mechanism as it is at the moment is that the price of ACCUs is way too low. The current price of ACCUs is around 38-39 Australian dollars, compared to, for example, the EU price on carbon, which is around the equivalent of about 135 to 140 dollars.
A number of proposals have been put forward in the context of the review. One is to have a blanket increase in the baseline decline rate. So instead of facilities having to reduce their emissions by about 5% per year, they probably need to be reducing their emissions by about 7% per year in order to meet the upper end of the government’s 2035 emissions reduction target for the whole economy.
Another proposal has been capping ACCUs, and another proposal has been just to put in place a kind of mitigation hierarchy, where companies have to demonstrate that they have taken all possible on site abatement measures before they can get access to credits.
I have some issues with all of those.
The issue with increasing the baseline is there are basically 4 sectors in the safeguard mechanism: there’s mining and fossil fuels; there’s transport; there’s manufacturing; and there’s landfill. Now landfill is a very special case. It is dealt with as a separate category under the safeguard mechanism. And I’m not really going to talk about it too much now because it is quite a different sort of business model.
Of the other 3 sectors, mining and fossil fuels have very high profit margins, particularly since the war in Ukraine and the current war in the Middle East. They have readily available technology to electrify mining trucks, to electrify a lot of their machinery. So they have money and they have technology.
Transport have lower margins: heavy transport is a bit tricky in terms of technology; air transport is tricky in terms of technology. That government is investing a lot in what they call low carbon liquid fuels, but that’s probably going to take a little while to come on stream. Light and medium commercial vehicles have electrification options for both road and rail. I mean, we’ve seen the number of electric vehicles on the roads in Australia, particularly this year since the petrol price started going through the roof.
Manufacturing has very low margins, and a much more difficult path in terms of available technology at the moment. Within the safeguard mechanism, the main sectors are aluminium, steel and cement. Abatement for them is a lot more difficult. So a blanket increase in the decline rate from about 5 to about 7% would effectively end, I think, in a massive transfer from the manufacturing sector to the mining and fossil fuel sector, because the mining and fossil fuel sector is in quite a good position to generate credits and then sell them to manufacturing who don’t have as many options.
So there is an equity question. There’s also a policy question, as in do we actually want heavy manufacturing in Australia? And I think the government has shown pretty comprehensively through a Future Made in Australia, through the bailouts of steel firms and aluminium companies, that they do want heavy manufacturing in Australia. So potentially imposing significantly higher costs through the safeguard mechanism is not the best approach, given that they have limited on site abatement opportunities.
The idea of capping availability of credits and a mitigation hierarchy kind of goes against the whole idea of the carbon price, because the idea is to set the price so that the market can deliver the most cost effective abatement possible. So at lowest cost and highest efficiency: that is what the price is supposed to do.
Forcing a huge amount of reporting justifying why they need to buy credits, not only means a lot more administrative cost to the companies, it will also mean a lot more administrative cost to the government because you’re going to have to have government officials marking that homework. So I kind of question why you would want to put in place all of this administrative cost to do something that effectively the price is meant to do.
Capping the availability of credits would do a couple of things. One is it would be a really big market intervention and it could well end up with a significant transfer from manufacturing to mining. The other thing is one of the features of the initial safeguard mechanism legislation, as it was brought in, in 2023, was to make new fossil fuel projects come in at net zero emissions. If you’re going to do that, then you need to ensure that they have credits available because otherwise you’re basically saying you cannot have a project. Now, I know that there are a lot of people in this country who would like to see the end of new fossil fuel projects, but this seems to be not a very reasonable way of implementing that policy. If you were going to implement that policy, you should just implement that policy and not try to do it by the back door. On the other hand, if you exempt new fossil fuel projects from an ACCU cap because they’re having to come in at net zero, then that sends a pretty weird message to the rest of the safeguard mechanism that these big polluting fossil fuel companies should be exempt from a market distorting cap.
So I don’t think it would be effective. It seems to me to be a very blunt instrument that probably won’t achieve what it needs to achieve.
Glenn
Right. That really does highlight just what a complex policy area this is. And we are effectively still paying the price for some bad decisions, bad policy making, bad politics over a decade and a half ago with somebody who’s no longer in politics and a government that’s no longer in place.
And it does make it a very difficult policy area to manage in terms of achieving the overall outcome of reducing emissions, doing it in a way that does not unfairly disadvantage industry or result in inequitable transfers of wealth, and helps us meet our global responsibilities. And almost the insanity of it is apparent when you look at how other countries are able to set prices and have a more realistic framework to operate in.
I think as Malcolm Turnbull used to say quite frequently, this is an issue of economics and physics, not of ideology. And yet we are still paying the price for a distorted ideology, for cheap political gain.
But on that point, Luke, we haven’t heard from you for a while. Have you got something you would like to say about all of this?
Luke
Yeah. I have a a few questions as to why and why not make certain changes given that your contention, Janaline, is with the ACCU price being raised to a point where manufacturing facilities are not able to survive that price because they can’t reasonably decarbonize, because either the technology exists or it’s too expensive for them. And you say that the resource and mining sector will be able to just eat up that extra cost with that problem.
My understanding is you would offset that cost with the changes made to the diesel fuel tax credit scheme - which for our listeners not in the know, that is a scheme in which businesses can claim 53.7 cents per litre of diesel back for fuel used in machinery, plant equipment and heavy vehicles - and capping that at $50 million, and redirecting those funds that would be saved to a decarbonization fund to help the manufacturing sector.
So with that context in mind, would you be opposed to doing something like reducing the baseline rate and then doing that in tandem with something which would support the manufacturing sector?
Janaline
So that would be one approach. It is pretty tricky, I have to say, to reopen the baseline negotiations. In 2022-2023 when the safeguard mechanism was being proposed, the regulator engaged in some very detailed negotiations with each of the 200-odd facilities that were covered to negotiate those baselines. You would also have to change legislation. For practical reasons. I would be inclined, and I’m speaking here again as a former Canberra-based bureaucrat, to look at other options that weren’t so administratively complex.
Thanks for mentioning, though, the diesel fuel tax credit. This is not a safeguard mechanism measure. It’s not something that can be done in this review. It is a taxation measure and therefore would have to be done in the budget. But there is a proposal out there to cap the diesel fuel tax credit at 50 million, which would only affect, I think about 18 companies now, which are the biggest diesel users in the country. All but two of them are mining companies; two of them are very large resource freight companies.
So what the diesel fuel tax credit is doing is pushing out the return on investment for electrifying, say, mine trucks from about five years to about 9 years. And so it is actually cheaper for these really big mining companies to keep buying diesel, to get the diesel fuel tax credit and to use a small part of that refund to buy Australian Carbon Credit Units to make their safeguard obligations. Now to me this looks very perverse because essentially you’ve got one bit of government policy that is working against another bit of government policy.
Capping the diesel fuel tax credit would do a couple of things. So firstly, it would remove a disincentive to these companies to invest in electrification and therefore on site abatement, and it would also free up quite a lot of diesel for the rest of the market, which is not a small thing in a fuel crisis.
Glenn
Now, like almost everything to do with climate change in Australia, the safeguard mechanism remains contentious because it sits at the intersection of climate policy, economic competitiveness and the country’s role as a major exporter of resources and energy.
Some argue that stronger emissions limits are essential if Australia is to meet its climate commitments and remain competitive in a world that is increasingly demanding low carbon products. Others claim that imposing additional burdens on business will increase costs, deter investment and shift production overseas without reducing global emissions.
The role of carbon offsets is also contested. Some view them as a cost effective flexibility mechanism, while others believe they allow companies to delay genuine emissions reductions.
As a result, the debate is not simply about climate change, but about how Australia balances environmental responsibility, economic growth, regional employment and industrial competitiveness in the transition to a net zero economy. In terms of the safeguard mechanism, it seems the central question comes down to whether it should primarily drive rapid on site industrial decarbonisation or should it continue to provide substantial flexibility through carbon markets and offsets.
Janaline, in this highly contested policy area, there are inevitably different views on the appropriateness and effectiveness of various approaches. What are some of the alternate approaches and how can we know which one is the best given we simply do not have the time to play an endless game of trial and error in this policy space?
Janaline
The federal opposition, the Liberal and National parties, have said that that would scrap the safeguard mechanism if they come to power. One Nation has made a similar promise.
So part of me agrees that actually scrapping the safeguard mechanism and replacing it with that economy-wide price on carbon has a lot of merit.
The Superpower Institute has a proposal for what they call a polluter pays levy, which would put, effectively, a tax on the production and import of fossil fuels into Australia. So it’s tackling the problem at the fossil fuel production and import stage. I think it would affect about 30 companies, so it would be quite easy to administer and it would generate a lot of revenue. Their modelling shows it would lead to a very significant reduction in emissions at a much faster pace, and it would also generate a lot of revenue for the government that could be used to compensate people for higher prices;which could be used to fund a whole lot of government services. So I’m very attracted to that model.
There are some quite significant downsides though. First is the tragic state of our politics, which means that it would be very, very difficult for any political party to sell this, and clearly for that reason literally no political party in Australia is currently backing this in.
It also doesn’t deal with land carbon. One of the problems in Australia is that our land carbon sector is firstly quite a big emitter, but secondly a very, very big carbon sink. This is actually quite important because the UN is already saying that we are on track to exceed the target of 1.5 degrees above pre industrial levels for global temperatures.
If we overshoot that target, we need a lot of carbon drawdown to bring us back, and we need to have a lot of investment therefore in carbon sinks. Right now, the best available technology to draw carbon out of the atmosphere is natural vegetation. And the best mechanism that we have in Australia to finance that is the ACCU system. And it works because it’s compulsory and so companies have to buy these ACCUs and so there is a guaranteed income stream.
So it’s a second-best option. But I would say let’s do the policy we can implement and make it as effective as possible, rather than try to get the ideal policy that is highly likely to end up in a political dead end. I’m really sorry: that is kind of the opposite of idealism. It sounds probably a bit lame, but I do feel that we need to live in the real world.
One of the things that doctors say about exercise is that the best exercise programme is the one that you will do. And I would say at this stage, given the urgency of the situation, the best carbon reduction policy is the one that you can implement.
So one of the proposals that I’m putting forward that I think could have an impact within the current system, without requiring a huge amount of legislative or administrative change, is just to count methane according to its short term global warming potential rather than, as happens at the moment, accounting for it in terms of its long term global warming potential.
So what does this mean? The national greenhouse accounts, consistent with international practice, calculate the global warming effect of all gases according to their carbon dioxide equivalent. And the standard measure that they use is the global warming potential over 100 years. And the reason for that is because carbon dioxide is very, very long lasting. It hangs around in the atmosphere and it accumulates for centuries. That is the reason that we have this level of global warming now, because it has been accumulating since the 18th century.
Methane is a little bit different. So methane has a much higher global warming potential than carbon dioxide. But one of the features of methane is that it has a very, very high global warming potential in its first few years, and then it tends to dissipate. So the global warming potential of methane over 100 years is about 28. The global warming potential of methane calculated over 20 years, which is when methane is most potent in the atmosphere, is about 84, so 3 times as much.
So my proposal is: for the safeguard mechanism, because we are talking about a relatively short term project, we’re talking about the mechanism’s workings over the next 10 years, we should be acknowledging that methane has this much, much greater effect than we’re actually accounting for.
The government could just say if you have methane in your safeguard baseline, then if you exceed your baseline and you have to get credits, you need three times as many credits for the methane as you do for the carbon dioxide.
So for example, if you are a coal mining company and half of your baseline is methane, then let’s say you need to find 10,000 tonnes worth of credits. So 5000 of those are CO2: you will need 5000 credits. 5000 of those are methane. So you would need 15,000 credits for the methane. So instead of surrendering 10,000 credits, you would be surrendering 20,000 credits, acknowledging the fact that methane has a much, much higher short term warming potential.
Why is this useful? Because if companies that are emitting methane really focus first on reducing their methane emissions, that has a much bigger immediate impact on climate change.
The other benefit of this, in terms of that equity issue between the different sectors that are covered by the safeguard mechanism, the only facilities that have significant methane emissions are coal mining, gas production and gas processing.
Glenn
Yeah. So that’s quite a detailed explanation of that proposal and there’s a lot of maths in there. But really what it comes down to is a simple quantifiable phenomenon, really, that relates to one gas over another, and a way of reducing the emissions of that more damaging gas in the short term to achieve the outcomes that we need. But that’s obviously going to come head to head with ideology and political opportunism.
But before we get on to that, Luke, what’s your perspective on what Janaline’s just outlined?
Luke
Yeah, it’s a a good point. Given that the ACCU price is quite low. Given that the carbon price is not fixed, it is set by the market, could you give an idea of what all that extra demand would look like in changing the price on carbon?
Janaline
I am going to be honest here, I have not done any modelling on this, but I would assume that this would increase the demand for credits and therefore would increase the price. Now that would affect manufacturers, it would affect everybody who has to buy credits, and therefore I would hope would spur them to accelerate their on site decarbonisation.
But given that you’re focusing on methane, that increased cost would fall on the methane-emitting companies. So if this measure made the price of ACCUs rise by, say, 20%, manufacturers would have to pay that extra 20%. But a coal mine with 50% methane would actually be paying 100% more, and an underground coal mine which has - up to 90% of their baseline is methane - would be paying around 3 times as much as they are now. So it would raise the price for everybody, but the burden would be on coal and gas rather than on manufacturing.
Luke
Would you agree with an idea of making facilities consider their scope 3 emissions in the safeguard mechanism, and therefore would that not serve a similar purpose in targeting facilities that export carbon rather than the manufacturing facilities?
Janaline
So just for our listeners, let’s just explain what scope 3 emissions are. So scope 1 emissions are the emissions that a company produces directly by making their product. Scope 2 emissions are the emissions that come from the energy that a company uses to create that product, so the emissions that come from generating electricity. And scope 3 emissions are the emissions that are produced when that product is used.
Now obviously, if what you’re producing is, I don’t know, tinned fruit, your scope 3 emissions would be zero. If what you’re producing is liquefied natural gas, then your scope 3 emissions would be very considerable.
There have been a lot of calls for Australian fossil fuel exporters to account for their scope 3 emissions. The international accounting around this is quite tricky because, much as I hate those word salads about ‘countries are only responsible for the emissions generated on shore’, that is actually true. That is actually how the international system works.
They can also be quite hard to calculate. So if you have a lump of coal that is being burnt in a generating plant that is capturing its emissions and storing it, then those emissions are going to be a lot lower than if you have that lump of coal burned in a facility that doesn’t do anything to capture emissions.
That said, the government has introduced legislation to require companies to report what they call their climate related financial risk disclosures, and part of that is actually reporting on their estimated scope 3 emissions. So there are mechanisms in place for companies to do this.
I would have to say that if your goal is to stop the emissions from Australian fossil fuel exports, you would actually be better off trying to get our buyers to decarbonize.
Luke
Yeah, as in just addressing the demand side is very important because otherwise they won’t change anything if they’re not being convinced to change. And therefore they’ll just keep buying gas and keep buying coal.
Janaline
Yeah, and it’s also just more effective because, otherwise, what is their alternative? We’ll talk about the international climate discussions in another episode. But countries that are having trouble agreeing to a commitment to transition away from fossil fuels aren’t opposing those words because they hate the planet. They’re actually worried about how they’re going to deliver affordable and reliable energy to their people. So I think it is much more fruitful to actually show them a pathway through commitments to industrial decarbonisation for them.
I think that would be a much more effective way of reducing global emissions than trying to load up the safeguard mechanism with measures that are technically complex and that also have real policy issues, not to mention the political backlash. In my view, it would actually risk tanking the safeguard mechanism.
Glenn
Right. Well, on that note, I think we’ve given a very clear picture today of why government is hard. Here is a real challenging policy area that’s trying to deal with a global problem that is only getting worse and doing it in a way that operates within our somewhat quirky political system.
Now our time has come to an end, Janaline and Luke, but if we got some final comments to just wrap up this really rather complex and challenging discussion. We’ll start with you, Luke.
Luke
Yes, I’m a big fan of the ACCU scheme. I think it does some really important work, like savannah burning, which happens largely in Arnhem Land, where cool burns are done on savannah planes in order to prevent larger bushfires from occurring. Notwithstanding the fact that it also supports so many First Nations communities and economic empowerment, it is an objective way to reduce the amount of carbon which will be going into the atmosphere. That is the fundamental goal and it is happening.
And other important ideas like the improved native forest management method which was put forward by the NSW government, a method which incentivizes state governments to generate money from protecting forests and managing them, actively managing forests, rather than logging them.
I think that this methane proposal is really interesting. I hope it has the teeth to be able to drive up the price of ACCUs and hopefully encourage some more on site decarbonisation. Because, as cool as I think the ACCU market is, we can’t rely on it forever.
Glenn
And Janaline.
Janaline
Those are all really good points, Luke. ACCUs are really important to incentivize land carbon in Australia. Having said that, I mean absolutely we need to focus on on site decarbonisation and one of the ways of incentivizing on site decarbonisation is to make credits more expensive, so that in a relative sense it’s cheaper to invest in decarbonisation on site. Now while I dream of an economy-wide price on carbon, I think we also need to bear in mind the urgent need for good quality land carbon.
So I would say on the whole the safeguard mechanism is a useful tool. But like most of these policies, it’s not a silver bullet, and we do still need to look at policies across the economy to drive down emissions across the board.
Glenn
That was another episode of Why Can’t They Just? The theme music that we use for this podcast is a piece called Insurrection by Pierre Chrétien, performed by the Soul Jazz Orchestra, courtesy of Do Right Music Inc.
Janaline
You can also hear us on Canberra community radio, 2XX FM 98.3 on Tuesdays between 6 and 7, or via 2XXfm.org.au. If you like our work, consider supporting us on Patreon, via our website whycanttheyjust.com.au.
Glenn
I’m Glenn Davidson.
Luke
I’m Luke Robertson.
Janaline
I’m Janaline Oh, and this is Why Can’t They Just?

Janaline is a former diplomat and current climate, environment and anti-racism activist.
“As a longstanding Canberra-based bureaucrat, I believe in the power of policy to shape and improve lives. I am also acutely aware of the importance of having those policies understood by the people affected by them.
“I started Why Can’t They Just? as way of moving beyond slogans and into what policies really are and what they mean for real people.”

Luke is a student in conservation biology and environmental policy.
“I got interested in public policy and particularly environmental policy around 2020, seeing the damage that things like the ‘Wild Horse Heritage Bill’ did to Kosciuszko National Park, as well as budget cuts made to the national parks service that eventually worsened the Black Summer Bushfires.
“I joined the Policy for People and Why Can’t they Just team after seeing the hard fought passage of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act and the power of community organising for good. I am now hoping to help with community outreach in all areas of policy to make Australia the fairest and most equitable country that it can be.”

Glenn has a background in education, public service and community radio.
“After far too long being annoyed about the confected outrage, gaslighting, punching down and wilful distortion of facts in our national discourse, I jumped at the opportunity to join the team at Policy 4 People and Why Can’t They Just. I hope to contribute something positive to ordinary people like me understanding complex issues and exercising their vote in an informed way to build and sustain a community and nation that works for all of us.”