Coaltion to spend $1 billion on the Great Barrier Reef

The Coalition Government has announced it would commit $1 billion to improving the health of the Great Barrier Reef if reelected.

On the surface, this sounds like an impressive sum of money. But it turns out to be a bit of a scam. The funding commitment stretches over ten years, which seems to have become a standard approach by both major parties to make funding commitments seem bigger than they are. As such, the commitment amounts to around $100 million per year. Recently a number of experts found that approximately $10 billion needs to be spent over the next ten years to maintain the reef’s health.

And it gets worse. The funding is not new money. It is money that already sits in the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. And the government plans to leave the money there, in an organisation that can only legally spend its resources on clean energy. As a result, we have a government committing to spend a paltry $100 million per year on clean energy initiatives that will have only secondary benefits to the reef.