Environmental Politics and Policy in Queensland Under Labor, 1998–2012

Abstract

Environmental issues have been politically salient in Queensland throughout recent decades of Labor dominance. While in general Labor has benefited politically from being regarded as the ‘greener’ of the major parties, state Labor governments have also sometimes found environmental policy difficult to deal with. This is partly a reflection of the political passions that environmental and resource use conflicts can generate and is partly due to the pressures on environmental assets from population and economic growth in Queensland; primarily, however, it reflects the difficulty of reconciling environmental and sustainability policy goals with the historically dominant model of development in Queensland.