Environmental Policy Failure: The Australian Story provides Australia's environment is under unprecedented stress, which is now all too real in terms of problems such as rising sea levels, catastrophic bush fires, drought and dying river systems. This book argues that this stress is more than a failure of environmental management, and indeed more even than a failure of political will, although that has been critical. It is a failure of policy on many fronts rooted in the failure of development practices to integrate ecological sensitivities and concerns. What is more, this failure is long standing, and remains steeped in two hundred years of Eurocentric valuing of nature in economic terms rather than as ecological capital.

This book reviews some of Australia's most critically challenging environmental issues of our time and assesses the capacity of contemporary policies to solve them. It reveals, case by case, the nature of environmental policy failure, as a characteristic failure for example of both Labor and conservative governments across many generations. It is relatively clear then why Australia's energy emissions have been burgeoning and why there has been no industrial restructuring over the last two decades to reverse this now dire trend.