Why I am perfectly happy to pay $500 million so a multinational mining conglomerate can get a faster 'yes'

I was halfway through my kingfish crudo at a rather quiet, understated little spot in Double Bay on Tuesday when the man across the table from me broke down in tears.

His name is Julian, and he is the managing director of a mid-tier resources conglomerate that pulls things out of the ground in Western Australia and puts them onto boats bound for places we try not to think about. Julian is a strong man. He has weathered commodity super-cycles, union disputes, and the tragic loss of his third superyacht in a docking incident in Monaco. But as he dabbed his eyes with a linen napkin, he confessed the one thing that was finally breaking his spirit: the sheer, agonizing boredom of waiting for environmental approvals.

"Do you have any idea what it’s like?" he wept, adjusting his Rolex. "We find a pristine, untouched stretch of wilderness. We draw up the plans to turn it into a hole the size of Belgium. And then, the government makes us wait two whole years while some graduate with a clipboard counts the mating calls of a local frog. The uncertainty is killing me, mate."

I reached across the table and placed a comforting hand over his. I didn't know what to say. The cruelty of our federal bureaucracy had finally shown its human face.

Which is why, when Treasurer Jim Chalmers announced in his fifth federal budget that the government will spend $500 million to fast-track environmental approvals for mining, energy, and housing projects, I nearly dropped my morning espresso in sheer, unadulterated relief. Finally, a government that understands the true meaning of productivity.

For too long, the national conversation has been dominated by a vocal minority of inner-city complainers who believe that the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC) is there to protect the environment. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of economics. The environment is simply a placeholder, a blank canvas waiting patiently for a multinational corporation to realize its highest and best use as a high-yield extraction site or a poorly insulated luxury housing estate.

What Jim Chalmers understands, and what the chattering classes consistently fail to grasp, is that time is money. And right now, we are wasting precious time pretending we aren't going to eventually let Julian dig his hole.

Let us examine the genius of this $500 million budget measure. The Treasurer has correctly identified that the greatest barrier to Australia's prosperity is "red tape." Red tape is a highly technical economic term that refers to any piece of legislation that prevents a billionaire from doing exactly what they want, exactly when they want to do it.

By injecting half a billion dollars of taxpayer money directly into the bureaucratic pipeline, we are effectively funding the streamlining of our own natural destruction. Some shortsighted critics have argued that $500 million is a lot of public money to spend on helping private companies bypass environmental scrutiny. They say this money could be spent on public housing, or healthcare, or schools.

But what good is a school if the children inside it cannot look out the window and marvel at the raw, untethered efficiency of a fully deregulated mining sector?

Chalmers has pitched this as a "win-win for our economy and our precious natural environment." I could not agree more. If you truly love nature, you must recognize that the most compassionate thing we can do for our flora and fauna is to give them certainty.

Exactly. Anticipation is always worse than the event itself. By speeding up the approvals process, we are ripping off the ecological band-aid. We are telling the endangered species of this country: your eviction will be processed with the utmost bureaucratic efficiency. You will not be kept waiting. This is the kind of respect that nature deserves.

The Treasurer was very careful to phrase this funding as a way to give project proponents a "faster yes or a faster no." This is a beautiful piece of political rhetoric. We all know what happens when you spend half a billion dollars to optimize a government approvals pipeline. You do not spend $500 million to build a machine that says "no" with greater velocity. "No" is cheap. "No" is free. You spend $500 million to grease the wheels of "yes."

And we desperately need that "yes." The budget measure specifically targets housing, energy, and mining. Let us look at housing. We are currently facing a housing crisis of unprecedented proportions, largely because property developers are occasionally asked to prove they aren't building residential towers on top of active sinkholes or protected wetlands.

I know a developer in Sydney—let's call him Marcus—who spent eighteen months fighting the local council because his proposed luxury apartment complex would allegedly "cast a permanent shadow over a public park" and "destroy a crucial wildlife corridor." The sheer arrogance of the public park to demand sunlight when Marcus was offering a 12-story monument to off-the-plan foreign investment!

Under the new, streamlined $500 million EPBC process, Marcus won't have to suffer. The government will deploy a highly funded, heavily caffeinated task force of approval officers whose sole KPI is to stamp his paperwork before the ink is even dry. The wildlife corridor will be paved, the apartments will be built, and Marcus will finally be able to upgrade his wife's Range Rover. This is what Chalmers means by a "productivity push."

We must discard the antiquated notion that environmental protection requires time, thought, or caution. We are a modern, dynamic economy. If we are going to hollow out our continent and sell it overseas, we should at least have the dignity to do it at breakneck speed.

I, for one, am immensely proud to be a taxpayer in a country that recognizes the suffering of the mining executive. When I pay my taxes this year, I will rest easy knowing that a fraction of my income is going toward a dedicated government fast-lane, ensuring that when Julian wants to obliterate a coral reef or flatten a sacred site, he won't have to miss his dinner reservations to do it.

Jim Chalmers has shown immense courage in standing up to the environment and telling it to hurry up and die. It is a bold, visionary step for Australia. And frankly, it is the least we can do.