Australians are used to hearing that the laws and schemes established to protect our natural environment are dismally failing. Audit after audit, in jurisdiction after jurisdiction, has confirmed it.

However, even by these disgraceful standards, Western Australia is in a league of its own.

The state, led by a Premier who is spearheading a campaign to block an independent federal EPA, is operating what is probably the worst biodiversity protection scheme in the nation. 

The scheme is called the Pilbara Environmental Offsets Fund, and we now know just how bad it is, because the state government recently released the results of its first third-party evaluation.

The PEOF was mandated in 2012, to better protect the Pilbara bioregion, which covers an area of about 179,000 square kilometres, with less than 7% of it in government-managed conservation reserves.

From 2012, the state’s environment minister began requiring proponents of projects in the Pilbara to pay into the “strategic Pilbara conservation initiative”, which was later rebadged as the PEOF, to compensate for the residual impacts of their developments. 

The federal environment minister also gave proponents the option of paying into the PEOF from that date.

Fortescue’s Cloudbreak mine in 2012 became the first proponent required to pay into it. And by 2019, when the mechanics of the fund were finally fully established and it had an implementation plan, multiple projects had conditions that required payments into the fund expected to total $90 million over 40 years.

The number of projects with PEOF payment obligations has continued to grow. And there are now 30 projects that have offset fund payment conditions relating to Pilbara bioregion impacts, most of them iron ore projects.

So how is this fund faring?

The evaluation, which was published in October 2024, covers the period up to the end of FY23.  It found that only one project had received any specific funding. The Budadee Aboriginal Rangers had received $600,000 to develop and implement a control plan for the Calotropis weed. 

That’s it. Eleven years after contributions to a Pilbara fund became mandatory, an evaluation found a grand total of one project had received $600,000.

Admittedly, the evaluation also identified another three projects that it said had been “established” under the fund. But at the time of the evaluation, one of these (another weed control project) had yet to receive its $1 million, and the other two had no financial allocation earmarked for them.

The evaluation also found payment rates are widely believed to be set too low. And it points out that proponents don’t pay anything into the fund at the time that they get their approval. Instead, they only start paying when they start clearing. 

In addition, it found that PEOF reporting requirements are not being met. 

Things have improved very marginally. 

Last December, Environment Minister Reece Whitby announced an additional $7.9 million would go to three projects. Two of the three will be run by the Budadee Aboriginal Corporation – comprising more money for its Calotropis project and money for a bilby project that was listed in the evaluation as one of the four “established” projects, but which at that time had yet to receive funding.

The third project will receive $1.5 million, to support work by the Nyamal Aboriginal Corporation to better protect northern quolls. 

But even that might be a case of catch-up, in terms of Pilbara quoll protection. That’s because the evaluation stated that one stakeholder had advised that pre-PEOF it had been running a project that was “delivering positive environmental outcomes for northern quolls”.

However, the stakeholder couldn’t roll the project over into the PEOF, and consequently abandoned it, and instead simply committed to paying money into PEOF.

“The result is that environmental outcomes that would likely have been achieved if the project continued, were not realised,” the evaluation says.

So here we are. As at the end of 2024, a fund that since 2012 has been used to justify the residual impacts of about 30 massive developments, has funded or announced funding for only two organisations, one of which will run a couple of projects.  

In short, the PEOF is a breathtakingly bad program. It’s a dismal reflection on the Western Australian government, and on the big resource companies that are benefiting from this failed scheme.

Ironically, the independent consultancy that did the evaluation has also hosted “F*ckup nights” in the state, where people go to “break the taboo of failure”, and to explain what they’ve learnt from their mistakes. 

It’s a clever initiative. And, based on the PEOF evaluation, you might think Premier Roger Cook and the resource companies backing his efforts to derail national nature reform would be perfect speakers if the confession series continues in the state in 2025.

But F*ckup nights are for people who can admit their failures, and who want others to learn from them. They are not for people who double-down on their own mistakes, and who try to prevent others fixing theirs. 

Murray Griffin is a climate and sustainability communications and content advisor, and director of Earthed.au.