Aesop warned the Greeks of the danger in about 520BC; Avianus repeated it for the Romans a century later. William Caxton warned the English in 1484; as did Jean de la Fontaine in seventeenth-century France. It is of course the ever-timely fable about foolish societies deliberately destroying the very things their wealth and prosperity depend upon.

Yet those who, across so many societies and different economic eras, have repeated the precautionary tale of the farmer who kills his gold-laying hen could never have imagined the absolute foolhardiness and recklessness of the Albanese government and its two star environmental ideologues, Tanya Plibersek and Chris Bowen.

Secretly being rushed through the bowels of the Burley Griffin swamp in Canberra is potentially the most dangerous legislation ever to hit Australia – an insidious project looming over every business and consumer called the Nature Positive Plan. It’s goal, in a nutshell, is to replace what are already among the most onerous and investment-destroying environmental laws in the world with even tougher new rules, greater wads of job-destroying green tape and further battalions of meddlesome bureaucrats. The ludicrous leftist premise is that all future development in and on this wide brown land must be ‘nature positive’. This is the same undergraduate mindset that saw the Voice as ‘democracy positive’, views windmills and solar panels littering the landscape as ‘planet positive’ and sees sterilising girls and boys as ‘gender positive’.

The Nature Positive Plan, which Labor plans to legislate this winter, is being sold as a revamp of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act) following a recent ‘review’. But it is far worse than just tinkering at the edges. The entire process is shrouded in secrecy, with only a hand-picked group of luvvies and certain representatives from industry bodies allowed to attend the various closed-door sessions that have so far taken place, in which they are permitted to take notes but not to take away anything shown to them in the room. One bureaucrat from the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment & Water admitted in Senate Estimates, ‘I can tell you there are a lot of sore arms from people taking notes.’ And what, you may ask, is detailed in these copious notes? Nothing short of the engineered destruction of Australian industry, investment and productivity.

Prime Minister Albanese himself made the decision not to share any of the proposed legislation, guidelines or even an exposure draft. (So much for Albo’s, ‘The Australian people deserve accountability and transparency, not secrecy’.) But what we already do know is enough to send shivers down the spine of every successful company or business in the mining, agriculture, tourism, building or resources sectors. What is inevitable, if the Nature Positive Plan goes ahead, is that billions of tonnes of iron ore and other natural resources deposits will stay in the ground, resulting in hundreds of billions of dollars in federal taxes not being raised, and tens of thousands of jobs never being created. Our downward economic spiral will accelerate. According to the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, in Western Australia alone there are investment projects worth nearly $320 billion awaiting environmental approvals. The Office of the Chief Economist in the Department of Industry, Science and Resources estimates that there are some 289 major resource projects scattered across the nation which have been announced but have yet to receive approval or even to have progressed to feasibility studies. That’s tens of billions of dollars of investment and the creation of thousands of jobs already at risk – multiply that by many more times when the Nature Positive Plan is passed.

Already we learned this week that it was only iron ore and coal that saved the economy from going backwards in the last quarter of last year. Our gold-laying hen.

The Nature Positive Plan will increase the regulatory burden on investments and proposed developments and add huge costs to industry which will flow through to the consumer. There will be mandatory reporting of emissions, of course, and payments if you can’t comply. We are not just talking about large mining projects, but Mum and Dad tourism operations, indigenous entrepreneurs, builders and developers all having their dreams and projects obliterated by Canberra latte-sippers and tree-huggers. Not to mention new hospitals, new hotels, new dams, new roads and new railways. Even the Albanese government admits investment is already much lower than would otherwise be expected given commodity prices and it has been estimated that this missing investment is probably worth around $60 billion per annum. But instead of making life easier for investors and businesses, Tanya Plibersek’s and Chris Bowen’s Nature Positive Plan  will make things a thousand times worse.

The original EPBC Act took years to create and ran to thousands of pages. This far more restrictive new set of laws is being rushed through in a matter of months to meet the ideological obsessions and fantasies of Canberra and the Albanese government’s inner-city Green-left supporters. This is not a government acting in the public interest, but one shrouded in deception and secrecy. Nature Positive is Australia Negative. We are taking a butcher’s knife to our golden goose.