Climate Law in Australia

Abstract

When Sir Ninian Stephen opened the annual conference of the Australian Mining and Petroleum Law Association in 1991, he was asked to discuss the distribution of power between the federal government and the States but opted instead to talk about climate change. The former justice of the High Court, then serving as Australia's Ambassador for the Environment, set out to convince his audience that, while climate change might 'seem an already over-exposed topic... trivialised by too many alarmist articles in the popular press', it was one of the major problems not just of the decade but also of the coming century which lawyers needed to consider.