The parliament will sit at 9am today – and first up will be the supply bills (which keep the money flowing) which both the house and the senate will deal with. The senate will then have to deal with Labor’s environment bypass laws which the Coalition passed along with Labor late yesterday afternoon in the house.

The Greens had moved to delay the laws by sending them to a committee for an inquiry, but that was voted down. The Greens and crossbench will try that again in the senate later today, but it will hinge on the Coalition.

These laws are part of John Howard’s legacy which no one has done anything to address in the decades since. The laws have led to more than 700 coal and gas mines being approved without any consideration to their impact on the climate. Australia has one of the worst extinction rates in the world (and we are about to add the Maugean Skate to that list with these new amendments Labor is ramming through) and deforestation continues.

Labor promised an environmental protection agency, but offered one up that wouldn’t actually do much to protect the environment. Rather than negotiation with the Greens and crossbench on it (which would have made it stronger) Labor pulled the legislation and now claims it was the Greens and crossbench which stood in the way of an EPA (when it would have been another toothless tiger).

So that’s the situation. We are about to see the parliament pass laws that will allow nature-destroying projects bypass an environment minister’s reconsideration powers and lead to the extinction of a fish that has been around since the dinosaurs, as well as severely impact a World Heritage area, all because the government doesn’t want to tell a foreign-owned industry that employs about 60 people in the area and pays no tax they can’t farm salmon in that one little spot.

Unless the Coalition decide to do something. Doubtful.