Introduction
Scope of the 2004-05 Environment Budget Statement
This statement documents the Government’s key outcomes for the environment and outlines spending on environment activities for 2004-05 and the years ahead. It is an overview of policy and expenditure for the whole of the Australian Government. It also identifies new environment measures that are managed by Australian Government portfolios.
Outline
Chapter 1 of this statement contains an overview of the Australian Government’s environmental expenditure, as well as a description of new initiatives arising from the Government’s environmental strategic directions and priorities for 2004-05.
Chapter 2 contains an overview of the Government’s major environment polices and programmes.
Chapter 3 describes key achievements and major strategic directions for protecting the environment, and discusses environment programmes in more detail.
Chapter 4 outlines the strategies and tools employed to achieve environmental outcomes.
Expenditure for environment activities undertaken by this Government is listed in Appendix 1.
Structure
Activities reported in this statement are grouped thematically. The themes reflect those used in the State of the Environment Report 2001, and are also aligned with the reporting structure of the Environment and Heritage Portfolio. The statement can therefore be cross referenced with other budget publications, in particular the 2004-05 Portfolio Budget Statements for Environment and Heritage, and non budget publications such as the State of the Environment Report 2001.
The extent to which spending can be identified and ascribed to environmental purposes varies across programmes. As a result, some expenditure with environmental implications may not be recorded in this statement. In order to avoid double counting, allocations of funding to other programmes from the two major flagship programmes, the Natural Heritage Trust and the National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality are identified separately in Appendix 1. The allocations are not necessarily disaggregated in the text in Chapters 1, 2 and 3.
Style conventions used in this document
Amounts in this document are generally rounded to one decimal point using the standard rounding conventions. Due to rounding, the aggregation of elements within a table may not match the actual ‘total.’