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Since the 1970s, the Reef has been a site where Australian environmental policy has flourished, mirroring global environmental policy seeking to 'balance' human activity through 'ecologically sustainable development'. The article examines the parallel and intersecting processes of modern environmental policy and news media practice in the context of the Reef to unveil how Australia's news media are communicating critical moments in the protection of the Reef. Through two key conservation moments – the 1981 World Heritage Listing and the 2012 threat to place the Reef on the List of World Heritage in Danger – the article examines the role of news media in different geographic contexts, highlighting the complex politics of protection from early conservation campaigns to the contemporary era of protecting the Reef in the context of global environmental crisis. We identify how ecologically sustainable development discourses can be used to communicate positions that challenge and discredit policy initiatives aimed at protecting natural environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A prerequisite for meaningful environmental legislation is that it he based upon an adequate scientific understanding of the natural system to which It is applied. In 2003, the Australian Commonwealth and Queensland State governments introduced a Reef Water Quality Protection Plan. which aimed to "improve" water quality in river catchments adjacent to the Great Barrier Reef (GRR) and in nearby coastal waters. The Plan was introduced in the absence of any substantive evidence for regional degradation of GRR water quality. This paper reviews the available data regarding nutrient contents En the Tully River, north Queensland, which is cited as the best (available) evidence for human-related changes in nutrient export from (GBR) catchment [1]. It is shown that the claim of human-related nutrient enrichment in the Tully River, and regionally, is without substance. No detectable trends in GBR water quality have occurred since systematic measurements were first started in the 1980s. Environmental policies that are based on mischievous claims of chimerical damage to the Great Barrier Reef damage the reputation of science as a tool for disinterested analysis, and provoke widespread cynicism in the community regarding the integrity of contemporary environmental politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]