Missing in action: five issues the major parties are avoiding in the 2022 federal election

Over the past three years, the evidence has been laid out in several reports. Graeme Samuel, the former competition watchdog head, was charged with undertaking a once-a-decade review of national conservation laws and found they were failing and the environment was in unsustainable decline. The auditor general reached similar conclusions.

The Coalition made deep cuts to environment program funding after being elected in 2013 and it has been only partly restored. Australia is the global capital for mammal extinction. The number of ecosystems and species under threat is accelerating, in part due to extreme events such as bushfires and ocean heating, due to the climate crisis. Plans to protect them have often not been delivered.

What could the next government do to address the problem? Some scientists laid out their vision here.

Australian scientists are calling for more government research funding, which has declined in recent years despite vaccines and treatments for Covid-19 highlighting the key role science plays in tackling global challenges.

Prof David Karoly, who worked on four of the six major assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told Guardian Australia this week that CSIRO scientists had been barred from speaking publicly about government policy, and that budget cuts had transformed the agency into one reliant on external contracts to survive.

Over the ensuing year, the arts and culture sectors became one of the hardest hit financially, up there with tourism and hospitality. Lockdowns, venue closures and social distancing rules drained about $1.4bn from the live entertainment industry in 2020 alone.

Yet neither major political party has outlined a single cultural policy in the election campaign to date.

Given sustained high levels of virus transmission across the country, far more Covid deaths this year than the previous two years combined, and the arrival of three new Omicron subvariants in Australia, health experts have expressed surprise at the absence of coronavirus policies from the election campaign.

The Coalition has not announced any pandemic-specific policies as part of its election campaign, but Labor has said it would establish an Australian Centre for Disease Control for future pandemic preparedness. The move was floated back in 2020 but the commitment has hardly been broached in the past several weeks of the election campaign.

Education is usually a central issue in the election and 2019 was no different, with Labor promising $14bn over 10 years for public schools.

While these initiatives may be worthy, none of them answer concerns from the teachers union about when public schools will receive full funding and catch up large inequities with non-government schools. The Greens have proposed giving public schools $49bn over 10 years, to fully fund all costs including out-of-pocket fees charged to parents and guardians.

Higher education policy has been quiet since the Coalition passed the jobs ready graduate reform package, hiking the cost of arts and other degrees in 2020.