[gottorf]

> given how past Australian governments outright sharted on nature protection or Aboriginal activists in favor of mining conglomerates, I'd classify the country as lawless as well

Making human lives better means that you have to do dirty, destructive work like mining, drilling, and manufacturing. To some degree, we're trading pristineness of nature for increased living standards for people. As technology improves, there is potential for our footprint to get smaller, but that's almost always balanced out (or more) by an increase in population.

It's easy to make the whole country a nature preserve. You then either import things that were produced in a dirty manner overseas, or your living standards drop to that of our Aboriginal ancestors.