Monique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

The Australia state of the environment 2021 report found that our biodiversity is declining and that the overall state of our environment is poor. The Nature Repair Market Bill introduces a nature repair market, in effect, a biodiversity market, the aim of which is to encourage private sector investment in long-term nature repair. This market should, in theory, enable proponents to undertake projects which protect or enhance biodiversity on land, in aquatic environments and in our oceans. Projects will be rewarded with biodiversity certificates tradable in the market and regulated by the Clean Energy Regulator.

There is no doubt that we need legislation to prevent biodiversity. Australia has large swathes of degraded land. We've lost at least 100 species to extinction since European colonisation. Nineteen Australian ecosystems are already collapsing, including the Murray-Darling Basin and the Great Barrier Reef. For Australia to reverse the distressing environmental decline, we have to drive real benefits from legislation like this. We have to support landowners to restore degraded landscapes. We have to increase biodiversity.

We have signed up to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, which commits us to protect 30 per cent of our land to nature. This means 30 per cent of every kind of habitat. We're not just talking deserts and salt lakes; we're talking native forests, farms and grasslands. This can't be just about nature protection; it's also about habitat restoration. The scientists, the environmentalists and the farmers have all told us that these are areas that need serious investment.

We know that it will cost $2 billion a year to protect Australia's natural environments and to reverse our biodiversity decline. Just for reference, $2 billion is about one-fifth of what we're spending this year to subsidise fossil fuels. We spend just 15 per cent of what is needed to prevent extinctions and to recover threatened species, even though half of our GDP has a moderate to very high direct dependence on ecosystem services. With this legislation, we're proposing to hand that great responsibility for the protection of ecosystem services dependent on nature to the private sector. We should, in fact, be taking the lead, not passing the baton.

This bill does not guarantee effective action on nature repair. There's far too little detail to it. It is a framework legislation. The most significant elements of the scheme are still to be provided via a series of legislative instruments to be made by the minister. These elements include the rules of the scheme, details of the instruments to be used to assess biodiversity and the scheme's methodology determinations. The bill is a revamp of a previous iteration prepared by the Morrison government and introduced to this House in February 2022. At that time, the Senate committee which assessed the bill identified a number of issues with it, including but not limited to its broad deletion of administrative powers and immunity from liability. Those concerns have not been addressed by this bill.

External reviews have suggested that measures for monitoring, auditing and compliance provisions delineated by this bill are insufficient. There are no provisions regarding the frequency or scope of committee meetings requiring regular audits by the regulator. The Senate committee reviewing this legislation will not report until August. This all feels premature, undercooked and ill formed. On paper, the Albanese government's stated goals are a zero extinctions target and the protection of 30 per cent of Australia's lands and seas by 2030. However, this Nature Repair Market Bill lacks clarity on the conservation outcomes it will achieve. It doesn't actually define the nature or the scope of its objectives, other than describing them as 'enhancement or protection of biodiversity'. We're being asked to trust the market to value biodiversity and to act effectively on conservation, while not doing so ourselves. Landholders are not being guided as to what projects the government sees as more or less valuable, as higher or lower priority.

In reality, businesses' desire to voluntarily purchase enough biodiversity certificates for corporate social responsibility remains uncertain. Worldwide, less than nine per cent of biodiversity conservation funding comes from offsets, nature based solutions, carbon markets and philanthropy combined. This bill does not identify any regulatory levers which the government could implement should there be insufficient voluntary investment to create a functional nature repair market. We're just going to put it out there and we're going to hope for the best.

The problem is that we have seen biodiversity markets before, both abroad and domestically. Their effectiveness rests on whether they reward stewardship that really benefits biodiversity or whether they rely on offsets which can harm biodiversity elsewhere. There is concern, with good reason, about commodifying nature, about this scheme's integrity and about its interaction with our national environmental laws.

Environmental offsets are meant to compensate for unavoidable impacts on environmentally significant matters, to offset losses at one site with like for like at another site. In practice, though, we know that the governance of such schemes is often poor and that they can have the perverse effect of giving tacit approval to destruction and biodiversity loss. This bill should therefore ensure that biodiversity certificates cannot be used to meet offsetting obligations under Commonwealth, state or territory legislation. We need certainty regarding the extent to which the environmental credits given accurately represent the environmental outcomes gained. This means that the proposed biodiversity certificates have to reflect actual biodiversity gain which would not have occurred in the absence of the project.

The bill allows for certificates to be issued for projects which act to protect sites, but an obvious concern with this absence of additionality is the potential for over-inflation of perceived biodiversity benefits. It's proposed that we will have prescribed biodiversity assessment instruments which will dictate the methodology relating to measurement or assessment of biodiversity and its protection or enhancement, but we don't know what these instruments are and we don't know how the assessments will operate.

The potential for comparison between different species and ecosystems is concerning. If we lose all our koalas, can saving a moth species or the greater glider compensate? What are the relative benefits of interventions to save numbats as opposed to Gouldian finches? This bill assigns the government's responsibility for species preservation to a market. The government should, in fact, establish robust measures of biodiversity and it should delineate how direct benefit from projects assessed under this scheme will be established. We urgently need the EPBC Act reform to be brought to this House, such that we can establish a national environmental standard for our environmental offsets. Without that, this bill is putting the cart before the horse.

We have to have concerns about the proposed involvement of the Clean Energy Regulator, given the governance issues relating to the Clean Energy Regulator identified by the recent Chubb Independent Review of Australian Carbon Credit Units. This bill proposes additional functions for the CER in an area in which it does not have specific expertise, and before those broader governance issues have been addressed. Concerns persist generally about governance and compliance, not only as administered by the Clean Energy Regulator but across the spectrum of government agencies dealing with environmental matters.

Just last August the Minister for the Environment and Water, in discussing this scheme—the scheme in front of us today—claimed:

… maybe one day Australia will house its own Green Wall Street: a trusted global financial hub, where the world comes to invest in environmental protection and restoration.

They're lovely words, but these are words from a government which has approved the Isaac coalmine and which this month allowed removal of the Murujuga rock art from the Burrup Peninsula in breach of the globally accepted Burra Charter for international best practice in heritage conservation. These are words from a government which has given $1.5 billion to the Northern Territory government to build the Middle Arm facility, three kilometres from the Darwin suburb of Palmerston, to support fracking of the Beetaloo basin and development of the Barossa gas field and pipeline. Sadly, we have seen already that we cannot trust this government on important issues relating to environmental protections. We need legislation on these matters to be absolutely watertight, and this bill is not that.

These examples underscore the importance of transparent, accountable and robust governance in all of our environmental agencies. The credibility of our environmental efforts hinges on trust. Trust can only be cultivated by maintaining the highest standards of governance and compliance. We need strong environmental protection legislation with clear enforcement. If it is to proceed, the nature repair market scheme must be administered under the forthcoming independent Environmental Protection Agency or the proposed extinction prevention hub, not under the Clean Energy Regulator. It's time for Australia to lead the way out of the climate crisis. We can't approve a scheme that, rather than creating a nature positive market, could have the perverse effect of increasing nature destruction. It's time to stop kicking this can down the road. This bill in its current form is undercooked and underwhelming, and it is very difficult to commend it to the House.

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