Ted O'Brien (Fairfax, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Hansard source

For a number of reasons, I welcome the opportunity to speak on the Nature Repair Market Bill 2023, and the Nature Repair Market (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2023. Foremost among those reasons is that, with a few exceptions, to which I'll return shortly, this legislation is clearly based on work that was undertaken by the coalition when we were in government.

Early last year, the coalition brought to the parliament the Agriculture Biodiversity Stewardship Market Bill 2022. That followed considerable consultation with a wide variety of individuals and groups, including farmers, environmental groups, industry, the finance sector, Indigenous Australians and representatives of the states and territories. As minister for agriculture at the time, the member for Maranoa told the House on 9 February 2022 that the content of that bill was predominantly designed to give greater recognition to the role played by farmers across Australia in cultivating and maintaining healthy ecosystems across approximately 60 per cent of the country's land mass. It was a well-crafted bill that sought to right the wrong of those farmers' stewardship of their land not being adequately honoured.

It did this by seeking to give expression to a biodiversity stewardship market that rewarded landholders financially who had restored, protected and enhanced their local environment. It's not entirely apparent why the Labor Party thought it was necessary to spend around 10 months and something in the order of $11 million to largely replicate that work which had already been undertaken by the coalition government. It also begs the question of why Labor has brazenly claimed, as they have done on a number of occasions, that their legislation is a world first when, in truth, the legislation before us today is not even an Australian first.

It's also worth adding that long before the Albanese government arrived on the scene policymakers in a number of other parts of the globe had also been working towards establishing these kinds of markets. For the coalition's part, we have believed for some time now in the potential for a voluntary biodiversity market in Australia. We have believed there may be merit and value to such a market, as it can, potentially, offer new financial incentives for environmental conservation and restoration.

We therefore welcome the general thrust of Labor's approach, which is now to try to introduce such a market from the second half of 2024. And we commend them on adopting a continuation of our general approach and, in effect, for agreeing that the former coalition government's approach was correct. However, it needs to be stressed that there are a number of stark and consequential contrasts between the legislation of the former coalition government and that legislation of Labor, which is before the House.

The most critical of those differences is Labor's decision to extend the remit of the market beyond purely agricultural land. By widening the market to, potentially, cover all land tenure and water, they're almost inevitably going to bring more stakeholders and many different kinds of scenarios into the marketplace. In the early days, at the very least, that's likely to lead to confusion, particularly for first-time entrants into a biodiversity market and also for anyone trying to determine who's specific consent will be needed, in each case, for projects to proceed. Just like with their recent changes to the safeguard mechanism, this risks making government an active player in the market, with all the dubious and unintended consequences that that entails.

These bills allow potential participants in the market to define and apply their own idiosyncratic methodologies for their projects. That's probably going to take on a life of its own and won't be likely to have the same integrity and controls as our proposed scheme did. The coalition's scheme was based strictly on the application to potential projects of the carbon plus biodiversity and enhancing remnant vegetation assessment models, on which we work in collaboration with the ANU.

Based on our experience, we have serious reservations about it opening up the parameters and methodologies for which projects can be assessed and certificates can be traded. Further, there also remains uncertainty about what criteria and evidence will be used in relation to: the exclusion of projects; the precise role of a native title body corporate and, indeed, how native title considerations will be made more broadly; what standards or controls will exist, in relation to biodiversity assessment instruments; and to what extent changes made to offset regimes in other areas of Albanese government laws, regulations and policies might or might not apply here.

It is therefore appropriate that the bills have been referred to the Senate Environment and Communications Committee. A number of technical aspects of the Nature Repair Market Bill 2023 also require more detailed scrutiny. We hope that the committee will be adequately informed of the reasoning behind the changes being proposed in these bills. We also hope that the committee process highlights what both the coalition and Labor have gotten right and, indeed, how we might be able to improve the operation of the market even further, especially in laying the groundwork for government spending on environmental measures being much better targeted.

We know that groups like the Greens think money grows on trees and that they want billions of extra dollars to be spent by governments—and, therefore, by taxpayers—on their favourite conservation and environmental projects long into the future. But, clearly, it's an impossible ask. What makes things even harder for future governments are the various dirty deals that can be done between the Greens and the Labor Party, such deals that have the effect of putting the budget under more and more pressure. In light of such constraints, there is an imperative to try to foster and encourage more private sector involvement and better recognition of responsible private landholders' actions.

In closing, I think anyone closely following this debate will not be surprised to see the coalition reserve our final position on these bills until after the Senate committee process concludes. It may also be that we seek to encourage the government to make changes to the bills or that we seek to make some amendments of our own when the bills reach the Senate. In principle, at this point, and in keeping with all the work we have previously done in this area, the coalition cannot support the passage of either of these bills. There are too many gaps. There is too much missing detail. Accordingly, there are too many concerns from a number of key stakeholders for the bills to receive our endorsement.

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