Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Curtin for raising the legislation, and that particular aspect of it, and I acknowledge the member for Curtin who, in her time in this place, has followed these issues related to the environment throughout her whole time here.

If I can go through the changes that are there with respect to offsets in two sections, if I may. The first concept is a change—at the moment, under environmental law, there is a principle of no net loss. Under the new principal, it goes to net gain. That's a significant shift that happens in terms of what offsets are aiming to deliver for the environment. The second concept at the moment is that a business delivers an offset directly themselves, and that's the only option. As the member for Curtin has described, under the legislation it becomes an option of either delivering the direct offset to the business itself or paying for the government to do it via a restoration contribution payment.

There is potentially a real strength for the environment in the payment mechanism if we get this right, and it's this: when you have small offsets all over the place, effectively you end up with no sections that are large enough or have landscape scale to have true environmental resilience, particularly when we're dealing with climate change. If you can have somebody who is independently charged with looking at where those offsets occur, then instead of businesses choosing this area and that area, where effectively you end up with a map of Australia that looks like someone's got a toothbrush and splattered bits of paint to get these tiny little dots with no resilience, you end up with a situation where you can deliver landscape scale offsets which are capable of resilience and, therefore, delivering a long-term outcome for the environment in a scenario where we've made the change I referred to at the start, of going from no net loss to a net gain.

That's why the independent Restoration Contributions Holder is established. The concept of that holder is effectively, for the land sector, an equivalent to what we have under the Water Act for the Commonwealth Environmental Water Holder, where you have someone who's in charge of holding, in this case, an amount of money, but delivering with a direct obligation to provide landscape scale outcomes, which, project by project, the environment has never been able to get out of the EPBC Act.

The concept that the member refers to in terms of the government's appetite for amendments, the minister has made clear that we are in discussions on this legislation. We want to see it be able to get through. We are in constructive conversations with the different groups around the parliament. We want to make sure that we get this done, and we get it done this year.

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