David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Minister, I wanted to go back to the conversation we were having, before the hard marker earlier, about offsets. You were saying that, when small proponents potentially don't have the ability to play in that space and actually find like-for-like offsets, they can pay into the fund. You then said that it potentially wouldn't be like for like, but there's the potential for much more broadscale conservation work. Could you explain to us how that would work when you have fairly small but really significant impacts on critically endangered ecosystems—say, temperate grasslands and box gum woodlands, where we're down to less than one per cent or a couple of per cent of what is left of these ecosystems. Say 50 or 100 hectares of that were damaged or destroyed and someone pays into a fund, what guardrails are there in place to ensure that it's not 50,000 hectares of rangeland that are actually offset, where, clearly, there are very different species and a bunch of species that probably aren't as threatened? How's the government going to work that one out?