Steph Hodgins-May (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Eighty-five per cent of Australians live within 60 kilometres of a coast. The vast majority of us have had to travel over oceans to call this place home. The ocean is our identity. It shapes our coastlines, our climate and our cultures. It has fed families for tens of thousands of years. Right now, our oceans are under immense strain, and this is why the Greens welcome and support the High Seas Biodiversity Bill.

This bill implements Australia's obligations of the agreement under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction—the high seas treaty. It is the first global framework in 44 years to protect biodiversity in international waters. Two-thirds of the world's ocean lies beyond any single country's control, but until now only about one per cent of those waters have been protected. This treaty creates, for the very first time, a legal pathway to establish marine protected areas in the high seas. It allows nations, including Australia and our Pacific neighbours, to work together to protect migratory routes for whales and sharks, safeguard spawning grounds and build resilience against climate change. And, of course, it is long overdue.

On 17 January this year, the treaty entered into force internationally, without Australia having ratified it. This delay is shameful. Protecting the high seas is in our national interest. The Greens will have two amendments to this bill, one which strengthens language to include reference to marine protected areas throughout the bill and another that significantly increases penalties on Australian corporations found in contravention of the objects of the bill.

Aside from this bill, we must also be clear about the next looming threat to the high seas, and that is deep-sea mining. As demand for critical minerals grows, there is an increasing global pressure to open up the ocean floor in international waters as the next extractive frontier. Vast tracts of seabed, ecosystems we have barely had the chance to study, are being eyed up for industrial scale extraction. We know more about the surface of the moon than we do about the deep ocean, and yet we are poised to gamble with that biodiversity for short-term profit—an all-too-familiar tale of short-term profit.

The high seas treaty was designed to stop international waters becoming a lawless free-for-all. Allowing deep-sea mining to proceed would undermine that very purpose. The damage could be irreversible, and Australia should be taking a clear, principled position in support of a global moratorium on deep-sea mining. Protection of our oceans must come before profit. Here is the hard truth: signing up to protect oceans outside of our jurisdiction means little if we continue to undermine them. Labor claims that 52 per cent of Australia's marine waters are protected. That sounds impressive at the outset until you look closer. More than half of those marine parks allow commercial fishing and mining. Around only 22 to 24 per cent of our waters are highly protected areas. This is not leadership by any standard.

If Labor were serious will ocean protection, it would strengthen our existing marine protected areas so that they are genuinely free from extractive industries, it would save Scott Reef from fossil fuel project expansion, it would nominate the Great Australian Bight for World Heritage listing and it would end all new gas drilling in our oceans. Yet we are seeing the opposite. We see new offshore acreage releases for gas drilling, including in the Otway Basin off the coast of my home state of Victoria, literally while smoke is still in the air. We are seeing seismic blasting that harms whales and sea turtles. We see decommissioned oil and gas left to rust in our waters and wash up on our beaches. We see investment in disproven carbon capture technology, injecting CO2 into our seabeds with no guarantee of its safe storage. We see iconic ecosystems, from the Great Barrier Reef to Ningaloo, battered by climate fuelled bleaching while this government continues approving new coal and gas projects.

You cannot claim to be a friend of the ocean while expanding the industries that are heating and acidifying it. Rising heat is bleaching corals, destroying kelp forests and driving species towards extinction. Our marine wildlife is disappearing, even as the lines on the map marking protected areas expand. Protection on a map alone is not enough. It must be enforced. Healthy oceans are about protecting Australia's lifeblood. They underpin industries and communities across this country. Sustainable fisheries depend on ocean health. Tourism from Hobart to Port Douglas, from Ningaloo to the Whitsundays, relies on thriving marine ecosystems and resilient reefs. From Port Fairy to Lakes Entrance, from the Great Ocean Road to Bass Strait, livelihoods are tied to the health of the sea.

For tens of thousands of years, First Nations peoples have understood the ocean not as a resource to exploit but as a country that is living and interconnected. The Bunurong people of the Mornington Peninsula and Western Port Bay have strong sea country conditions. Bunurong stories speak of a time when Port Philip Bay was dry land, before the sea returned and reshaped the shoreline. They are records of change tracked across generations by people who know the rhythms of the sea and its connection to land and culture.

When we protect marine ecosystems we protect incomes, we protect food security, we protect culture and we protect the next generation's right to experience a living and thriving ocean, not a degraded one. We welcome this bill, but we strive for more ambition. Ambition must be met by courage at home. The fate of our oceans hinges on climate action. Every new oil and gas approval locks in more warming, more bleaching, more ecological collapse. If this government truly wants to be remembered as one that stood up for the sea, it must stop expanding fossil fuels. It must strengthen marine sanctuaries and hold the corporations that pillage our oceans to account. The ocean has given us everything—stability, sustenance and wonder. Will we finally give it the protection that it deserves? The Greens are ready to make sure that we do.