Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

That's how it's been described. We already have one of the highest rates of extinction. It all comes at a time when we've had the largest step backwards in conservation history with the removal of the Coral Sea as a marine park. In fact, there has been more area taken from conservation areas than in any country ever. So that's why I'm interested in these cuts.

The first national review of threatened species monitoring has found that one-third of the 548 endangered species and 70 per cent of our threatened ecological communities were not being tracked at all. It has been reported that the poor performance has been driven by factors likely to be exacerbated by these job cuts. It worries me that that isn't a priority.

The same, of course, could be said for the heritage division of the department, because over the years they haven't been a priority. I note that, in your five minutes of speaking, you spent about 10 seconds talking about heritage. That seems to me indicative of the priority that it has. The minister knows my interest in Thompson Square in Windsor, and I note that the minister took the step of writing to the premier of New South Wales. Yet what worries me in his analysis of Thompson Square and the decision not to emergency-list it nationally is that no-one from the department of heritage went on that site. This site has the oldest brick-barrel drains in the country, convict-made brick-barrel drains. No-one from the heritage department has even been there. What does that say about the funding that has gone to the department in order to adequately protect not just colonial history but also Indigenous history? I think that does raise questions, and I'd like to hear the minister's view on the funding for the heritage department—not for the money that you're offering people, but for the resourcing that you have within that department to adequately assess things, by going on site, on the ground, and really looking at what constitutes national heritage.

I'd also be interested to know how the government plans to maintain the biodiversity that it so clearly values, and the welfare of Australia's vulnerable native wildlife when it's cutting staff and resources from the divisions responsible for tracking these threatened species. How many threatened species are awaiting the development of recovery plans? How does this number compare to the number of threatened species awaiting recovery plans five years ago? What is the department going to do to monitor the effectiveness of recovering threatened species, and how do they know when a species has recovered? I'd really appreciate answers to those questions.

See this speech in context