David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

These two bills, the Nature Repair Market Bill 2023 and the Nature Repair Market (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2023, establish a legislative framework for what I think initially will be a voluntary national market for new so-called biodiversity certificates. This sounds quite harmless and beneficial, but there are a lot of problems with this scheme which I will just outline for people in the House and listening around Australia. This market, an artificial construct, would enable biodiversity certificates and enable project proponents to start up a biodiversity project on any type of land tenure, including aquatic and coastal environments. This legislation is only the beginning of it. It is just the primary legislation, but all the details will subsequently follow in legislative instruments that won't have as much scrutiny. The bills also amend part of the Clean Energy Regulator Act 2011 and the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Act.

People have said this will ignite a green Wall Street. People, even people in the Greens, have mentioned that the logic and the science behind it is a bit spurious, and it will allow people to greenwash projects that have huge environmental footprints. It's a piecemeal response to a perceived ill. It will lead to a lot of industries chasing yet more certificates to allow them to continue their businesses. We already have Australian carbon credit units and we have safeguard mechanism credits, and to this we can add biodiversity certificates. This demand by industry for these certificates is having adverse consequences and misappropriating the use of good agricultural land. It's putting up the price of land as people with much bigger chequebooks than farmers will be dedicating large and small swathes of good agricultural land to these passive schemes, and we will have much less agriculture as a result.

There are a few other really important issues. These biodiversity certificates, once created, can be purchased, transferred, claimed, used and publicly traded. It creates a personal property, a tradable personal property, which can be separated from the owner of the land on which the project is put. The proponent of the biodiversity doesn't necessarily have to be the title owner of the land. It provides a requirement to obtain consent; if there is land that is subject to native title, there will be a requirement for the proponent and the owner of the land to obtain consent from native title holders.

On the face of it, that sounds good, but in many states even Torrens title has native title claims or cultural rights claimed over it. In Queensland, it's not just Crown land but grazing homestead perpetual leases; a lot of agricultural grazing and productive land is held under that sort of tenure. It will be able to be applied on onshore waters, in lakes and rivers, and in offshore waters, in the marine and coastal environment. I can understand why they would have to approve for areas of native title exclusive use, because it's theirs exclusively. But because native title claims can be put just about anywhere, depending on what state you are in, and over vastly more areas, it basically sets up a requirement for everyone to go and get approval.

We know this costs money. It's not just a visit and, 'Yes, this will be great.' There is always money changing hands. That is where I have great problems with this, because the certificate then becomes a very tradable instrument which doesn't necessarily deliver any coherent, broad strategy. It will cherrypick bits and pieces, not just of those lands that I mentioned but all private lands—Crown lands. And, over time, the requirement under the safeguard mechanism for industry to offset all their existentially required industrial processes for Australia and the modern industrial world to exist means Australia will be dotted with all these biodiversity certificates on top of Australian Carbon Credit Unit lands, and Safeguard Mechanism Credits lands.

Under this proposed scheme, the certificates can be generated as class A for 25 years, or up to 100 years. But when you read the detail, and when we do see the legislative instruments—which will come at some time in the next year or two—the secretary could purchase these or he could have auctions for them. He could deem, if he thinks it's needed, to change a 25-year commitment to a 100-year commitment. So anyone who is thinking that this is voluntary, should know that it might end up with their land being tied up for anything from 25 to 100 years.-Even when they onsell it, that covenant on the property will last.

These could be auctioned off by Crown landholders and purchased or deposited with the regulator, who could then onsell them. It's really a question of there being a lot of market—in fact, all market. I can see why people love these schemes, because it's just like trading tulips: there's nothing tangible. We're trying to put strict compliance and regulation into it but, as one ecologist, Dr Yung En Chee, a quantitative ecologist at the University of Melbourne, said that the nature repair market:

… is a policy based on lawed premises, non-existent evidence of effectiveness and is a poor use of public resources relative to alternative policies …

We know there is a threat to biodiversity in this country, but it would be much better if we were doing things to address the horrifying rates for Australian marsupials, invertebrates and large and small animals under threat from feral pests. Many of us here have sat on environment committees looking into the threat of cane toads or feral cats, that lead to more extinguishments of birds, in particular, and small mammals than the latest bushfires. And they do that every year, but there's nothing that I've seen coming out after the State of the environment report about us addressing that. There are millions of feral pigs and dogs, and, I hasten to say, hundreds of thousands of camels in Australia destroying a lot of habitat. These are of far, far greater importance to control rather than tying up someone's property, leading to something like a Ponzi scheme where certificates are traded around the country with Indigenous landholders clipping the ticket on the way through. It's really something that's very concerning. We've always got to look at the details and the consequences of these schemes.

As I said, the main thing is that there's increasing pressure on a lot of our big industries to get these certificates in some shape or form. They're like the indulgences that brought about the Reformation in the 1500s: you got plenary absolution if you paid money and offset some of the sin that you were deemed to have created. A lot of these processes that happen in the industrial world are existential for the modern world to happen. Sure, we have to try to minimise it, but the biggest thing in this country to offset all the carbon going up into the atmosphere is to put low-carbon energy systems in place. But the lowest, safest, cheapest and most rapidly expanding form of energy is banned in this country. We are banning the cleanest and the safest form of energy.

Look at the plans the states have in New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland. These 41 renewable energy zones around the country are going to span ridges, vast tracts of land, like Alan Finkel said, 'as far as the eye can see' solar panels and 40 giant wind turbines every month—millions and millions of solar panels that only last 15 years or so before they have to be destroyed. They will be destroying vast tracts of habitat. The Hume Link will consume about 45,000 hectares of habitat that will be destroyed, remnant vegetation. There's the windfarm at Walcha where there are 550 big towers. It's like an industrial wind park. It will destroy that valley. All the marsupials and animals that live on those ridges won't go anywhere when there's DC current and whirring and infrasound all over the place. They become wastelands.

They're planning on putting in pumped hydro schemes in Queensland, like in New South Wales. There are three in New South Wales, at least. There are a couple of huge pumped hydro schemes in Borumba, in the Pioneer-Burdekin. Run-of-river hydro, where the river still flows—if you're going to lock up water and do it so that you can use it whenever the price goes up, when the wind and the sun aren't generating, that's a bad use of resources. It's unnecessarily destroying a lot of nature. The footprint of a nuclear power plant is minuscule compared to the millions of acres that the perpetual building of renewable energy will release on the Australian landscape.

As I said, this is another scheme that will make the bankers and the traders and all those people who are making money out of flipping certificates and trading them very pleased. I'm getting into a lather thinking about it. But I don't think there's going to be much. Even Sarah Hanson-Young thinks people are deluding themselves. She is a pretty extreme Greens senator, but, for once, she's actually making a point. These are indulgences. It is like the tulip mania. People think you can make money out of something and pay much more than the intrinsic value of it.

If we are really going to get serious about repairing nature, let's control all our feral pests and animals; let's abandon this reckless destruction of sensitive agriculture and horticultural landscapes with the 28,000 kilometres of poles and wires that aren't necessary. We could just be using our existing grid if we replaced our coal plants with clean nuclear power reactors, which have a very low environmental footprint. So, buyer beware! If I was an owner of land, I wouldn't be signing up for this. A lot of people I know who have had vast tracts of land that have been hard to work but have been very productive see this as money for jam. But once it's there, everyone will be feeding off it. You will be encumbered and that property will be encumbered for up to 100 years. It's voluntary at the moment, but the gods of environmentalism that deem these things the solution to a problem will be urging them to become mandatory.

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