Anne Webster (Mallee, National Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Regional Health) Share this | Hansard source

There's an old saying, 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it,' yet this Nature Repair Market Bill tinkers with a pilot program that the coalition put forward in its Agriculture Biodiversity Stewardship Market Bill. This repair attempt has created a mess. For those reasons, at this stage, the coalition cannot support this bill. Former agriculture minister and Nationals leader David Littleproud introduced the agriculture focused bill in February 2022, but it lapsed due to an election and a change of government.

I support market based solutions to complex issues. The alternative approach that we often see from those opposite is government based solutions. This bill has been criticised by those that you could say are on the left or far left of politics, who say that the bill actually entrusts too much to the market. These critics object to the government theoretically copping out of its perceived obligation to spend on environmental projects because private market investment through these certificates will be available.

As we've seen in other fields, large corporations are falling over themselves to signal to the market that they're doing what Australians and people all over the world want to see large corporations doing. When you consider the scale of the multinational mining companies, in terms of their budgets, the federal budgets of many nations pale into insignificance. Whether you are comfortable with that or not is a debate for another time, but this bill maintains a focus on unlocking the immense private capital available to finance biodiversity outcomes rather than leaving it up to the government.

It is the market where we have seen great innovation and reward for effort achieved, rather than the arbitrary whims, fancies or even darker aspirations of government when it comes to the government picking winners. Some of the greatest innovations in human history and the latest technology we have in our hands have arisen from the private spaces of investors, their garages, laboratories or workshops, coming up with solutions that benefit humanity and the planet. So I welcome the government leaving the market based element of what was the Agriculture Biodiversity Stewardship Market Bill unchanged.

Let's also remember that biodiversity is by its nature diverse and, in some respects, still unknown. It is complex. The carbon market has been simplified to a price per tonne of carbon dioxide sequestered or prevented from being emitted into the atmosphere. In the biodiversity market, how you value a biodiversity outcome will be left up to the market. This ties into work being done internationally to set standards on how these outcomes are calculated. My point is that if these are not left up to the market and international developments, we could end up with yet another level of bureaucracy here in Australia and the subsequent cost to taxpayers of pricing the value of these certificates.

It is welcome that this bill doesn't tamper with the previous bill's market based mechanism. That part wasn't broken, and, thankfully, Labor haven't tried to fix it. But what they have done is inserted additional elements and opportunities for government to muddle the market, risking breaking the biodiversity market with their Orwellian nature repair. A key difference between this bill and the coalition's bill was that our bill rewarded farmers for the great biodiversity work that they already do. Let's remember that the majority of the Australian continent is agricultural land, be it private farm properties or pastoral leases. As the then agriculture minister Littleproud said when introducing the bill:

… farmers … play a key role in maintaining healthy ecosystems on nearly 60 per cent of Australia's land. However, their stewardship of that land is not currently valued by the market.

We need a national voluntary agriculture biodiversity stewardship market that recognises and financially rewards them for their efforts to restore, enhance or protect biodiversity.

Minister Littleproud went on to explain that the then proposed agriculture biodiversity stewardship market:

… would complement the voluntary carbon market, providing an incentive for farmers to establish carbon plantings that also deliver biodiversity benefits. Environmental plantings deliver carbon and biodiversity benefits, but to date, only carbon benefits have been recognised.

This is true, and we are breaking new ground in Australia by proposing a market for biodiversity. Labor have taken an agricultural land focused initiative and expanded it to other land and even to the oceans. They have run ahead of the pilot projects initiated under the coalition, such as the Carbon + Biodiversity Pilot, which trialled market arrangements for farmers to create a new income from plantings that deliver biodiversity improvements and carbon abatement. Eligible farmers made environmental plantings of native trees and shrubs on previously cleared land and committed to maintaining them—potentially at great cost, I might add—for 25 to 100 years. The Carbon + Biodiversity Pilot project participant farmers could also enter into a carbon abatement contract to earn Australian carbon credit units and receive a biodiversity payment. The other pilot project is the Enhancing Remnant Vegetation Pilot, enabling farmers to protect and enhance remnant vegetation on their land with tenure agreements for which they would receive a payment and/or rent and some reimbursement of their management costs. I might say that the incongruence of the Labor government now looking to put transmission lines right through that native remnant vegetation is mind-boggling.

Those pilot projects were meant to provide the first supply of biodiversity certificates, but now Labor has thrown open the door to almost any land under the Australian sun being open for credits. Would it not have been better to allow the pilot projects to establish how this will work and get through the prototypes and teething issues before throwing the market open to everyone? If this passes in its present form, we may never know. Let me give a brief example of how working collaboratively with farmers would have been a better approach. From my own electorate of Mallee, the Wimmera Regional Catchment Strategy states:

The Wimmera is a biodiversity hotspot. The region is the geographical and biological transition between temperate and arid Australia.

The strategy says that the Wimmera features:

…the distribution of numerous 'temperate' species, like the smoky mouse (Pseudomys fumeus), southern brown bandicoot (Isoodon obesulus) and long-nosed potoroo (Potorous tridactylus).

The strategy goes on to explain:

Formerly dominated by grassy woodlands, these areas are famed for their agricultural productivity but also support important biodiversity assets like the Wimmera grasslands, internationally significant wetlands and habitat for the critically endangered south-eastern red-tailed black cockatoo (Calyptorhynchus banksii graptogyne).

They are magnificent birds. The strategy goes on to explain how the remnant patches of native vegetation are extremely important to maintaining biodiversity, situated as they are, 'interspersed within the agricultural matrix'. It made sense, as the coalition was doing in working first with the farmers through the previous bill, to enhance these biodiversity stepping stones, or 'pathways', as the Wimmera Regional Catchment Strategy defines them. I understand that the initial pilot work of the coalition bill was easily adaptable to rangelands as well, and we could have expanded the market comfortably into those areas. But now the floodgates have been thrown open, and there's a risk the market could become 'not fit for purpose' in the eyes of potential investors.

This bill brings all levels of government into the market, including state governments and, at least in theory, local governments. The biodiversity enhancing work that state governments do will qualify for biodiversity certificates under this bill, so what have Labor done? They have already skewed the market. They've brought government into the game when the pilot projects were about establishing a price in the open market. Now the market involves governmental players, which will diminish what would have been the opening value of farmers' certificates under what the coalition proposed. Don't get me wrong—local government would be thrilled, in my electorate of Mallee and throughout regional Australia, with the prospect of an income stream through biodiversity certificates. However, they are already crying out that they cannot afford to maintain their roads and other services and have stretched their budgets as is. They are pulling out of providing aged care after Labor's ham-fisted implementation of the royal commission recommendations, where they failed to acknowledge the regional health crisis, the regional aged-care crisis, the regional housing crisis and the regional workforce crisis, so I'm not optimistic that, in the early nature repair market that Labor proposes, our stretched regional councils will have the budget to invest in the biodiversity work that would theoretically earn them a new income stream. In the end, most biodiversity work by governments is conducted by state governments, not local governments. Could this market have been conceived to expand state government revenue streams to offset the cost of doing biodiversity work? It is conceivable. We will see state governments get an even bigger budget and local government budgets shrink under Labor's expanded nature repair market.

As we debate in this place the constitutional mechanisms to enable a referendum on the Voice to Parliament for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, it is significant that Labor's Nature Repair Market Bill elevates the consent requirements for native title holders. This bill will require native title holders to be consulted and give their consent to the project much earlier than the previous bill allowed.

The expansion of land to which this bill applies now also means that native title bodies will be able to apply for a biodiversity certificate. I cannot help but wonder if this is the beginning of the Voice economy. In the absence of economic development in areas controlled by a land council or similar, are Labor now creating a new income stream to compete with the market that was initially designed by the coalition for farmers to reward their on-farm conservation efforts? I'm not saying that the scheme should never have been opened up more broadly, but a deliberate, considered, pilot project has now been thrown open to all comers and, conveniently, during a debate on a voice to parliament: 'Here's a new potential income stream for Indigenous communities.' I'm not critical of economic development in Indigenous communities, but this does look like Labor's opening salvo in establishing a voice economy.

Over the summer holidays, we saw Treasurer Jim Chalmers's economic essay on restructuring the Australian economy to reflect, to put it simply, Labor values and Keynesian economics. This expansion of the coalition's model to include other land holders, adding all levels of government and Indigenous land councils, looks like it has Treasurer Chalmers's ideological fingerprints all over it. The bill is silent on the apparent offset market approach. As Leader of the Nationals David Littleproud highlighted yesterday, Labor's approach to climate regulation will now see the biggest carbon dioxide emitters hunting for offsets. The compliance time frame on carbon has been brought forward to please inner-city people who believe action on climate change isn't happening fast enough, which is going to drive emitters into the offset market. Tracts of agricultural land will be purchased to tick the box, and emitters will continue emitting. Due to the likely interconnections between biodiversity and carbon credits, we can be sure the mysterious offset arrangements, hiding to the side of this bill, will further frustrate what was, under the coalition government, a soundly developed biodiversity market.

See this speech in context