Matt Thistlethwaite (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Defence) Share this | Hansard source

The Albanese government has a clear and consistent plan to improve Australia's natural environment. We've already introduced our changes to emissions reduction, with a target being set for a medium-term and longer-term target. We're introducing new vehicle emissions standards. But we're also keen to prepare our natural environment, and the Nature Repair Market Bill 2023 goes to the heart of ensuring that all Australians can participate in nature repair. It's not just a role and a job for government to be involved in rejuvenating the ecology of Australia. It's also an area where, in particular, private businesses and individuals can be involved. This challenge that we've set, of safeguarding 30 per cent of Australia's land and seas by 2030, is one that all Australians can participate in.

Globally, the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity has adopted the same goals, highlighting the urgent concerns raised in the 2021 State of the environment report about environmental degradation and inaction. The Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act review by Professor Graeme Samuel underlined the role that businesses and the private sector, and their investments, can play in halting environmental decline. Private companies, conservation groups, farmers and landholders are already looking at ways to make positive changes to their practices, to conserve Australia's natural environment. The nature repair market will lean on science and invite Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to share, on their own terms, their unique knowledge about the ecological challenge.

By legislating the market, we'll secure its ongoing integrity, stimulate investment in nature and inspire environmental enhancements across Australia. The Clean Energy Regulator, an independent statutory authority seasoned in handling such environmental tasks, will issue tradeable biodiversity certificates to Australian landholders, and these certificates can then find their way to businesses, organisations, governments and individuals. Every landholder, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, conservation groups and farmers, can join in this market. The projects they undertake could include weeding, planting native species and controlling pests: projects that are expected to deliver and yield long-term nature-positive results. This includes projects on land and water and bodies such as lakes, rivers and marine and coastal environments. The market will boost regional Australia with job creation and nature-positive economic activity.

First Nations Australians will have a lot to offer in regard to this challenge, and they'll find the nature repair market offers employment and economic opportunities. In my electorate, in Botany Bay, at the moment there's a project being undertaken, a partnership between the University of New South Wales and the Gamay Rangers, the Indigenous rangers group, whose role and responsibility is to protect and conserve the natural environment around Botany Bay. They've undertaken a partnership project to restore the seagrass to Botany Bay over time. It's been interesting to talk to some of the scientists from UNSW who are leading this project and get their views about the benefits that they've received from listening to and sitting with elders and the Gamay Rangers and hearing their perspective not only on ecological conservation but on cultural conservation as well. That has fed into the project and is achieving positive results, a great example of how First Nations Australians can contribute to ecological repair.

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