Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to rise in support of this bill before the House of Representatives today, the Nature Repair Market Bill 2023. Labor wants to leave our natural spaces better off for the next generation. I listened carefully to the speech from the member for Parkes. We represent quite different regions within New South Wales. I'm sad that he feels unable to support a bill that will leave this country better off for the next generations.

There are plenty of farmers who actually regard themselves as some of the best stewards and guardians of this land and are very, very keen to participate in a scheme that would assist them to ensure that their productive farmlands are able to both produce product for the nation and export but also conserve really important parts of our biodiversity in this nation. I look forward to working with farmers not just in New South Wales but across this country who have a deep, deep connection to this land, and their knowledge and skills will be vital in helping ensure that we do leave our natural spaces better off for those that come after us.

This bill is going to introduce a world-first scheme. No-one has tried this before. But it should not be beyond Australia to lead the world in these matters. This is going to be a scheme where landowners can be paid by a third party for protecting and restoring nature on their land. We're supporting farmers and First Nations communities—who, of course, are significant landholders in this nation—to do things like replanting vital stretches of koala habitat, repairing damaged river beds or removing invasive species. It will mobilise and make it easier for business, philanthropists and others to invest in repairing nature across Australia, and it will allow them to buy a quality product that is verified and regulated so that they can be sure that their investment is big, long lasting and has great environmental impacts at the end. Investors, philanthropists and landowners everywhere want to know that their investment is going to count for something. This scheme will help ensure that is the case.

A recent report found that by creating this biodiversity market Australia can unlock $137 billion to repair and protect our environment by 2050. That is an extraordinary sum of money—$137 billion. It is extraordinary that those opposite might be offended by the creation of a market solution to our biodiversity issues, but there you go. Strange things happen in politics. The purpose of this bill, let's not forget, is to establish a voluntary market framework to support landholders in protecting and restoring nature. It will include, importantly, a traceable biodiversity certificate, assurance and compliance arrangements, a public register and a nationally consistent approach for measuring biodiversity outcomes.

There are some terrific examples of what this scheme might deliver and some of the possible projects that it could include. Where landholders see that they have a natural marsh that needs restoration because it's a critical habitat for diverse native frogs, fish, turtles and wetland bird species, this scheme might assist in the provision of money to help remove drainage ditches and carve out livestock and feral herbivores from those areas as necessary. It might include projects like the Indigenous rangers, who undertake a lot of feral animal exclusions now but need additional support. They do things such as buffel grass removal, feral cat control and cultural burning, like we see in the central desert and the savannas in northern Australia. The certificate generated for projects like that could support Indigenous rangers working on country for activities for many years to come. It's a whole new source of income for the Indigenous rangers project, which we know is phenomenally successful in this country. It could help with projects like restoring a seagrass meadow permanently lost from historic poor catchment water quality, providing habitat for sea turtles, dugongs, marine fish and seahorses. Monitoring could be provided by local commercial and recreational fishers, who foresee local increased fish stocks. That's what they want to see in their waters, which they want to see as continued productive spaces in this nation.

After 10 years of inaction on this front—we heard that there were some possible thoughts and some groundwork being laid by the former government, but nothing happened—the Labor government have taken up that baton, and we've said that we can't tolerate inaction on this front any longer. We can't see the state of our natural surrounds fall to disrepair and misuse. We need to rebuild trust. We need to restore public confidence and public accountability. These are key to the government's Nature Positive Plan. The market will be regulated by the Clean Energy Regulator, which will have monitoring and enforcement powers, to ensure that projects are conducted in accordance with the rules. This includes monitoring, reporting and notification on the delivery of project activities and progress on the environmental outcomes. An independent committee will be there to provide advice to the minister about the methods that set the rules for the projects. That's important too. The status and ownership of certificates will be tracked through a public register. So high levels of accountability are built into this scheme.

As I said, this scheme is a world first. Australia is absolutely well placed to be a leader in this regard, and it comes as no surprise to me that it will be the Australian Labor Party to lead on this front. We are, after all, the party that has delivered every significant environmental reform in Australia. No other party has consistently acted to protect our natural assets, as the Australian Labor Party has. In 1983, Labor saved the Franklin River from being dammed. Labor protected the Daintree, Kakadu and Tasmanian World Heritage areas. Labor reformed the native forest industry and protected the most important old-growth stands across the country. Between 2007 and 2013, the federal Labor government built the largest network of marine national parks in the world, and we set Australia on a path to a low-carbon future. We protected 170,000 hectares of Tasmania's forests as World Heritage and halted the supertrawler.

While these are big, headline actions that inspire, Labor, importantly, have also embedded environment into our planning processes, and we've built ways to assess, regulate and enforce environment controls. In the early 1970s, former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam appointed Australia's second federal environment minister, Moss Cass, and the country's first urban planning minister, Tom Uren. Under Whitlam, the nation's first environmental impact statement inquiry was established and found that the sand mining on Queensland's Fraser Island was untenable. Embedding environmental outcomes while building the nation and its prosperity was central to the endeavours of the Whitlam government and the modernisation of the Labor mission.

Australia is home to some is of the most stunning natural environments in the world, but, after a decade of neglect under the Liberals and the Nationals, many of those places are now in a state of unacceptable disrepair. This has jeopardised efforts to protect threatened species and conserve natural habitats while undermining tourism opportunities for our regional economies. The nature repair market forms part of our Nature Positive Plan to protect more of what's precious to us all, repair more of what's damaged and manage nature better for the future. The government is rewriting Australia's old, broken environment laws to better protect our environment and make clearer, faster decisions. At the heart of this plan is $121 million to establish Environment Protection Australia to restore trust to a system that badly needs it. The EPA will be a tough cop on the beat. It will transform our system of environmental approvals. It will be transparent and independent. It will make environmental assessments, decide project approvals and the conditions attached to them, and it will make sure that those conditions are being followed on the ground.

Our budget last month provided urgent funding to save some of Australia's most precious places and those who look after them, including $262.3 million to support our Commonwealth national parks. This is new funding that will go to upgrading or replacing outdated infrastructure, ensuring staff can carry out threatened species protection, increasing opportunities for First Nations employment and businesses and much more. We also had $92.8 million for urgent upgrades in the town of Mutitjulu within the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park to provide critical infrastructure like water, sewerage and electricity—basic essentials many of us take for granted. We'd like to provide those and make sure that the Mutitjulu community also get to enjoy important infrastructure and connectivity. We want to help deliver better outcomes in terms of health and housing in that community, too. This is an important investment.

We also had $163.4 million to ensure the Australian Institute of Marine Science can contribute to providing world-leading scientific marine research and protect our oceans, including the Great Barrier Reef. We had $45.2 million for the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust to address a critical backlog of repairs there. There are deteriorating walls, docks and seawall stabilisation, and there are safety concerns, like the rock falls from the cliff. Other maintenance is needed to ensure public safety and avoid permanent loss of heritage value. We're also investing $236 million to establish a national and reliable flood warning system—an issue that is important to each and every one of us in this parliament, I would have thought. The funding will be used to purchase and upgrade gauges, ensuring that communities in flood-prone areas can be better prepared and supported.

We want to protect our environment from destruction, but our ambition for nature is much bigger than that. Just like the Hawke government established Landcare, we want to restore environments that have been damaged in the past. That's how we build a truly nature-positive Australia, leaving our environment in a better state for our kids and our grandkids. The Albanese Labor government is investing in projects that repair nature, including money to support our programs that repair world heritage properties and restore Ramsar wetlands. I have a Ramsar wetland in my electorate, at the Hunter Wetlands National Park. They are critical to our natural wellbeing. Having money go into those wetlands is something we should all applaud.

We also have funds towards conserving threatened species and ecosystems. There's another $118.5 million to help community groups, NGOs, local governments and First Nations groups carry out projects to clean up and restore local urban rivers and waterways. These projects include activities like planting native species along creeks and building small-scale wetlands to filter pollution and improve water quality. We're investing $7.7 million to support landholders to carry out activities to repair nature, by establishing a world-leading nature repair market. That's the subject of today's bill. That's what I seek support for from everybody in this House. We want to be a country that stops environmental decline and does the heavy lifting of repairing our nature now.

I ask everyone to join the government in this ambitious goal. As I said, it should not be beyond the Australian government to do so. We have long fought for nature on the world stage. Let a Labor government again put us on the world stage with the passage of this legislation today.

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