Tania Lawrence (Hasluck, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Australian poet Judith Wright wrote of the wild black cockatoos:

Tossed on the crest of their high trees

Crying the world's unrest.

And the world is restless. We have come to a point where our own actions have made life more difficult for many species, both flora and fauna. Where I come from, in Noongar boodja, the karak—the black cockatoos—of three subspecies are under severe pressure. Mammals, birds, reptiles and vegetation are under threat in different ways and through different causes all over Australia. If we agree that this is an issue—and I'm sure we agree on that point—then we can only differ in the way in which we decide we need to respond.

There are different ways to respond to biodiversity threats, and they are not exclusive. One way is to improve protection. The budget provides for a new Commonwealth protective regime for the environment, an overarching EPA, which will better ensure that development occurs in a manner consistent with environmental values and outcomes. This is no small change: $121 million has been budgeted over four years for Environment Protection Australia and $51.5 million for Environment Information Australia to ensure that decisions by the EPA are well founded and better information is available to the community as well.

It would be wonderful if protection were enough. The parlous state of many of our environments tells us that we need to do more. Members are often on their feet in this place speaking of evidence based policy, and that is fair enough. We should always look for evidence to underpin our policymaking in health, in education and in every area of government. Failure to base our policymaking on the best available evidence leads inexorably to ills such as the terrible delays in this country taking proper climate action, with this Labor government now having to play catch-up. Protection has not been enough. The evidence for this is contained in many places—in the hills and the valleys, in our towns and waterways, and in the diminishing count of many species that once flourished in this country. It is contained in the Samuel report. In October 2020, Graeme Samuel stated:

Australia's natural environment and iconic places are in an overall state of decline and are under increasing threat.

He called for:

… actively restoring the environment and facilitating the scale of investment needed to deliver better outcomes.

The new Commonwealth environment protection agency, as good as it will be, will not be charged with actively restoring the environment, nor will it be charged with facilitating investment. It will have a different regulatory role. The current bill is designed to meet Samuel's challenge. He further stated:

The scale of the task ahead is significant and is too large for governments to try to solve alone. To support greater collaboration between governments and the private sector, new mechanisms are needed to leverage the scale of investment that will be needed for decades to come.

We already engage positively as a society with nature, through cultural activities like hiking and camping, and we engage positively through laws and regulations designed to protect. The budget goes further than ever before in that regard, as I mentioned earlier. This bill for a nature repair market seeks to allow more people to engage positively with nature through the economy, by making the repair of nature more visibly and actively an economic good. It encourages those who already do this work to do more and to receive benefit, and it encourages more people, businesses, not-for-profits, associations, councils, Indigenous organisations and companies to engage. I have heard the usual wobblies from some members opposite, that the scheme will somehow be compulsory. It isn't. I've heard that it will eat up valuable farmland. It won't. Members need to catch up.

On 29 April this year, I attended an incredibly informative workshop hosted by the knowledgeable Chris Ferreira, founder of the Forever Project. That organisation is proud to have provided environmental education to over 130,000 people over the last 30 years. Chris taught us how to create our own patch of rural paradise through healthy soil, water and land management. Sharing details with the workshop attendees of the government's nature repair market plan gave life to those ideas and gave hope to those landholders as to how they could enact that change to restore their land by having the backing of those businesses, not-for-profits and community organisations through the unlocking of their share of the $137 billion that this is forecast to provide. This will enable them to put into practice the nature restoration that Chris spoke about.

There are dozens of environmental groups within the peri-urban electorate of Hasluck, each with a particular focus. I will name just some: the Perth Hills Climate Change Interest Group, Trillion Trees Australia, the Citizens Climate Lobby Hasluck Chapter, the Susannah Brook Catchment Group Inc., the Blackadder Woodbridge Catchment Group, the Jane Brook Catchment Group Inc., Kanyana Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre and the Ellenbrook Bushland Group. These groups and others will follow this debate with keen interest, and some of them will no doubt seek to add economic action to their political advocacy. The business community, too, is happily waiting for this scheme to begin. Law firms up and down the main street of every city—Minter Ellison, Corrs and others—have already published advice to their clients about this new market.

I invite members opposite to get on board. I understand that this legislation is heralded as the first of its kind in the world. That, by itself, it might cause some disquiet. I've only been here for a year, but I know this about legislation: for every piece of legislation, sometime, somewhere, it was the first of its kind. Pensions, universal education, Medicare, superannuation—some innovative person somewhere came up with an excellent idea and then everyone else copied them and later called it normal, even mundane. It's okay to be first. It's wonderful.

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