Sam Rae (Hawke, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It gives me great pleasure to rise in support of the Nature Repair Market Bill 2023 and related bill. It is an exciting time to be an environmentalist in this country. It's an exciting time to be an environmentalist under this Albanese Labor government. It's always interesting to reflect on history when we're looking at big reforms moving forward. Of course, this will be the first step in introducing a market based mechanism to recognise biodiversity and to generate the tradable certificates required to support that market moving forward. It reminds me of a period under the last Labor government, when we set about doing the same thing with carbon certificates. I'll come back to that shortly.

As many people in here know, my first love is environmental science. I studied environmental science here in Canberra at the ANU and focused on forestry and forest science during my period there. The issue of sustainability has been at the core of my interest across a whole range of areas ever since, and the conversation that we were always having in that space was about the triple-bottom-line benefits of any particular activity and, indeed, any particular regulatory policy intervention. The triple bottom line is about getting positive net outcomes at an environmental level, a social level and an economic level. And that is the theoretical framework, the best-practice framework, that we pursue in terms of sustainable environmental management. Of course, true environmentalism has to be pragmatic. It has to be progressive—you have to be able to make progress on it—and a critical component of the sustainability of any environmental regulatory framework is the economic component of it.

When I think about the economics of environmental management, I think of it very broadly, but one of the key areas I always come back to is jobs. Jobs—good, well-paid, sustainable jobs—are at the core of any sustainable environmental effort, and in order to create and sustain those jobs there does need to be an economic return from particular activities. This legislation provides the steps required to start to establish the necessary market to create the economic return that will ultimately create more jobs in the environmental sector and deliver a greater level of sustainability accordingly. We all understand the importance of biodiversity in any particular ecosystem, and the nature of ecosystems and environments is that they are evolving; they are changing. There is no static environmental state, and, accordingly, we have to understand our own human influence on the environment around us. Through aggressive environmental interventions, industrial development and then also some downstream effects of other human activity we do have an impact on biodiversity, in all the places and spaces, be it through the expansion of our cities and communities into new land and new areas or, perhaps, from pollutions and other contaminations of airways and waterways that do flow on and have those downstream effects. We understand that everything we do has an impact on the environment around us. Unfortunately, if that's not well managed, if that's not consciously considered, we can have a negative impact on biodiversity. But that does not necessarily have to be the case. Indeed, there are a whole range of industrial activities, a whole range of employment-generating business and other social activities that can happen in our environmental systems and can, in fact, aid and further enhance the environmental credentials of those systems. Sometimes it's about repair and sometimes it's about organic enhancement along the way.

I particularly like to think of one of my beloved sectors: the forestry sector. It is a sector that is an employer all across our country, with many thousands of jobs in every state and territory. The native forest sector here in Australia has the potential to be one of the great sustainable industries, one of the great sustainable employers. There's no doubt that the industry itself has faced challenges over time and has not always found itself either capable or willing to conform with the regulatory frameworks that are in place that to protect the environmental credibility of the spaces they operate in, often despite the best of intentions of those that are there. To some extent, that has been exacerbated by the unnecessary expectation—perhaps unreasonable at times—that the costs associated with that environmental maintenance, repair and enhancement will be borne by the existing commercial operations when in actual fact those environmental interventions are externalities of the standard commercial operation in that space and, indeed, what we need to do is generate a mechanism for the economic return on those investments.

This is what this bill does. This bill recognises biodiversity as an asset for our community, an asset for our society and, indeed, an asset now for our economy. It now creates the conditions for investment in environmental biodiversity. Those businesses or community groups that go about improving biodiversity in their local environment can now generate an economic return to fund that activity, to fund those improvements. That's a really critical component here. This is something, as I said earlier, that was attempted to be done, similarly, with carbon crediting. I was very fortunate to work on some carbon modelling projects in the lead-up to the Copenhagen climate change conference around the time that the former Labor government was bringing the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme legislation into this place. It's again a pertinent time to be thinking about the politics around that particular issue, particularly as we see the Liberal Party and the Greens teaming up once again in the Senate to knock off a very important piece of progressive legislation. That's, of course, what happened in regard to the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, a model with great similarity to the concept of a market-based mechanism for biodiversity improvement. What we have seen is the recent review of Carbon crediting, led by Professor Ian Chubb, with a look back at that period of dysfunction that was caused by the Greens party teaming up with the Liberal Party to essentially deny the Australian economy, Australian society and the Australian environment the opportunity to have a market-based mechanism for recognising carbon sequestration and carbon abatement.

We know the cost of that was a flailing decade under the conservative government, under the Liberals opposite, whereby they couldn't land an environment or energy policy. The consequence of that for our economy was that big employers, particularly those that had significant emissions profiles, were unable to act with confidence. As they didn't know the future of the regulatory environment in which they were operating, they were unable to act with security. Ultimately, the impact of that was they weren't able to invest in their own carbon abatement. Even though they wanted to reduce their emissions, they weren't able to make the necessary investments to do it because the investment environment was so deeply compromised by the Greens party and the Liberal Party teaming up in the Senate to prevent a world-leading market based mechanism. The irony of those so-called economic liberals opposite working with the Greens to stand in the way of a market based mechanism to deal with the environmental challenges of that particular time is not lost on us.

Coming back to the review of carbon credit units that Professor Ian Chubb recently completed, we took the lessons of the former government's dysfunction, and they are enshrined in this piece of work. We now have a proposal before us for a market based mechanism for biodiversity recognition. It's a system that has integrity and a framework that is structured, considered and, importantly, scientifically informed about what biodiversity is. What the improvements look like is a system for measuring those improvements and, importantly, attributing an economic value to those improvements in the form of the tradable certificates.

There are a whole range of organisations, businesses, community groups, philanthropists and others across our economy who are passionate about protecting biodiversity, who want to see a market based mechanism that they can have confidence in, that has integrity, that they can begin trading with a view to supporting the economic framework that leads to the environmental and social outcomes that biodiversity brings. We're so very lucky to see some of those businesses, some of those community groups, leading the way in that space, and that has informed a lot of the work that has gone into this. We know the demand is there. We know the Australian community wants to see sustainable biodiversity improvements. We know that must have an economic underpinning. And we now, finally, have the mechanism, delivered through this bill, delivered through those tradable certificates, for that economic underpinning.

There are a whole bunch of different activities that those groups can undertake, and they are, importantly, scientifically informed. Weeding, planting native species, pest control: these are examples of the types of activities that can improve or lead to improvements in biodiversity outcomes, and we can see that happening in ecosystems that are varied and variable all across our wide, brown land—that's not always brown. We've seen that in our forests; we see it in our riparian ecosystems along our rivers and our waterways; we see it in our agricultural zones, which are ripe for improved biodiversity, particularly with improved forward thinking. Farmers, particularly new generations of farming families coming through, can see the opportunity within their own established wildlife corridors. They can see it in their windbreaks. They can see the opportunity for improved biodiversity, particularly as those farmers are now generating greater efficiencies from the arable land that they do have.

There are other parts of the ecosystem that can be protected on an ongoing basis. We see that with the reduction in land-clearing activities that occur. And again, these are all opportunities to generate biodiversity certificates—something that we've never had a mechanism for delivering an economic return on previously. Once again, we see this legislation as the enabling piece for facilitating the demand of the community to improve biodiversity while making sure it is done so sustainably and with an economic underpinning.

The Nature Repair Market will enable, indeed, it will encourage First Nations and traditional owners to further involve themselves in these activities, with leaders in this space to be drivers of the interventions required in accordance, as I said, with science and with traditional knowledge. Bringing those things together will ultimately mean that we create more jobs across our country and more jobs for Aboriginal and First Nations people, who bring a particular level of expertise and passion to this pursuit. We know that they will be sustainable, well-paid jobs because of the economic underpinnings that this legislation delivers. We know that the ability to trade certificates to generate a scientifically informed biodiversity return that has an economic attachment to it means that those jobs will be sustainable into the future. We can enjoy both the biodiversity outcomes and the employment outcomes. This legislation brings together the triple-bottom-line outcomes we have been seeking for so long. It lines up the environmental interest with the social and economic interests. I commend the legislation to the House.

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