Dan Repacholi (Hunter, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

They voted against the safeguards mechanism, which is a policy that they championed. They voted against their own policy because for them politics is more important than progress. Unlike the previous government, we are making sure that Australia does its bit to look after the environment. We are not slacking behind the rest of the world. But clearly there is a lot of repair to be done. Significant investment is needed in conservation and restoration for a nature-positive future, and the findings of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act review by Professor Graeme Samuel AC make clear that businesses and private sector investment can contribute to reversing environmental decline and help repair and heal nature. We know that some of these private companies, as well as conservation groups, farmers and other landholders, are looking for ways to achieve positive outcomes for nature.

The time for this bill to be introduced is now, with an independent report by PricewaterhouseCoopers estimating that the market for biodiversity in Australia could unlock $137 billion in financial flows by 2050. This is a significant amount of demand, and we are making sure we are well placed to respond to that demand. This isn't about politics either. The Nature Repair Market will be based on science and allow Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders to promote their unique knowledge on their terms. This legislation will encourage investment in nature and drive environmental improvements across Australia.

The projects which will be undertaken include activities such as weeding, planting native species and pest control to deliver long-term nature-positive outcomes. These projects can be undertaken on land or water, including lakes and rivers as well as marine and coastal environments. This is also a win for regional Australia and electorates like mine because it will help create jobs and a nature-positive economy as well.

In order for the Nature Repair Market to be effective and make a real difference, it is important that buyers can invest in the market with confidence. To help make sure that this is the case, the bill provides for biodiversity certificates to have integrity and represent an actual environmental improvement. Another key integrity measure is an independent expert committee which is responsible for ensuring projects deliver high-quality nature-positive outcomes underpinned by a constant approach to the measurement, assessment, and verification of biodiversity. There will also be assurance and compliance requirements, which include monitoring, reporting and notification on the delivery of project activities and the progress of environmental outcomes. This will help to ensure the integrity of environmental outcomes.

Part of rebuilding and repairing means restoring public accountability and trust. Transparency will be a core element of the scheme; comprehensive information and project certificates will be available on a public register. Additional information will be regularly published by the regulator, and there will be activity releases of relevant data by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water. This means parliament and the public will be able to monitor the scheme, providing opportunity for citizen oversight, which will also support certainty and value for the market.

Our government is committed to doing things differently. We are committed to taking care of our environment and creating a better system to make sure that the environment is properly taken care of. The Nature Repair Market will be an opportunity to create a supply of projects certified through purpose-designed offset methods, and the register will be a comprehensive and public source of information on these projects and the biodiversity that they are protecting. This is a way forward for how Australia repairs the environment. This bill will establish a new market for investing in nature positive outcomes. It will support Australia's international commitments to protect and repair ecosystems and reverse species decline and extinction. It will generate investment and job opportunities for the nature-positive economy and create new income streams for landholders, including Aboriginal peoples, Torres Strait Islanders and farmers. It's a win for the environment, it's a win for landholders and it's a win for jobs. This bill is a win for business and a win for our nation. This bill is a winner for all.

We are blessed in this country, and in the Hunter specifically, with our natural environment, and at no time should we stop advancing as a country or as humans, but, as we do so, we have a responsibility to make sure we look after the environment. We need to do this for ourselves, and we must do this for our generations to come. This bill is another step in this journey, and I commend this bill to the House.

Kate Thwaites (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Recently our government marked our first anniversary in office. It's an exciting milestone, but it's one where we also reflect on what we've already achieved and the huge amount of work that remains, and this bill really fits into that area. It's an area where, under the previous government, we saw neglect. It's an area that our government is determined to do more in.

As I'm sure many of us here in this place would agree, we are here to serve our communities and to leave a legacy for future generations; to make the lives of people in our communities better today, better tomorrow and better well into the future. For me, bills like this one are ones where I think about the future of my children, and I know that for many people in my community these are the types of issues they talk to me about: 'I want to know what sort of world am I leaving to my children. I want to know will they be able to see the very special, amazing, unique places, the nature in Australia that I got to see growing up. Will that be there for future generations?' That's really what we're considering here: what kind of world are we leaving for the next generation, and the next and the next?

It is one of the reasons why I am proud to be part of this government, one that has already, in our year in office, taken great strides on climate action and on protecting the environment, including through the nature repair market, which is a key plank in our government's nature-positive plan. And this market is important. In facing the challenges in environmental protection and climate action, everyone—governments, organisations, individuals—must work together. We know that we need significant investment in conservation and restoration for a nature-positive future, and that all of these parts of our communities can contribute to reversing environmental decline. Every single one of us has a role to play in this. And this is where an initiative like the nature repair market can really make a difference. The market will make it easier to invest in projects to protect and repair nature. It does just what it says. It will help in supporting landholders, including farmers and First Nations communities, to do things like plant native species, to repair damaged riverbeds and to remove invasive species.

One of the welcome developments we've seen in Australia in the past few years has been the expansion of interest in driving better environmental outcomes. I know I said there is huge interest in my electorate in this, but I know it's not just in my electorate. I know there are people right around Australia who have a genuine interest in this, who are getting involved in so many different ways. I know there are landholders across Australia who are interested in doing more, in doing their bit as part of this broader effort to conserve and restore nature across our country.

Conservation groups have been doing this important work for decades, but they are now being joined by more farmers and landholders as well as all the community organisations and companies who do want to play their part in this really important effort, in this work that we are doing to protect these places not just for now, but into the future and for the generations to come.

Last year, the Minister for the Environment and Water released the State of the environment report. It's a five-year report card on the Australian environment. For those who were not following that release closely, I remind the House that this was a report that those opposite didn't want us to see. The member for Farrer, now the deputy Liberal leader, was at the time the minister for the environment. She really didn't want the public to see that report, because she refused to release it. We know why, now that we have seen that report. It is, put simply, a horror of a read. There is example after example of just how much damage a decade of the Liberal and National parties in government did to our environment—once again, one of those key areas just neglected. The damage done under their watch is nothing short of disgraceful. Because of that neglect by those opposite—we've learned through the report—the Australian environment is in very bad shape, and it was heading in the wrong direction. The report found that Australia has lost more mammal species to extinction than any other continent. For the first time, Australia has more foreign plant species than native. Habitat the size of Tasmania has been cleared. Plastics are choking our oceans—up to 80,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometre. And the flow in most Murray-Darling Basin rivers reached record low levels. It is in no way exaggerating to say that these facts paint a dire picture.

Of course, it is no surprise. It is incredibly disappointing, it is distressing, but it is really no surprise that the environment fared so badly under the Liberals and Nationals, in their decade of waste and denial, when you think of what they did. They got rid of any sort of climate laws we had in the country, failed to fix our broken environment laws, laughed about Australia's Pacific island neighbours going under water—we all remember that comment—and failed to land a single one of their 22 different energy policies. They sabotaged the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. They promised $40 million for Indigenous water but never delivered a drop. They set recycling targets with no plan to actually deliver them. They voted against the safeguards mechanism, the policy that they previously championed—although that one came after we were in government, but still there is a pattern emerging here, isn't there? They cut highly protected areas of marine parks in half. They cut billions from our environment department.

As I said, this record of really doing nothing, of in fact actively working to undermine our environment, actively enabling the type of damage that we have seen, has continued. There have been a number of bills before the parliament in the year since the election which have presented a number of opportunities that have been put to those opposite to acknowledge that their approach failed during their decade in office. But it continues to be clear, through their actions in this place and outside, that they have not learned anything. Regardless, our government will continue to do the important and necessary work on repairing nature in this country, on fixing our environment, on protecting the places that are so special and unique to this country and, of course, on addressing climate change.

In one year alone, our government has already taken important steps on our ambitious agenda for the environment and our goal of a nature-positive Australia, protecting more of what's precious, repairing more of what's damaged and managing nature better for the future. Our government is developing stronger laws to better protect nature, to give faster, clearer development decisions—and that's a move that has been welcomed across the board. We are establishing a federal environment protection agency, a tough cop on the beat enforcing the stronger laws. I know there has been a lot of support for that move, in particular, in my community. We are working towards zero new extinctions, backed up by our $225 million investment to protect koalas and other threatened species. We are restoring our urban rivers and waterways. Again, this is one that is close to the heart of my local community. There are three projects in my local community that are benefiting from this work. There is $1.7 million for the Annulus Billabong in Yarra Flats Park, $150,000 for the Friends of Edendale in Eltham North and $500,000 for the Darebin Creek—all important urban waterways in Jagajaga. We know how important it is that we do the work to restore and protect those areas. We're restoring mangroves, saltmarshes and seagrasses along our coast in Queensland, Tasmania and South Australia, through our Blue Carbon projects. We're cracking down on plastic pollution, doing that work that was neglected for far too long. We've signed up to ambitious global targets and we're giving plastic recycling a $60 million boost. We're doubling the number of Indigenous rangers to help look after country, and that's just a taste.

The Nature Repair Market Bill 2023 and the Nature Repair Market (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2023 add to the work our government is doing in so many areas to repair the environment. Once established, the nature repair market will be a world-leading voluntary market framework to support landholders in protecting and restoring nature. It will include a tradable biodiversity certificate, assurance and compliance arrangements, a public register, and a nationally consistent approach for measuring biodiversity outcomes. The market will help to mobilise private investment to protect, manage and restore Australia's natural landscape. As I've already said, there are so many people in Australia—corporations and others—who want to be involved in this work. What they've been looking for is the mechanism to allow them to get involved to do their part to help conserve, protect and restore nature, and that is what this will do. It will enable the Clean Energy Regulator to issue Australian landholders with tradable biodiversity certificates for projects that protect, manage and restore nature. These certificates can then be sold to businesses, organisations, governments and individuals. There are a wide range of provisions to ensure the biodiversity certificates have integrity, so that people can invest with confidence.

All landholders, including First Nations peoples, conservation groups and farmers can participate in the market. Landholders can undertake projects that improve or protect existing habitat as well as projects to establish or restore habitat. These projects can be on land, in inland waterways, lakes or rivers, or in marine and coastal environments. Some examples of the type of work that might be undertaken through this are: improving or restoring existing native vegetation through fencing or weeding; planting a mix of local species in a previously cleared area; and protecting rare grasslands that provide habitat for endangered species. The bill includes provisions to ensure that nature projects are based on the best available science, because on this side of the House we listen to the science. We know that being guided by the science is the way to protect our environment, to tackle climate change, and to ensure a sustainable future not just for us but also for our children and their children, the work that good governments should do in this place. The provisions that ensure that include: an independent expert nature repair market committee; methodology determinations that set out the requirements for different types of projects, meet legislative biodiversity integrity standards and are endorsed by the repair nature market committee; a consistent way of measuring improvements in biodiversity, set out in an overarching biodiversity assessment instrument; requirements for biodiversity projects to be undertaken in line with the methodology determinations; tradable biodiversity certificates that are regulated to ensure they provide accurate information about projects; and a public register of projects and certificates.

Our government is making it easier for people to invest in the activities that help repair nature. We are incredibly fortunate in this country to live on a continent that includes such special, magical places. These are the places that are our heritage. They are the places that our First Nations people are offering to share with us—offering through the work that's happening in this place today on the Voice—for us all to protect and look after as part of our history and ongoing future. When we have those places here, it behoves all of us to do everything we can to protect them and to make sure that we do the work now that means they will be there for future generations. That's why this bill and the work our government has been doing more broadly to protect the environment and tackle climate change in this country are so important. It is why I am so proud to be a member of the Albanese Labor government. It is why members of my community come to me and say: 'It is so important you do this work. I want you to do this work now for us, for our children. This country is worth protecting.' We know we have to do the work now to make sure the environment is protected into the future. We do want to leave the environment across our country better off because that is better for all of us—it is better for those of us here today and it is better for our kids and our grandkids. We do want to work with communities right across the country to do this work. This bill will support landholders, farmers and First Nations communities to do those things that many of them are already doing off their own bat. This will provide the mechanism and the market to do the work and to have more people get involved, things like planting native species, repairing damaged riverbeds and removing invasive species. Beyond those just doing the work, we are making it easier for others in Australia to invest in that work. We are creating a market that will allow for people who do want to support this work to see how they can be involved through the market, a market that is, as I said, based on science and based on what is best for the environment. We are setting this up so that it is not only a scheme that works for the short-term or in special interests—in fact not for special interests—but also a scheme that is set up to protect our environment into the future and allow all of us to be part of making sure that our country's environment is protected and that we do the work that's necessary.

Mike Freelander (Macarthur, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm very grateful to be given the opportunity to speak today on this very important legislation. The Nature Repair Market Bill will make it easier for all people in Australia to invest in the production and repair of our natural environment, including businesses, organisations, non-government organisations, individuals and companies. Each have a pivotal role in helping repair our natural environment, in preventing climate change and protecting the future environment for our children, our grandchildren and the generations that will follow.

I have a very special interest in this in my electorate of Macarthur. My koala population is the last surviving urban koala colony that is chlamydia free. My electorate of Macarthur is at the apex of the Sydney environment, if we see the Sydney Basin as a triangle that spreads towards Macarthur, the south-west. We have vital environmental features in my electorate, including the bases of the two major rivers of the Sydney Basin, the Georges River and the Nepean River. We are, really, the last area of the Sydney Basin that is available to for housing development, and we've seen development applications for massive developments happening to my electorate and just to the south-west, including the townships of Picton, Wilton, Appin and Maldon, where there is already massive development happening.

Shamefully in the last 20 or 30 years, there's been haphazard development in the Sydney Basin. There have been extinctions and loss of environment, and the last remnants of the Cumberland Plain woodland is gradually disappearing. That's been under the watch of successive government, not always coalition governments but some Labor governments shamefully, and I think we all have to have responsibility for this. At last, federally, we have the government that is honest about our environment, that is transparent about what we want to do and that is very active now in trying to protect our environmental future for the generations that will follow.

I'm now grandparent, and I want my grandchildren to grow up in an environment where they can see the natural habitat, the flora and the fauna, the same as I did. Our opportunity to do that is disappearing fast. In Macarthur, we have schools where kids can look out the windows of their classrooms and see koalas in the trees around them, and I think that is something that is worthy of protecting beyond measure. Yet we have developers and we have politicians who are willing to see that destroyed. In the last 10 years of Liberal-National government in New South Wales, we've had complete in action on the environment—both at a state political level and at a federal level. I invited all the state environment ministers since I was elected in 2016, all the federal environment ministers since I was elected in 2016—the coalition environment ministers—to come to Macarthur and see what was happening, including the last coalition Treasurer, who was also an environment minister, the former member for Kooyong—to come out and have a look. The only person who did was Matt Kean, the then New South Wales environment minister. He made a lot of promises. None were fulfilled.

It almost brought me to tears watching the Cumberland woodland being destroyed every time I would go out to Appin and watch the Appin development. I saw these koala habitat trees being bulldozed into the ground—absolutely tragic. I begged the environment ministers—I begged Gabrielle Upton when she was the New South Wales environment minister, I begged Melissa Price when she was the federal minister and I begged Matt Kean when he was the state environment minister—to do something to stop this environmental destruction. Nothing was done.

It's winter now, and our koalas are mostly pretty sedentary at this time, but pretty soon it will be spring. We'll watch those koalas cross Appin Road and get killed. We'll watch our wombats, our wallaroos and our lace monitors—the big goanna like lizards—cross the road and be killed. Nothing has been done. There have been promises made and nothing has been done—until the advent of a federal Labor government. Finally, we're getting things done.

This legislation is a commitment by the environment minister, the member for Sydney, Tanya Plibersek, to environmental protection. It's imperative that we follow the findings of the State of the environment report, which found that our environment is in very bad shape and was not static but getting worse. The report found that Australia had lost more mammal species to extinction than any other continent, that plastics are choking our oceans and that this all occurred under the watch of the previous coalition government as things were rapidly getting worse, as our population ramped up and as our climate deteriorated.

Over the past year there have been over 500 new species discovered in Australia and named by scientists. This equates to two new species every day. I think that's remarkable. I thank our dedicated scientists for the work they do in making us aware of our flora and fauna and how they must be protected. At this stage I'd like to pay credit to Professor Robert Close, a scientist from Western Sydney University, who did the first koala study of south-western Sydney and found the large numbers of koalas that we have with disease-free status, and their mobility across the Georges and Nepean river areas. He also documented many that had died in road traffic accidents et cetera.

The Albanese Labor government is committed to protecting our local species and to putting in place laws that will encourage people to do this. With my colleague the member for Hughes, I have set up the parliamentary friends of endangered species group. I think it's important that all of us as politicians, as lawmakers, realise the urgency of the crisis facing our environment—and we must act now. It is getting too late to change things.

I'm always very interested in new ways and means to protect our environment. We depend on our scientists to tell us about this. In Macarthur, in our periurban environment, we have the potential to allow our children and grandchildren to maintain the ability to see koalas from their classrooms, to see kangaroos and wallabies in our woodlands, to see the beautiful lace monitors—the big lizards—but also things like our snakes and our other reptiles, and our birds. We have black cockatoos and all sorts of bird life in our environment. I want our kids to be able to continue to see that. I was dismayed by the lack of action from previous governments, state and federal, to realise the urgency of protecting our national environment and our flora and fauna. Sadly, those on the other side really never understood the importance of it and never understood the important biodiversity that is present in our urban and peri-urban areas that require protection. Good government means transparency and it means action, and this is what the Albanese government is doing with this legislation. I also thank the New South Wales Labor government for being committed to the same policies. We depend also on our non-government organisations such as the Total Environment Centre and the Nature Conservation Council, which have helped us find ways of preserving our environment for the future.

This bill brings us all together. It brings together politicians, farmers, private companies, conservation groups, scientists, universities and individuals to protect our environment. The biodiversity offsets that will help us protect our environment are a more than $120 billion market. This is something we will now set in stone in legislation for the future, and this legislation will help with that. Transparency of course is a core of this policy, and it is very important that we allow people to see what is happening in our environment around the country. I speak mainly about Macarthur, but I have been all over this country and have seen the magnificent diversity of environments that we have, from Tasmania, to Western Australia, to Kakadu, to the Great Barrier Reef—

A government member: The Great Ocean Road!

The Great Ocean Road in Victoria has been mentioned! It is a magnificent environment that I have been to and seen. This bill will help preserve those environments for the future generations. We often take our grandchildren down to the South Coast to look at some of the unbelievable environments around Jervis Bay and further south, and I want them to be able to continue to see the biodiversity in those areas. It is so important for their future that we do this. This bill will support certainty and value for the market, and it shows our commitment to restoring accountability and public trust, which our Nature Positive Plan preserves.

Further, we're committed to working with all government and non-government agencies to ensure that the certificates issued in the Nature Repair Market are not the products of greenwashing, to ensure that they really mean what they say and to ensure there is transparency about what they do. Tanya Plibersek, the environment minister, is determined to do that. It's imperative that these certificates accurately reflect the projects and investment that they represent and that the projects in the carbon and biodiversity markets are not affected by misleading claims, and transparency is important in that. These are all very, very important steps, and I am very proud to be part of a government that takes nature protection and preservation seriously. We are already committed to protecting 30 per cent of our land and seas by 2030. We have set a goal of zero new extinctions, with a more than $200 million investment in protecting threatened species.

Overall, this bill will establish a new market for investing in nature-positive outcomes and environment-positive outcomes. It will support Australia's international commitments to protect and repair ecosystems and reverse species decline and extinction. I am very fond of our local species, particularly our koalas. I have encouraged a proposal to make a Twin Rivers national park in the Macarthur area, connecting up the Georges and Nepean rivers in a koala protection area, that will connect up with the Dharug National Park, which has very important Indigenous heritage and Indigenous artefacts in the park. I really would like that to be preserved as a further extension of our local national parks. All of this will happen only with commitment from all forms of government, local, state and federal. I am very proud to be part of an Albanese Labor government that is supporting this environmental plan for our future, our children’s future and the generations that follow in the future. I commend the bill to the House.

Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Like the member for Macarthur, I have a peri-urban electorate. I'm not sure my koalas are quite as famous as the member for Macarthur's koalas, but we do see the odd koala at the Langwarrin Flora and Fauna Reserve. I have seen both a tiger snake and a tawny frogmouth in my own backyard, and needless to say there was one of those I was happy to see! Like in many electorates, whether they be urban, peri-urban, regional or rural, the people in my electorate care deeply about both the local environment and, more broadly, Australia's environment and what we have always been incredibly proud of: our native flora and fauna. I was trying to think of a way to describe how integral to the sense of being Australian our flora and fauna is. I came up with the suggestion that Crocodile Dundee wasn't necessarily popular for the acting so much as—

Not everyone in the chamber agrees with that statement, but I will carry on! It was not so much for the acting as it was for a depiction of an Australia that Australians, no matter where they live in the country, no matter how long they've been here—whether they were born here or came here—inherently think of as Australia. It is the outback, the native animals—a slightly outdated, sexist man, but apart from that! The environment somehow is just a part of all of us. As I said, people in my electorate care about that and identify with the Australian environment, as do people across the country.

Here are just two small examples of what locals are doing in Dunkley because they care about the environment. Of course, those who have the longest connection to the environment—and it's about culture as much as it is about where they live—are out First Nations people. Ben was kind enough to talk to me about a program operating in my community and the surrounding region called the Warreen Beek rangers course. Warreen Beek means 'saltwater people' in the local language. It's a training program for Indigenous rangers developed with the Bunurong and Wiradjuri land councils in collaboration with a lot of other groups, including Holmesglen TAFE and Trust for Nature. The course was developed as there was a lack of trained people to work as land management practitioners. It was consultation with community members that led to the idea of starting a course. We are not only tapping in to First Nations connection with the land but also giving people qualifications that allow them to use that connection as part of a career.

Rangers in the program are learning to care for country. It is a course that's designed specifically with and for traditional owners, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, to learn the skills to work on country, providing accredited training in areas such as pest plant control, revegetation, construction, chainsaw use, occupational health and safety, and cultural studies. It's a hands-on approach that provides a culturally safe space for people to learn together and is actively improving the local environment. Students in the course have worked in coastal areas and on properties that have conservation covenants, providing landholders with a chance to understand traditional knowledge. Students learn land-care skills such as plant identification and threatened species conservation techniques. This is the sort of program that this Albanese government wants to invest in and support. It's a concrete example of commitment to environment being delivered by local communities with and for First Nations people, something that I think is a tangible example, of course, of what the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice will accomplish if we get the referendum through later this year.

The second example of my community's commitment to the environment and sustainability that I wanted to tell the chamber about is the Frankston High School Eco Team. I've had a lot to do with in the different students that have come through in the four years I've been in this place and the few years before I was elected. They are always, always looking for ways to improve the environment around their school and the sustainability of not just their school but the broader community, in the knowledge that climate change and threats to biodiversity are the existential threats to their future.

These exceptional young people recently came and spoke to Paul Edbrooke, the member for Frankston, and me about the need for better environmental education in schools, embedding education about sustainability across all courses so you're not just learning about it if you are studying geography; it's part of science and English and home tech and all of the subjects that everyone does. Everyone can learn about environment and sustainability, how the subjects impact those concepts and also how those concepts can enhance the subject. Then they had an incredibly detailed and impressive submission about the policies of the education department on protecting the environment and sustainability, showing how they were vague and lacked enforcement. As their school is going through renovation because of investment, they asked why the state government didn't have stricter standards on sustainability and protection of the environment when building public school facilities. I don't think you could get smarter or more involved young people than the Frankston High School economics team, who are actively taking a role in looking after the environment, for their future but also for the people that come after them.

We know that we now have a government that is committed to protecting 30 per cent of Australia's lands and seas by 2030. These are the goals that were adopted globally under the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, and they're the goals that this piece of legislation is looking to help us reach. The goals reinforce the findings of the 2021 State of the environment report in Australia, which was an incredibly disturbing report with a story of environmental degradation, loss and inaction.

How could it be the case, in a country where the environment, the flora and fauna, are deeply embedded in our national psyche, that we could have lost more mammal species to extinction than any other continent? How could it be the case that Australia, a country where we almost venerate the wattle, the banksia and all of our local plant species, now has more foreign plant species than native species in the country? How could it be the case? In just short of two decades—in this century alone—habitat the size of Tasmania has been cleared. We know that plastics are choking our oceans with about 80,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometre. I'm not even making a political point. It's really just the point that this is where we're at in this country. We can't be a country that sees ourselves as unique in the world because of our landscapes, our waterways and our animals yet does nothing to protect them or doesn't do enough to protect them.

It's why I'm really pleased about this government's Nature Positive Plan and the establishment of the Nature Repair Market. If anybody embodies the saying 'hit the ground running', it has to be the Minister for the Environment and Water, who hasn't wasted a minute getting on with the job of saying: 'What legislative measures do we need? What oversight measures do we need? What role can we play in the international community to not just protect what we have left but try to restore some of what we've lost?' That's what's really important. This Nature Repair Market doesn't just protect what we've got; it also helps us restore what we've lost, harnessing business and private sector investment, working so that landholders, farmers and First Nations communities can play their roles in planting native species, repairing damaged riverbeds and removing invasive species.

All the speakers before me have talked about what this legislation does, so there's nothing new or revelatory in what I'm saying about it, but the structure of this scheme is really important. It's fundamentally important that the clean energy regulator is going to have that regulatory role. It's fundamentally important that there is going to be transparency and integrity in the scheme. We have to make sure that there's not greenwashing. It just boggles my mind, really, that corporations would like to pretend that they're doing something for the environment but not actually do it. If you know that you need to pretend, then you know that there is a moral imperative. You know it matters to people but you still don't care enough to actually do it. That's why it is really important that the ACCC and ASIC will have a role in ensuring certificates under this market aren't really greenwashing.

I am proud to be part of a government that wants to do things differently. I am proud of a government that wants to act swiftly. I invite members of the opposition to be part of that. We do stand here and make partisan remarks. We have talked about the 10 years under those opposite, which we see as marked with wasted opportunities and neglect, but maybe let's put that behind us for this and say, 'Let's move forward.' Let's have some bipartisanship about moving forward about something that, when it comes down to it, surely we all care about. We all care about protecting Australia's unique environment. Surely we can't have an argument about encouraging biodiversity and all it represents. I'd be surprised if there was an argument about using a market system to do so. I would have thought those on the other side would have been right up for that sort of mechanism. Let's put the cudgels down for once.

Anika Wells (Lilley, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Aged Care) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

No.

Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Minister for Aged Care is slightly sceptical about that approach. I just mean about this, right now. Let's put the cudgels down about going forward. Here's this legislation; here's an opportunity to start being part of a cooperative approach to protect what matters the most, which is somewhere healthy, safe and beautiful for us all to live in and for our grandchildren and children to live in. If we don't have that, the rest of it isn't going to matter very much.

Alison Byrnes (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Nature Repair Market Bill 2023. Like many in this place, I want to make sure that Australia's next generation inherits a better Australia than the one that my generation inherited. This includes natural environment and the custodianship of it. Given the challenges that we now face with the change in climate, the task of remediation, repairing and rebuilding our natural environment has only become more challenging. These global forces mean that we shouldn't give up, that we need to become more innovative, more adaptive and more committed to task. That is what this bill before us seeks to do. It would introduce a world-leading voluntary market framework to support landholders in protecting and restoring nature. It establishes our tradeable biodiversity certificate, assurance and compliance arrangements, a public register and a nationally consistent approach for measuring biodiversity outcomes. This will mobilise private investment to protect, manage and restore Australia's natural landscape. In other words, this market will make it easier for businesses, organisations, government and individuals to invest in projects to protect and repair nature.

Establishing the market in legislation will ensure its ongoing integrity. It will encourage investment in nature and drive environmental improvements across Australia. If anything from the past decade of coalition government has shown us, it is that to attract investment you need to provide certainty, transparency and integrity.

To achieve this the bill establishes an independent nature repair market committee to advise the minister on scheme integrity. Methodology determinations that set out the requirements for different types of projects must meet legislated biodiversity integrity standards and be endorsed the Nature Repair Market committee. It also includes a consistent way of measuring improvements in biodiversity set out in an overarching biodiversity assessment instrument. It requires biodiversity projects to be undertaken in line with a methodology determination, tradable biodiversity certificates that are regulated to ensure they provide accurate information about projects, a public register of projects and certificates and an assurance and compliance framework to maintain integrity in the market and provide confidence that projects are being delivered as expected.

The Nature Repair Market will be based on science and enable Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders to promote their unique knowledge on their terms. Many speakers before me have outlined the unique role that First Nations people will have in participating in this market and the clear crossover it has with the Indigenous ranger program and the work rangers undertake in weed management, controlling feral animals, fire management, saving species and ensuring the health of our waterways and seas. We have many community members active in the program, including my friend Rusty Abbott, who is a passionate trainer of First Nations rangers in our region. Rusty recently explained that on the South Coast of New South Wales in the member for Gilmore's electorate there are now six rangers working in Batemans Bay and a further five in the Wallaga Lake area. There are also set to be more rangers in the years ahead, with programs set up in the New South Wales corrections system to support prisoners to retrain and have the skills and qualifications to become rangers when released and ready to re-enter the workforce.

This government understands the important role that our First Nations Australians play in bringing 65,000 years of knowledge into present-day action. That is why as a government we are doubling the number of Indigenous rangers by the end of the decade. We have declared new Indigenous protected areas and are increasing funding for the management of Indigenous protected areas. We have also nominated the Murujuga cultural landscape in WA for World Heritage listing, incorporating 65,000 years of First Nations conservation into action today—nature-positive heritage protection. We are delivering the $40 million of Indigenous water in the Murray-Darling Basin which was promised by the previous government but never delivered. We have signed a partnership with the First Nations Heritage Protection Alliance to work together to write new cultural heritage protection legislation.

This bill will establish a new market for investing in nature-positive outcomes. It will support Australia's international commitments to protect and repair ecosystems and reverse species decline and extinction. It will generate investment and job opportunities for a nature-positive economy and create new income streams for landholders, including Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islander farmers. More importantly this bill we see before the House today is part of the Albanese Labor government delivering on its nature-positive plan.

The Nature Repair Market Bill 2023 is but one of a suite of policies to protect, repair and rebuild our environment. The Australian government has committed to protecting 30 per cent of Australia's land and seas by 2030. The same goals have been adopted globally under the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity. These goals reinforce the findings of the Australia state of the environment 2021 report and its story of environmental degradation, loss and inaction—a report which the former minister, now deputy opposition leader, hid from the Australian people, refusing to release it, and we now know why. It is a catalogue of horrors showing just how much damage a decade of Liberal and National party neglect did to our environment.

Additionally, the Albanese Labor government has tripled the size of Macquarie Island Marine Park, to now see an extra 385,000 square kilometres of Australia's oceans placed under higher protection. We're investing $10.8 million to improve ocean and marine park management, and we are expanding blue carbon projects to restore mangroves, seagrasses and reef habitats for breeding and feeding. We're making Australia an environmental leader once again by signing the Leaders' Pledge for Nature, joining the international Mangrove Alliance for Climate, signing the joint declaration on the creation of a global coalition for blue carbon, joining the Forests and Climate Leaders' Partnership, joining the High Ambition Coalition to End Plastic Pollution, with a view to ending plastic pollution by 2040, and leading in making sure that the UN high seas treaty is signed.

The decade of environmental vandalism is over. I commend this bill, which is going to make it easier for people to invest in activities that help repair our unique natural environment.

Sam Rae (Hawke, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to 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.

Steve Georganas (Adelaide, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you, Deputy Speaker Buchholz, and thank you as well for filling in for me while I give this speech. I also rise to support this Nature Repair Market Bill. It is a very important piece of legislation. We just heard the member for Hawke outline many of the intricate details in his clear, precise speech about what this Nature Repair Market Bill will be doing. It is very important to restore nature to its natural habitat, while ensuring at the same time we give the opportunity to local community groups, farmers, Indigenous groups to restore their part of the world back to nature. That is what this bill is all about. It is about making it easier for people to invest in those types of activities that help repair nature, because we all have a duty to leave nature better for our children and our grandchildren. I have said many, many times here that we have an absolute duty in this place to ensure that we hand over a better world to the next generation, not just on the side of economics and everything else, which are very important, but also nature so this earth can survive.

This bill is about supporting landholders, as I said, including farmers, who are doing a lot of good work around the country. This will enhance that good work. It will also support First Nations communities to do things like plant native species to repair the damage done in riverbeds or to remove invasive species. We are also making it easier for businesses and philanthropists to invest in these efforts.

We know that last year the Minister for the Environment and Water released the official five-yearly report card on the Australian environment, which was called the State of the Environment Report. We know there were a lot of issues in that report. It was like going through a catalogue of horrors showing how much damage has been done to our environment through neglect. The report says that the Australian environment is in very bad shape and getting worse. Reading the report, some of the statistics you'll be shocked to hear. It found Australia has lost more mammal species to extinction than any other continent in the world. For the first time Australia has more foreign plants than native species. Habitat the size of Tasmania has been cleared between 2000 and 2017, and we hear plastics are absolutely choking our oceans, with up to 80,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometre. It is pretty horrendous when you stop and think about these statistics. And, of course, we have all seen over the last 10 to 20 years flows in most Murray-Darling rivers have reached record low levels. It's no wonder that our environment has fared pretty badly in the last decade.

The government is making it easier, as I said, even in my electorate, with the River Torrens, which flows right through the middle of my electorate. It starts up in the Adelaide Hills and runs out to the outlet at Henley Beach in the electorate of Hindmarsh. This was a natural river that came from the Adelaide Hills, flowed through the Adelaide Plains and out into the ocean. Before we settled here, before we urbanised most of that area that I'm talking about, the natural landscape played its part in nature. For example, most of the western suburbs, towards the beachside, were full of reed beds. The reed beds slowed the flow and filtered the water before it went out into the ocean. We've urbanised that entire area. We've cemented canals et cetera. All the pollution run-off into the River Torrens flows out into the Gulf of St Vincent, to Adelaide's beaches, destroying seagrass, destroying the environment in the sea. A Senate report came out in the year 2000, if I recall correctly, with many recommendations to restore the outlet into the Gulf of St Vincent in South Australia to ensure that we protected our fishing industry and the environment. The fishing industry in South Australia is huge, especially in the Gulf of St Vincent—everything from prawns to snapper to squid. You name it. I'm pleased to say that some of those recommendations were taken up, but this will be another opportunity for us in my electorate and in the state of South Australia to see how we can restore some of those flows back into a natural environment. I know a lot of good work is being done. We've seen parts of the River Torrens restored already. This will give the opportunity to smaller environmental groups, conservation groups, neighbourhoods, to jump on board and assist in restoring some of those reed beds back to their natural state so they can play a part in filtration of some of the pollution before it goes out into the sea, ensuring that we have a healthy Gulf of St Vincent so we can continue with our fishing industry and our recreation industry and, of course, maintain our natural environment.

With this legislation, the Albanese Labor government is delivering on its Nature Positive Plan, with the establishment of the nature repair market. This market will make it easier for businesses, organisations and individuals to invest in projects in their local area to protect and repair nature. As I said, an example is the River Torrens in my electorate. The government is committed to protecting 30 per cent of Australia's land and seas by 2030. The same goals have been adopted globally under the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity. These goals reinforce the findings of the 2021 State of the environment report and its story of environmental degradation. I pointed out earlier that we've lost more mammal species to extinction than any other continent in the world, and, for the first time, Australia has more foreign plant species than native species, which is pretty shocking. This will assist with some of that. We need significant investment in conservation and restoration for a nature-positive future, so we can hand over a better environment to the next generation.

Business and private sector investment can contribute to reversing environmental decline. This was highlighted in the findings of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act review by Professor Graeme Samuel AC. Private companies, conservation groups, farmers and other landholders are increasingly looking for ways to achieve positive outcomes for nature. I already hear some tremendous stories of work that farmers are doing in restoring some of their landholdings back to nature and of course the great work that conservation groups do in all of our electorates.

A recent report prepared independently by PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates that the market for biodiversity in Australia could unlock $137 billion in financial flows by 2050, and we're responding to that demand. The Nature Repair Market will be based on science and enable Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to promote their unique knowledge—and we know that they have unique knowledge—on their terms. Establishing the market in legislation will ensure its ongoing integrity, encourage investment in nature and drive environmental improvements across Australia.

The bill will enable the Clean Energy Regulator, an independent statutory authority with significant experience in regulating environmental markets, to issue Australian landholders with tradable biodiversity certificates. The certificates can be then sold to businesses, organisations, governments and individuals, and all landholders including Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islanders, conservation groups and farmers can participate in the market. Projects will deliver long-term nature-positive outcomes through activities such as weeding, planting native species and pest control, and they can be undertaken on land or water.

Again, I go back to the Gulf St Vincent in my part of the world where seagrass is being planted just offshore, which then generates breeding spots for the fishing industry. We know that's where sea species—fish and squid and everything else—do their breeding and feeding, where there's seagrass. So it's very important. They've been restoring that part of the world for a number of years now, and I hope this will encourage more restoration in the Gulf St Vincent.

The Nature Repair Market will enable, as I said, all that participation and utilise First Nations people to use their skills and knowledge for a nature-positive future. The market will also operate in parallel with the carbon market, facilitated by having the same regulator. This is important because the alignment will encourage carbon farming projects that will also deliver benefits for biodiversity. There will be administrative efficiencies in this approach and, more importantly, clear and accurate oversight of claims made in both markets. Our government acknowledges the recent review of carbon crediting led by Professor Ian Chubb. Lessons learnt from the carbon market have informed the bill and will continue to be reflected upon as the environmental markets develop. It will also provide for biodiversity certificates to have integrity and represent an actual environmental improvement. Buyers can then invest in the market with confidence knowing that it does have some outcome in the environment.

A key integrity measure is an independent expert committee that will be responsible for ensuring projects deliver high-quality nature-positive outcomes underpinned by a consistent approach to the measurement, assessment and verification of biodiversity. The integrity of environmental outcomes is also enabled through assurance and compliance requirements that will be part of this bill. This includes the monitoring, reporting and notification of the delivery of project activities and progress on the environmental outcome. The regulator will have monitoring and enforcement powers to ensure that projects are conducted in accordance with the rules, and that's very important.

Transparency will be a core element to the scheme. Comprehensive information about projects, how they're travelling and their certificates will be available on a public register for all to see. Additional information will be regularly published by the regulator, and there will be active release of relevant data by that Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water. This will enable the parliament and the public to monitor the scheme and provide an opportunity for citizen oversight, and it will support certainly and value to the market.

The department is committed to working with the ACCC and ASIC to ensure that certificates issued in the Nature Repair Market are not victims of greenwashing claims. We have seen some reports of greenwashing, and we've also seen ASIC looking into some of these greenwashing claims that are currently happening at the moment; we don't want to see that creeping in. That the statements made about the certificates accuracy must reflect the projects and investment they represent and that projects in the carbon and biodiversity markets are not affected by misleading claims. There has to be confidence in this system and this scheme, and this is one way of doing it.

We know that our environment has been deteriorating rapidly. There was a report that was received after the report showing that one of the foundational elements of this was an offset system that lacked integrity. We need to have that integrity, and I know that ASIC will be oversighting this, ensuring that greenwashing doesn't happen and that companies or people getting these credits are not just getting them without actual improvement in the environment. I commend this bill to the House. It's very important. I assure you that I will be supporting it, and I hope everyone else will also be supporting it, because it is our absolute obligation to the next generation of Australians.

Louise Miller-Frost (Boothby, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am so grateful to be in the chamber to hear the member for Hindmarsh's contribution, because, like him, I see this bill as a necessary step for us all to support in order to make sure that we are leaving this continent a better place for future generations. During the election campaign, many people asked me why I decided to put my hand up to run. I said that, first and foremost, it was because I wanted to make sure that we saw action on climate change. That is what drove me to stand and put my hand up to be the candidate for Reid, and it is what drove me each and every day of that campaign.

I think about what we are doing when it comes to the environment, how we are acting on climate, and what we are doing for future generations, and to that end I think about my son and the world that he will inherit. When I explained to him what this role was and why mummy was running to be a member of the federal parliament, I told him that I wanted to make sure that we were looking out of the environment. He had a couple of specific requests for me, should I become a federal member of parliament—he wanted me to plant more trees and protect our environment. I was very grateful to Strathfield Council, because on National Tree Day I was able to plant some trees in our local park along with my son. I was also able to fulfil a commitment to my husband recently when we went to the Great Barrier Reef. That was something he had been wanting to do for a number of years, and we finally got around to doing it. We were able to show my son the incredible diversity of marine life that is in the Great Barrier Reef, something that we are very lucky to have in this country. I've been able to fulfil two important commitments to my son and my husband when it comes to the environment in Australia. What I haven't been able to do is celebrate my son's birthday with him tomorrow. I wish him a very happy birthday for tomorrow. Hopefully, he will understand that mummy is in this place trying to ensure that we do everything we can to protect the environment so that we are able to grant his wishes that we protect the environment, that we plant more trees and that we look after the animals in Australia.

I saw the beauty of the Australian environment at the Great Barrier Reef, but I also saw the fragility of it when we went down to the south coast after the bushfires had torn through that place. There is so much for us to do to make sure that we are protecting our environment when it comes to things like this bill, acting on climate change and making sure that we take seriously the threats to our national environment that come when we do have climate change.

I think this bill being introduced to this House is incredibly important. It's very personal to me. It's the reason I put my hand up to stand for this seat and it's what I am driven to do every day in this place. When it comes to the environment, over the last decade there has been very little good news. The state of the environment report crystallised that. The report states:

Overall, the state and trend of the environment of Australia is poor and deteriorating because of increasing pressures from climate change, habitat loss, invasive species, pollution and resource extraction.

Changing environmental conditions mean that many species and ecosystems are increasingly threatened, and that is a stark warning—a warning which I hope everyone in this House listens to. We are the mammal extinction capital of the world. What an awful title to have. We have lost more mammal species to extinction than any other continent. I hope that's sits heavy with us all here. I hope we think about, if we had acted a decade earlier, how many of those mammals we could have saved. So let's not waste time. Let's start acting now.

Of all our different ecological systems, more than half have been found to be in poor state. What did the coalition do in response to this urgent report—a report that was sounding the alarm? It could not have sounded the alarm louder, and yet what did they do? The former environment minister, the member for Farrer, did nothing. Worse than that: she actively hid it from the Australian people. Heads in the sand, those opposite wouldn't even have the courage to own up to their own failings. We can add this to the long litany of failures presided over by those opposite when it comes to the environment.

They had a new energy policy almost every month but failed to stick with any of them. They announced recycling targets that sounded good on paper—70 per cent—but failed to get past the 16 per cent mark. They failed to progress our environmental laws despite having the blueprint to go forward. And let's not forget the Leader of the Opposition laughing at our neighbours in the Pacific for their climate change challenges—laughing at them.

But their neglect for the environment does not stop there. No, those opposite must feel like they are onto a good thing with this environmental denial, because in this term, after the electorate had sent a very loud and clear message that they wanted action on climate change, that they wanted us to be a more sustainable country where we were protecting our environment—after there was a resounding message sent at the last election, what did those opposite do? They continued to deny. They have opposed the safeguard mechanism, forgoing the chance for bipartisanship where business can invest with certainty when it comes to emissions. Unsurprisingly, they're opposing this bill.

What is surprising, though, about their opposition to this bill is that you would think that the party of the free market, the party of business, the pro-capitalist party would back this bill, because this bill seeks at a technical level to establish the legislative framework for a voluntary national market and biodiversity certificates. It would establish a market where proponents of a particular project could buy and sell these certificates on the Nature Repair Market. It would attach a value to the extraordinary flora and fauna that we have in this country so that we would no longer see mammals becoming extinct. It would provide a value to the extraordinary marine life and environment that we have on the Great Barrier Reef so that we would be incentivised to protect it.

What it does is provide an opportunity for private money to sit alongside the public money that we are providing through the government to protect our environment. But it's not there to replace government funds; it's there to bolster the significant efforts that we as a government are putting into protecting nature and restoring it, because unlocking private money in a monitored and regulated way is a good way to ensure that there is a broad cross-section of support for conservation efforts. This market would sit within this government's broader Nature Positive Plan, the biggest environmental reform agenda in a generation. It would sit alongside our reform of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, the establishment of an independent environmental protection agency and our reform of the use of environmental offsets.

We are on this side of the House take our obligations to the natural world and to future generations seriously. The scope of this policy will extend to projects that contribute to the enhancement and preservation of existing environments, as well as to projects focused on establishing or rehabilitating habitats. These projects can happen on land, in lakes and rivers, and in marine and coastal environments. Participation will be voluntary and open to all landholders, including farmers, First Nations peoples, conservation groups, businesses and local councils.

Once a participant implements a project aimed at repairing or safeguarding nature, they will receive a tradable certificate as recognition. These certificates will contain standardised information, including the size of the restored land and the nature of the work undertaken for the protection of threatened species. It will enable buyers to gain a precise understanding of their investments and facilitate comparisons and evaluations of different projects. Once approved by the regulatory body, these certificates can be sold to third parties, including philanthropists, businesses, governments or individuals. Landholders will be able to generate additional income from the sale of these certificates.

Those opposite who say they are on the side of farmers, get behind this bill. It's a system that will assist companies in showcasing their environmental commitments and demonstrating their sustainability efforts. Locally, it will encourage a variety of beneficial environmental work that a landholder might want to do but might not have the money to complete. I want to give an example here that the Minister for the Environment and Water used in her second reading speech, because I think it best illustrates the real advantage of the system that is being proposed here. She said that it could, for example, help:

… a farming family, who want to remove invasive plants and manage feral animals on their land so they can better protect a stretch of native forest where endangered greater gliders live; or a group of Indigenous land and sea rangers, who want to control feral species across a coastal floodplain, to protect sea turtles, migratory birds, and to improve water quality for fish and crabs; or another farmer, who wants to replant native grasses and trees on an unproductive stretch of land to make the area more resilient to drought …

When you think about it in terms of how it could possibly help farmers as well as the environment, I don't understand why those opposite are not backing this bill. There is no shortage of businesses, private individuals and not-for-profits who are keen to do the right thing environmentally. Many are doing it already, whether out of their own goodwill or because of community pressure or shareholder pressure. There is a move to make sure that corporates and the community are assisting with environmental protection, but they're currently doing it without any of the institutional frameworks to assist. We have a surplus of good environmental will, often with nowhere to go.

That's what this bill does: it builds a bridge between environmental goodwill and positive environmental outcomes. It is the means by which investors can invest in these positive outcomes without owning a plot of land directly and without having to enter into costly contractual arrangements. It allows investors to put their money behind projects that have the confidence of regulators. This leads me to the other important part of this bill: it will introduce the oversight and regulation necessary for this market to function. This is particularly important given the lessons of the Chubb review. I want to commend the bill to the House because I think it's important that we all get behind protecting and restoring our environment.

Melissa Price (Durack, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today as the federal member for Durack to speak on two issues that are critically important to my large rural and remote electorate. The first issue is the government's proposed bills to establish a nature repair market, the Nature Repair Market Bill 2023 and Nature Repair Market (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2023. First things first: we on this side of the House support in principle the creation of a biodiversity market. Indeed, our record in government shows that, with the introduction of the Agriculture Biodiversity Stewardship Market Bill 2022, we actually pioneered work in this area of policy in Australia. The core focus of that bill, which unfortunately lapsed at the conclusion of the 46th Parliament, was to establish the legal framework for a national voluntary Agricultural Biodiversity Stewardship Market to enable agricultural landholders to receive a tradeable certificate for undertaking projects that enhance or protect biodiversity in native species.

It is fair to say that to a large degree these two new bills replicate the comprehensive work, including the significant level of consultation with stakeholders, that we undertook in this area during our time in government. If they were to pass, Labor's bills would likewise legislate for the operation of a national biodiversity market, enabling the Clean Energy Regulator to issue Australian landholders with certificates for projects that preserve, manage and restore nature. They would then be able to sell these certificates to individuals, businesses, other organisations or indeed governments.

These kinds of markets are generally growing in popularity around the world. There are three main reasons for this: firstly, they incentivise new areas of spending on the environment by private interests; secondly, they allow for improved consultation on the most efficient and effective use of limited public resources; and, thirdly, they help to better prioritise the funding of environmental protection measures by governments. In other words, if their structures and frameworks are carefully and comprehensively designed, then these markets can help to improve and complement government-funded conservation activities by attracting new spending and resources from private individuals and organisations and, accordingly, by enabling governments to direct more of their money away from these forms of conservation towards other environmental priorities.

During our considerable consultation and thinking on this area of policy while in both government and opposition, we have recognised that biodiversity markets genuinely offer the potential for improvements in the way that Australians protect and restore the environmental values of our land. With their two bills, the Labor government is adopting the same broad philosophy, and we commend them for doing so. However—and there's always a 'however'—as has been the case on a number of fronts with this government, these bills contain several aspects that are lacking sufficient detail for anyone to be confident about whether they will be positive and worthwhile changes. In particular, I argue that the proposed extension of the parameters of the biodiversity market from just agricultural land to all land and water tenure needs some further examination to look at the various practical issues that this could lead to. Given that this decision will inevitably lead to more stakeholders and more different kinds of scenarios in the marketplace, there will most likely be a lot of confusion, particularly for first-time entrants to a biodiversity market. Similarly, these bills divert from the considerable amount of work, particularly from ANU, we undertook in basing our legislation strictly on the application to potential projects of the specialised carbon and biodiversity and enhancing remnant vegetation assessment models.

We have some concerns and reservations about an opening-up of the parameters and methodologies by which projects can be designed and assessed and how certificates can be traded. Additionally there are a number of further complexities and risks that the bill creates around precisely whose consent will be needed for projects to go ahead. Similarly there is an absence of key detail around what criteria and also evidence the minister will consider when making decisions on potentially excluding projects under section 33 of the Nature Repair Market Bill. In turn there are a lack of defined standards or controls around biodiversity assessment instruments and on the precise role of the native title body corporate. This added complexity and risk needs to be subjected to detailed scrutiny, and therefore it is appropriate that the bills be referred to the Senate Environment and Communications Committee. The opposition will reserve its final position on these bills until we see and hear what emerges from that committee process, but as things currently stand we have sufficient doubts about the veracity and quality of this legislation to not vote in support of it.

I'm also concerned about the prolonging of this process. Rather than build on and complement the comprehensive work that had already done for them by the coalition, the Albanese government bizarrely decided to go back to the drawing board and started the consultation process all over again. This has meant they needlessly prolonged processes and tried to reinvent the wheel and that they have generated more consultation fatigue, more irritation, more frustration and more consternation among key stakeholders than should have been the case. From evidence provided at the October 2022 Senate estimates hearing it seems the Clean Energy Regulator and the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water probably spent around $11.4 million in carrying out these 100 per cent unnecessary activities. We thank the many stakeholders, however, who did engage. Thank you very much for being a part of the process. We thank them for the work that they did whilst we were in government and those who continue to work with us in opposition to help chart the path for a successful biodiversity market in Australia.

Disappointingly, it isn't just at the federal level where Labor are writing uncertainty into law. In my home state of WA the Labor government has rammed through parliament its new Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act 2021. From 1 July landowners with more than 1,100 square metres will come up against more red tape for basic activities like clearing and planting trees, building a fence, putting in a bore or digging a dam. Undertaking any of these activities on your own land could mean you could have to engage local Aboriginal cultural heritage services, known as LACHS, at your own expense to get a permit. Kimberley Land Council and other Aboriginal groups have condemned the laws, claiming native title groups are vastly under-resourced for their rollout and pointing out that the LACHS are still not established. Labor themselves aren't even ready for their own laws to come into effect, with the permit system still not ready just weeks out from their starting to be enforced from 1 July. They are still not ready. These are just some of the issues with the state government's complex new regulations.

It is no surprise that WA's farmers and pastoralists, many of whom are from my electorate, are calling this shambolic. WA Farmers President John Hassell outlined that it's open to such bad interpretation that it's going to cause major drama in the sector. Understandably they are calling for a six-month delay on the commencement of the act so that these issues can be worked through constructively. Already more than 27,000 concerned Western Australians have signed a local petition for a delay. I want to give credit to the Hon Neil Thomson for facilitating this Tony Seabrook petition.

How has WA Labor responded? The new, unelected Premier likened the calls of thousands of locals in Western Australia to this delay as a dog returning to its vomit. West Australians are right to be concerned and confused about the new regulations and simply want answers, but this seems too hard for the new Premier Cook, who is on L-plates, clearly. They have instead resorted to slurs because they have botched the implementation of their own regulations. Western Australians are quickly finding out what this new Premier's priorities are. He has confirmed that one of his first acts as Premier was to call the rugby league boss to lobby for a team in Western Australia. Don't get me wrong: I love rugby league—I love rugby union a little bit more, I have to say—and I could get behind a WA team. But, Premier, if you have enough time to spare to listen to the NRL, you should take the time to listen to our WA farmers, instead of insulting and ignoring them. Our farmers are the lifeblood of our state, and they deserve better from this useless state Labor government.

To conclude, we on this side of the House, like all Australian, believe in protecting our diversity and also our sensitive Indigenous historical sights, but let's do it in way that constructively works with Australians; let's not take the Labor approach of confusing or imposing on Australians.

Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'd like to thank the member for Durack for her contribution to this debate. It was heartening to hear some of the positive comments she made about this important piece of legislation, the Nature Repair Market Bill 2023, particularly after being privy to the contribution made by the member for New England today, which led me to believe that all of those opposite believe that there is no problem—nothing needs to be fixed—and that anything implying we should take action, as a government, to protect or repair our natural environment, which has been degraded over time, is lunacy. That is what I took from the member for New England's contribution earlier today.

One of the problems I have with the member for Durack's contribution, though, is that she says, on the one hand, this government had taken too long and had done too much consultation, while, on the other hand, the Western Australian government has not taken long enough and not done enough consultation—both talking about similar things. I note, too, that the member for Durack's comments about the consultation that happened when the coalition was in government around a biodiversity market included deep conversation with farmers. There was some criticism in the member's contribution that the member for Sydney, as the minister for the environment, had taken this more broadly, beyond farmers and to other areas of our community, and that that was somehow the wrong thing to do, after the former government had done so much work. I take it that means that some work had been done on the notion of a biodiversity market. This piece of legislation, having been introduced by the member for Sydney, is about a nature repair market that goes beyond farmland and includes marine considerations. It is not surprising that those opposite are not embracing the notion of this going beyond current farmland.

I want to talk a bit about my electorate, which is home to a Ramsar wetland. The Ramsar site is at the mouth of the Werribee River, where it reaches the bay. This wetland is home to birdlife that comes from all over the globe at different times of the year. As breeding season comes, birds fly in from as far as Russia. They travel across the globe to come to this site, hence its protection under the Ramsar wetlands agreement. Sitting right beside it is land that was once farmland and on which sits the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works sewage treatment plant. On a drive from my electorate to the member for Hawke's electorate, I would see sheep grazing and maybe paddocks full of grain. Now, alarmingly, we see paddocks full of rocks, paddocks full of rabbits and, bluntly, paddocks full of noxious weeds sitting in very close proximity to what is an international site.

For me, the most important thing that this market would do is incentivise those people who are holding that current land. Let's face it, I know I represent a growth corridor, and I know that there's a lot of prospecting going on, with farmland being purchased and then left fallow, left so that we've got noxious weeds at a rate that I have not seen since I was a child. This is a danger. It's a danger to neighbouring farmers. It's a danger to anyone who wants to stay in the business of farming. It's a danger to the Ramsar wetland. If this bill incentivises people to take action to reverse that, then that's a good thing as far as I'm concerned, a very good thing in my electorate.

But it's not a surprise for me that those opposite are a bit torn about this piece of legislation. As the member for Durack pointed out, they'd done a lot of work around a market. Last week, after listening to contributions from those opposite, I was struggling to understand why the party of the market, the party that's so often criticised for letting the market rip, were coming in, one after the other, to criticise a bill that was going to create a new market and a market in an area that all Australians will benefit from. This market comes into being with the appropriate regulations around it, with the appropriate oversight around it and with the expansion of it beyond current farmland and into all areas of our great country. If it incentivises private capital investment into those spaces, this could be a real game changer for us as a country.

Colleagues of mine have talked about our commitment on this side to environmental protection. This bill does more than environmental protection. This bill is about repairing degradation. This bill is about giving nature a chance, about getting a natural footprint back into areas where that's possible. But it's not a surprise to me that those opposite are struggling with this concept. We know that the former minister, now the deputy opposition leader, the member for Farrer, hid a report from the Australian people—a report that landed last year, the official five-yearly report card on the Australian environment called the State of the environment report. That report landed but was hidden from view, not tabled in this place, not available to the public. We know why: because, after nearly 10 years of coalition government, it was a catalogue of horrors. It showed just how much damage a decade of Liberal and National Party neglect did to our environment. As those on this side have said, one of the primary things that report found was that Australia has lost more mammal species to extinction than any other continent. We're standing in a building where above us, on our coat of arms, we have an emu and a kangaroo—because they don't take a backward step—to note that we have lost more mammal species to extinction than any other continent. For the first time, Australia has more foreign plant species than native. Some of those foreign plant species will be noxious weeds, and I know in my part of the world that's certainly the case.

When I travel anywhere, after weeks away from home one of the things I do to ground myself back in the electorate is get in the car and drive across the Iramoo plains in the direction of the You Yangs, a path I've taken since I was a child. It grounds me, and it reminds me of where I am. It is depressing doing that drive now and seeing those paddocks being overtaken by weeds—absolutely depressing. Habitat the size of Tasmania has been cleared between 2000 and 2017. Plastics are choking our oceans with up to 80,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometre. In December 2019, flow in most Murray-Darling rivers had reached record low levels. That record becomes exposed while we debate action in this place.

I want to commend the member for Sydney for the work she has done in broadening the scope of her deliberations, in broadening the scope of the public hearings and consultation that has occurred, and in landing for us a bill that will see the development of a nature repair market and the regulations set around that to ensure we get this investment right. This bill will ensure we attract private investment and make it easier for businesses and philanthropists to invest in efforts of nature repair. This bill supports landholders including farmers and First Nations communities to do things like plant native species, repair damaged riverbeds and remove invasive species. These are incredibly important things.

The Albanese Labor government is delivering on its Nature Positive Plan with the establishment of this repair market. This market will make it easier for businesses, organisations, governments and individuals to invest in projects to protect and repair nature. We've committed to protecting 30 per cent of Australia's land and seas by 2030. As I speak, I am reminded of one of the other things the previous government did upon coming to office, and that was halving the national marine parks. That was an extraordinary act that undid groundbreaking work and wound the clock back. But we shouldn't be surprised because, as a government, they had 22 energy policies and failed to land one.

As a country we need to be standing up internationally and taking action on climate change and making positive changes in our energy market. Those opposite are having trouble coming in here and supporting the repair of our natural habitats across this great country. They seem to be in a time warp where you're either for farmers or you're against farmers. You can be for farmers and for nature. I'm from farmers and I know lots of farming families that have been actively involved in Landcare projects and planting trees. But in this chamber we get this picture of farmers as if they are completely and utterly centred on their own business at the expense of this country. They're not the farmers I know; they're not the farmers I represent. I represent farmers who will come to a meeting to talk about climate change and talk about action on climate change. I work with farmers who are scientists in the way they grow produce on their farms. I think that my farmers will welcome the Nature Repair Market Bill. My market gardeners, my vegetable growers will welcome the opportunity to have weeds eradicated from the dryer paddocks two kilometres away from where they're currently doing four crops of vegetables a year.

It is timely that this legislation is in the chamber. It has been interesting listening from this side of the debate to the varying points of view from those opposite. I welcome some of the positive comments made by the member for Durack and hope that those opposite decide that the integrity of environmental outcomes is an important thing and something that they should support. I hope they think about the work they did in government around a biodiversity market. I hope they take that knowledge to this piece of legislation, unlike the other things that have been policies of theirs in government that they have walked into this place and voted against. I am desperately hoping that this legislation makes a difference in communities like mine, makes a difference across this great country and makes a difference to places like the Great Barrier Reef. I think it is a real positive in terms of looking for and finding ways for our remote communities to also be involved in this marketplace and bringing together those who love this country, whether they have had an attachment to this country for 65,000 years or, like lots of people that I represent, they have only been in the country for less than five years. I hope that this legislation is something that everyone in my electorate can support. I hope that business and philanthropists get behind this market and make a difference in communities like mine.

David Smith (Bean, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Albanese government has committed to protecting 30 per cent of Australia's land and seas by 2030. The same goals have been adopted globally under the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity. These goals reinforce the findings of the 2021 State of the environment report,which confirmed that our natural environment is in poor condition and getting worse. A number of my constituents provided essential work in relation to putting that report together.

The 2021 State of the environment report has noted that all aspects of the Australian environment are under pressure and many are declining. Although there have been numerous environmental initiatives at national, state and territory levels, there has been insufficient overall investment and a lack of coordination to be able to adequately address the growing impacts from climate change, land clearing, invasive species, pollution and urban expansion. Australia has lost more mammal species than any other continent and continues to have one of the highest rates of species decline among countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.

I think of the many advocacy groups in Bean who have raised these concerns over the long-term sustainability and repair of the environment in Canberra and across the country, including the Landcare, Waterwatch and ParkCare groups. On indulgence, in support of one these groups: in March of this year I partnered with the Conservation Council ACT Region's Bush Buds program. My official 'bush bud' was the gang-gang cockatoo, beloved across the Canberra community as the territory's fauna emblem. Gang-gangs can be seen at all times of the year, nesting during spring and early summer in hollow-bearing trees. Sometimes you can see them in my backyard. A favoured food of Canberra's gang-gangs is the buds and gumnuts of the southern blue gum, a common planting of inner Canberra's parks and avenues. Sadly, gang-gang populations across Australia have suffered a 70 per cent decline in the last two decades. Fortunately, Canberra's population appears to be steady, and that's despite some serious threats from the 2020 Namadgi fires. Unfortunately, steep population declines are being driven across the country by native habitat loss, an issue that is growing as a major threat for many species across the country.

Community advocacy groups like these, right around the country, have unfortunately been burdened with the responsibility of addressing environmental preservation and restoration because of a lack of direction from the previous Liberal-National government. That lack of direction has meant that Australia's strategies and investment in biodiversity conservation do not match the scale of the challenge. The state and trend of Australia's ecosystems and species continue to decline. That improves with the introduction of this bill. In response to these ongoing shortfalls, the Albanese government is committed to delivering better environmental protection and reforms as part of the Nature Positive Plan. One of these reforms is creating the nature repair market. By encouraging voluntary private sector investment, the market will make a significant contribution to restoring Australia's natural environment.

The Nature Repair Market Bill establishes a transparent framework to issue Australian landholders with tradable biodiversity certificates for projects that protect, manage and restore nature. It will enable the Clean Energy Regulator to issue Australian landholders with tradable biodiversity certificates for projects that protect, manage and restore nature. These certificates can then be sold to businesses, organisations, governments and individuals.

This government understands that business and private sector investment can make a significant contribution to nature repair. Businesses are increasingly looking for ways to demonstrate their environmental credentials and positive outcomes for nature. Several groups currently estimate the market for biodiversity in Australia as potentially unlocking $137 billion in financial flows by 2050. With this bill, we are now responding to that demand. But this is not just a market for businesses or landholders. Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders, conservation groups and farmers can participate. Projects will deliver long-term nature-positive outcomes through activities such as weeding, planting native species and pest control. They can be undertaken on land and water. This includes lakes and rivers as well as marine and coastal environments.

Open participation and extensive opportunity for project locations will support regional Australia through jobs and nature-positive economic activity. Projects in this program could include removing drainage ditches, excluding livestock and feral herbivores to restore a natural marsh, which will create critical habitat for diverse native frog, fish, turtle and wetland bird species. Indigenous rangers will undertake feral animal exclusion, buffalo grass removal, feral cat control, cultural burning in the Central Desert. The certificate generated for such a project could support the activities of Indigenous rangers working on country for many years to restore seagrass meadow permanently lost from historical 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 increased local fish stocks.

This bill will also enable participation, and create employment and economic opportunities for Aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders. It will promote and enable free, prior and informed consent for projects on their land or waters. There will be opportunities to design projects that reflect the knowledge and connection to country of our First Nations people and to utilise their skills and knowledge for a nature positive future. Who better to inform the repair of our delicate ecosystems than those with a 65,000 year connection to it?

The market will operate in parallel with the carbon market, facilitated by having the same regulator. The alignment will encourage carbon farming projects and also deliver benefits also for biodiversity. There will be administrative efficiencies in this approach and, more importantly, clear and accurate oversight of claims made in both markets. The government acknowledges the recent review of carbon crediting led by Professor Ian Chubb. Lessons learnt from the carbon market have informed the bill and will continue to be reflected upon as environmental markets develop.

The Nature Repair Market will be based on science—that is a good thing to hear for a change—and underpinned by legislation to ensure its integrity. It will encourage investment in future repair and drive environmental improvements across Australia. There are seven provisions in this bill that will support the development of a Nature Repair Market. Firstly, this bill will create an independent expert Nature Repair Market committee to advise the minister on scheme integrity. The committee will have five to six experts with substantial experience and significant standing in one or more areas of expertise, including agriculture, science, environmental markets, land management, economics or Indigenous knowledge.

This bill will have the methodology determination setting out the requirements for different types of projects which are made by the minister, following advice from the nature repair market committee that the methodology meets legislative biodiversity integrity standards. There will be requirements for biodiversity projects to be undertaken in line with that methodology determination. There will also be a consistent way of measuring improvements in biodiversity, set out in an overarching biodiversity assessment instrument. This bill will create tradable biodiversity certificates that are regulated to ensure they provide accurate information about projects. Critically—and I know constituents from my electorate of Bean will be interested to know this—this scheme won't be used as offsets unless and until they meet these new standards.

The nature repair market will be an opportunity to create a supply of projects certified through purpose-designed offset methods. The register will be a comprehensive and public source of information on these projects and the biodiversity they are protecting. In addition to this, a public register of projects and certificates will include information about their ownership and provide access to reports about project delivery and environmental outcomes. Transparency will be a core element of the scheme. Comprehensive information about projects and certificates will be available on that public register. Additional information will be regularly published by the regulator, and there will be active release of relevant data by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water. This will enable parliament and the public to monitor the scheme and provide an opportunity for citizen oversight. It will support certainty and value to the market.

Finally, this bill will act as an assurance and compliance framework to maintain integrity in the market and provide confidence that projects are being delivered as expected. We know that under those opposite environmental management was simply not a thing. We knew that, and the people of Bean knew that. The report that has been referenced a few times in this speech—the 2021 State of the environment report—was finally released last year after being buried by the former environment minister. The release of this report revealed why it had been buried. The report revealed the true cost of nine years of Liberal and National neglect and environmental vandalism. Australia has lost more mammal species to extinction than any other continent. For the first time, Australia has more foreign plant species than native. Habitat the size of Tasmania has been cleared. Plastics are choking our oceans—up to 80,000 pieces of plastics per square kilometre. Flows in most Murray-Darling rivers have reached record-low levels.

The dire state of the environment is not due to just neglect; it is the result of an unholy hybrid assault of willing neglect and active environmental vandalism. What did those opposite really do for the environment? They axed climate laws. They failed to fix Australia's broken environment laws despite having a widely supported blueprint to do so. They laughed about our Pacific Island neighbours going underwater. They failed to land a single one of their 22 different energy policies. They sabotaged the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. They promised $40 million of Indigenous water—who can guess how much they delivered? They set recycling targets with no plan to actually deliver them. They voted against the safeguard mechanism—the policy that they had previously championed. They cut highly protected areas of marine parks in half—and believe it or not, Bean has got marine parks around Norfolk Island. They cut billions from our environment department. The State of the environment report identified what a pathway forward looked like. That pathway required greater national leadership—no wonder those opposite weren't interested. That much-needed leadership was needed to help foster a coordinated action and encourage investment to address our mounting environmental and heritage issues. Australia needed to measure progress and undertake effective, adaptive actions. Significant new effort is required to consistently manage environmental and heritage matters.

At its core, this bill is pretty simple. The Albanese Labor government is making it easier for people to invest in activities that help repair nature. We on this side want to leave nature better off for our kids and grandkids. That's why we're delivering legislation that supports landholders, including farmers, First Nations communities and community groups do to things like plant native species, repair damaged riverbeds or remove invasive species. This bill will establish a new market for investing in nature-positive outcomes. It creates the nature repair market with proper integrity and transparency, giving business and philanthropists a way to invest in nature with confidence. The market will make it easier for businesses, organisations, governments and individuals to invest in projects to protect and repair nature.

I was elected to be part of a government that would take leadership on these issues. Climate action and our precious environment were towards the top of the issues people voted on in Bean, and I am proud that we are tackling these issues. It is of no surprise it has been left to a Labor government to show courage and leadership on environmental issues. I thank the minister for her dedication and work in this space, and I commend this bill to House.

Andrew Gee (Calare, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In our part of the world we are pretty lucky: rolling hills, big valleys, healthy and productive waterways. We have some of the best agricultural land in the world and our farmers are also world-class. I would call them the best in the world, although I have to confess I am a little biased. We are part of the great food basket of Australia. We also have many sites of cultural significance with First Nations people working to protect and promote the rich cultural heritage of our area.

I believe the Nature Repair Market Bill 2023 presents a wonderful opportunity for the people of our area and across Australia to restore, repair and protect the incredible natural resources we have. I don't know a single farmer who doesn't take their responsibility to protect and improve the land they work on extremely seriously. This bill gives our farmers and other landowners the ability to make a real difference to our environment while also supplementing farming income. It is a win-win for farmers and the environment.

The Australian biodiversity market has been estimated to be worth $137 billion, more than half of which is forecast to be driven by biodiversity, conservation and natural-capital-themed bonds, loans, debt and equity. I note that the Australian government has suggested that unlocking this potential investment is critical to reversing the long-term decline in Australian biodiversity, revealed in the 2021 State of the environment report, which found that Australia's environment is in poor and deteriorating condition.

As a regional MP, farmers and the land are at the heart of the work that I do here. As I have already stated, our local farmers, orchardists and vignerons are some of the strongest environmentalists you will find anywhere. This takes the form of soil and pasture improvements, weed control, erosion rectification, tree planting, reducing the use of chemicals where possible, the improvement of waterways and smarter cropping techniques. They aim to make sure their farms and the land is passed on to the next generation so that it continues to produce the food and wealth of our nation.

At the Charles Sturt University Orange campus Loam Bio, with the support of the Australian government, is revolutionising carbon farming. It's very exciting, cutting-edge stuff. In Calare there are proximally 105 animals and plants that are threatened or endangered. Species such as the Bathurst copper butterfly, Littlejohn's tree frog and the regent honeyeater are all endangered, and plants such as the silver leaved mountain gum and the Rylstone bell are facing a similar fate. The time to act is now, and I'm supportive of this bill that provides tangible benefits for businesses and farmers choosing to support Australian biodiversity.

Within the proposed nature repair market, all landholders will be able to participate, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, with a wide range of projects considered eligible. This would recognise that landholders have different circumstances, interests and aspirations, and would encourage participation and increase supply. Projects will be wide-ranging and could involve replanting or nature restoration that increases carbon storage or improves biodiversity or the management of existing vegetation to improve habitat condition or outcomes for native species.

In 2020, the then environment minister appointed Professor Graeme Samuel to conduct an independent review of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, also known as the EPBC Act. As per recommendation 28 of the Samuel review, the Nature Repair Market Bill is fostering private participation in biodiversity restoration and is building the nature repair market off the back of key elements proposed in the Nature Positive Plan last year.

The Australian government, I note, is also in the process of implementing further recommendations in the Samuel review. These commitments include introducing national environmental standards, including standards on environmental offsets, and a federal environment protection authority. While I acknowledge that in an ideal world changes to the EPBC Act would have coincided with the introduction of the Nature Repair Market Bill 2023, I also accept that the EPBC amendments are a much larger body of work. Introducing the Nature Repair Market Bill before the EPBC Act amendments means that farmers in my area can reap the rewards sooner, and it encourages greater investment into enhancing Australian biodiversity

Within the bill, it's proposed that certain conditions and requirement will need to be met before an application is made to the Clean Energy Regulator for the issuance of a biodiversity certificate. Such requirements will include that the project is sufficiently progressed to have resulted in or likely to result in the biodiversity outcomes for the project, that the proponent is a fit and proper person and that the eligibility requirements and criteria have been met. Certificates are only issued for biodiversity protection or enhancement that would not normally have occurred and therefore provide a genuine environmental benefit. Essentially, biodiversity certificates will be a form of tradeable personal property which can be purchased, transferred, claimed, used and publicly tracked. These certificates will enable biodiversity outcomes to be owned and traded separately from the underlying land. Buyers are expecting to be able to invest in nature to achieve philanthropic objectives, meet their social and environmental responsibilities, compensate for their impacts on nature and manage risks associated with their dependencies on nature.

The role of the Clean Energy Regulator would include registering projects, issuing certificates, maintaining the public register of projects, undertaking compliance and enforcement, and providing oversight of the market. The bill also provides for the establishment and administration of a public register known as the Biodiversity Market Register to facilitate transparency, accountability and market efficiency. This will track issuance, ownership, transfer, relinquishment and cancellation of biodiversity certificates and will be managed by the Clean Energy Regulator.

The public Biodiversity Market Register will enable information relating to each biodiversity project to be reviewed, compared and scrutinised by the public. I believe this is essential in ensuring there is public accountability for the projects within the Biodiversity Market Register.

We live in an incredible country, and I want it to be just as incredible for the many generations to come. That is why I'm supporting this bill and supporting its objective to give farmers and landholders a tangible benefit for protecting or enhancing the biodiversity make-up of their land. I commend the National Party and the opposition for developing the key components of this bill. It is great work. I hope they can swing in behind it. And I think the minister's office for their engagement in this important legislation. I commend the bill to the House.

Andrew Leigh (Fenner, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Competition, Charities and Treasury) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In 1984 EO Wilson popularised the notion of biophilia, what he called 'the urge to affiliate with other forms of life'. His 1984 book was a bestseller and reminds us that many of us are at our best when we're in nature. I tend to start the day with a run and I thought I did it mostly for exercise purposes but then I realised one of the reasons it's really good for my head is I'm fortunate to live near Mount Mildura and Mount Ainslie, so I get to spend time with the kangaroos and the kookaburras and the spiders and the galahs and all the rest. That always seems to set the day up, as it did this morning, for an easier run. As I run through that area I'll often think about the lessons that I've learned about that part of the world from Tyronne Bell, a Ngunawal elder who took the time to take my family and me through parts of the Mount Majura and Mount Ainslie reserves, showing us where the scar trees were, where the traditional areas were and the way in which country has been used for millennia by First Nations people.

The Nature Repair Market is going to be important for First Nations communities, which is critical for the work those First Nations people do right across this country. We know that more than 60 per cent of Australia is privately held, and of that land, the majority is owned by farmers and First Nations. We know too that those areas are where a large share of critical habitats exist and where some of our most endangered animals live. This bill will support landowners to do things like planting native species, repairing damaged riverbeds or removing invasive species. This bill will do so in a way that ensures a market that is open to all landholders. Farmers, First Nations, conservation groups, businesses and local councils will be eligible.

At the heart of this bill is the principle that, when a landowner conducts a project to repair or protect nature, they will be issued with a tradable certificate. As an economist I am strongly in favour of tradable permit schemes, and this one will provide a range of standardised information, such as the size of land repaired, the kind of work conducted, the threatened species protected and the length of time the actions will continue. That will help buyers understand what they are investing in. Once those projects are approved by the regulator, those certificates can then be sold. They might be sold to a philanthropist, a government or an individual, and that will provide additional income for landholders.

It would let corporations demonstrate their environmental credentials, and it'll help philanthropists achieve their mission. Right now we have the challenge that, if philanthropists want to support nature repair, then they have to either buy the land themselves or find a willing landowner to enter into a customer management agreement, and that's frustrating for everyone. Companies aren't generally in the business of environmental management. They shouldn't have to own land in order to protect it. What we want to do is ensure that farmers and First Nations people can continue to steward the land. They don't need to sell the land outright or initiate complex legal agreements. Instead they can find projects they want to support and get the tradable permits from that.

What might that mean in practice? It might involve a farming family who wish to remove invasive plants and manage feral animals on their land or to better protect a stretch of native forest where endangered greater gliders live. It might involve a group of Indigenous land and sea rangers who want to control feral species across a coastal flood plain to protect sea turtles and migratory birds or improve water quality for fish and crabs. It might entail farmers who want to replant native grasses and trees on an unproductive stretch of land to make the area more resilient to drought and salinity or a group of fishers who want to regrow a meadow of seagrass, previously killed by poor water quality, to provide a habitat for dugongs, turtles and seahorses. These are just some of the examples, and the scheme is flexible enough to mean that landowners can do whatever environmental work is needed in their area. That might involve helping to support the east coast koala population, reviving critical nature corridors where animals travel for food and shelter or to avoid bushfires or replanting hillside vegetation to stop erosion and protect their local soil.

This provides a straightforward scheme and, importantly, a transparent scheme. The regulator will publish information on projects and the ownership and use of certificates, actively release relevant data and allow parliament and citizens to scrutinise the scheme. This scheme sits in conjunction with the recent review of carbon crediting led by Professor Ian Chubb, and we are keen to ensure that nature markets are properly regulated. These markets will not work if there is an element of greenwashing, if there isn't a national regulator enforcing the rules and ensuring compliance. The conservationists and organisations who want to support nature repair need trust and integrity around this scheme.

We understand the importance of protecting the land and seas. The Australian government has a commitment to protecting 30 per cent of Australia's land and seas by 2030. That's the same goal that's been adopted globally under the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, and it's going to require significant investment. This nature repair market will be based on science and will ensure the ongoing integrity of the market.

The bill will enable the Clean Energy Regulator, an independent statutory authority with significant expertise in regulating environmental markets, to issue Australian landowners with tradeable biodiversity certificates. The nature of this market is such that it will be transparent, as I mentioned, and that the department will work with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission to ensure that certificates issued in the nature repair market are not victims of greenwashing claims.

The reforms come before the House at a time in which Australians are showing a strong commitment to improving the natural environment. I have been pleased, over recent years, to hold a number of park clean-up barbecue events. They're always terrifically well attended by the local community and supported by Canberrans who want to improve their local environment. We've held these in grasslands around the electorate, bringing people together with gloves and bags. People go out and pick up garbage or pull out weeds, then we all wash our hands and enjoy a good barbecue.

We get a terrific turnout, too, in the ACT for Clean Up Australia Day, held, as members know, on the first Sunday of March each year. It was a real pleasure this year to have Clean Up Australia CEO Jenny Geddes come to the Hackett shops, in Canberra, to help with Clean Up Australia Day. Jenny did that because we were celebrating 20 years of activism on Clean Up Australia Day by Terry de Luca, who's been the Clean Up Australia coordinator in Hackett for a full two decades.

As we discuss these issues, I think, too, of the important work done by Indigenous rangers in the Booderee National Park, part of the Jervis Bay Territory that forms a portion of the electorate of Fenner. As you know, Deputy Speaker, when the founders set up the ACT they took the view that every capital city needs its own port. So, in the Jervis Bay, we have the Booderee National Park, and the work of the Indigenous rangers there, and it might be that they're able to tap into the nature repair market to augment the vital work they do with philanthropic support to improve the local work.

Here in parliament this week, we're going to be pleased to be able to hear, tomorrow night, from one of Australia's greatest authors, Tim Winton, who has produced a documentary this year called Ningaloo Nyinggulu. That is a three-part documentary that talks about the Ningaloo Marine Park and the inland desert areas. The documentary, which I commend to members of the House, shows the extraordinary beauty of the whale sharks, the green turtles, the humpback whales and other species in that area. The Ningaloo Marine Park got its World Heritage status in 2011—not coincidentally, a year in which Labor was in office. Labor's commitment to expanding our marine parks network is one which has carried through from the Rudd and Gillard governments to the Albanese government, and to our strong support for improving the natural environment.

In doing so, we work very closely with Indigenous Australians. Indigenous Australians have been on this continent for over 60 millennia. European settlers have been here for just a quarter of a millennium, yet in that time Australia has lost more mammal species to extinction than any other continent. Right now, Australia has more foreign plant species than native. From the years 2000 to 2017, habitat the size of Tasmania was cleared. Plastics are currently choking the world's oceans, including the great Pacific garbage dump, an area in which there is so much plastic that, in parts, you can actually walk on top of the plastics.

Over the course of the last decade, when the Liberals and Nationals were in office, we saw them axing climate laws; failing to fix Australia's broken environmental laws, despite having a widely supported blueprint to do so; failing to land a single one of their 22 different energy policies; sabotaging the Murray-Darling Basin Plan; promising $40 million in Indigenous water but never delivering a drop; setting recycling targets but with no plan to achieve those recycling targets; and laughing, as the Leader of the Opposition did, about our Pacific island neighbours going underwater. Since the change of government they have voted against the safeguard mechanism despite it being a policy that they previously championed. The safeguard mechanism was designed by Tony Abbott, yet when Labor in office sought to make it work the coalition voted against it.

The former government cut highly protected areas of marine parks in half and cut billions of dollars from our environment department. The former Liberal-National government had a recycling target of 70 per cent, yet recycling in Australia was stuck at 16 per cent for four years. That's what happens when you have a target but no plan to deliver it. That's why Labor not only has set a 43 per cent emissions reduction target but has a plan to get there. If you're wondering why our emissions reduction target doesn't end in a 0, it's because we didn't pluck a target out of the air and then figure how to get there. The target is based on our plan to improve Australia's environmental performance by steadily reducing our carbon footprint, by expanding the renewables share of electricity generation from one-third to four-fifths between now and 2030 and by ensuring that the safeguard mechanism delivers what it's meant to do. It is a shocking environmental record that those opposite left us when we came into office.

I was pleased to be part of a government that voted for significant climate action in this parliament last year, and I'm pleased now to be standing up on the Nature Repair Market Bill 2023, a bill that will make a tangible difference to communities across the country, allowing farmers and First Nations peoples to carry out environmental remediation, allowing corporations to be part of the acquitted positive environmental impact and allowing philanthropists to step up to the plate with the confidence that, if they're paying for environmental repair, that environmental repair will be delivered. The transparency that backs it is the same transparency that has led the Albanese government to put in place a National Anti-Corruption Commission. We are committed to good government and committed to the environment. I commend the bill to the House.

Andrew Charlton (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to support the Nature Repair Market Bill 2023. Let's get something clear. This government was elected to act on climate change, we were elected to stop the decade of damage to our country's unique natural environment caused by successive coalition governments, and we were elected to repair our natural environment with a whole-of-community effort, bringing together businesses, organisations, governments and grassroots groups to tackle this existential threat to our way of life. Our objective is to leave our planet, our country and our natural environment in a better place for future generations. We don't want to trash it for short-term gains, which was exactly what those opposite did for almost a decade.

We know the story of the coalition's record on the environment from the 2021 State of the Environment Report, the very same report that the now deputy opposition leader hid from the Australian people, and the findings of this report show why. It was embarrassing. It said that the environment suffered devastating damage and it predicted it would only get worse. Specifically, the report found Australia had lost more mammal species to extinction than any other continent—more than any other continent—and, for the first time in this continent's history, Australia has more foreign plan species than native species. That is absolutely shocking. The destruction of our biodiversity, the deleterious effects of decades of neglect. And to make matters worse, between 2000 and 2017 habitat the size of Tasmania has been cleared. That is the size of an entire state in less than two decades. Forests gone, many of which will never be replaced or will take decades to replace. This was the mess left behind by those opposite. That was a decade when the word 'government' seemed to cover everything but the environment, a decade where climate laws were axed, where environment laws were broken, where 22 different energy policies were floated but never landed and where billions of dollars were cut from our environment department. It is clear what the coalition thought about our natural environment when they were in government. It was just another program to be cut so they could save a billion dollars here and a billion dollars there. They wanted to keep claiming the title of better economic managers and even then they couldn't manage a single budget surplus.

Now more than ever we need to make significant investments in conservation and protection of our natural heritage to secure a better environment for our future, an environment worth inheriting from us for future generations, an environment entrusted to us by previous generations. When I say that protecting our environment is an investment, I really do mean it, not just in the social and cultural benefits but in the significant economic benefits just waiting to be unlocked. When a recent independent report was done on the market for biodiversity in Australia, an estimated $137 billion in financial flows by 2050 were discovered. That is a huge long-term economic opportunity that was left untapped by the former government.

We know that around the world countries that have preserved their environment have reached enormous economic dividends. Whether it be in tourism or natural industries or agriculture, environmental protection has made good economic sense. Those countries that have degraded their environments, that have allowed the quality of their land to erode, that have allowed their forests to be cut down, their rivers and seas to be polluted, have inflicted on themselves terrible economic damage. With this bill we are not only taking advantage of the economic opportunity afforded by the environment but we are also putting forward real solutions, and making a real effort when it comes to protecting our natural environment.

The Nature Repair Market Bill 2023 provides a framework for a voluntary national market that delivers on improved biodiversity outcomes. Eligible landholders who undertake projects that enhance or protect our nature and its biodiversity can receive a tradable certificate tracked through a national register. This bill will also enable the Clean Energy Regulator, an independent statutory authority, to issue Australian landholders with these tradable biodiversity certificates. These certificates can then be sold to businesses, organisations, governments and individuals. Establishing this market in legislation will ensure its ongoing integrity while encouraging and growing investment in nature. This in turn will help drive environmental improvements across Australia.

This market will operate in parallel with the existing carbon market. Both markets will be facilitated by the same proven and independent authority. This alignment will also make it easier for intersections in projects, encouraging carbon farming also to deliver benefits for biodiversity. The parallel operation of these markets will also address one of the biggest concerns when it comes to introducing Nature Repair Market implementation. By administering this market through the Clean Energy Regulator, the Nature Repair Market will benefit not only from the regulator's experience but from the administrative efficiencies that come from having clear and accurate oversight of claims made in both markets. Importantly, this bill and the establishment of the Nature Repair Market has been informed by the recent review of carbon crediting by Professor Ian Chubb. Lessons learned from the carbon market have been taken into account and will continue to be reflected on as environmental markets continue to develop.

This bill and the Nature Repair Market are important parts of our Nature Positive Plan. The government published this plan in December last year in response to the shocking findings of the 2021 state of the environment report. Our government's response, outlined in the Nature Positive Plan, is guided by three fundamental principles. First is the need to better protect Australia's environment and prevent further extinction of native flora and fauna. Second is the need for faster decision-making and clear priorities when it comes to action on environmental protections. Third is the need to restore public accountability and trust in environmental decision-making.

This bill begins the process of repairing our nature by acting on all three of these points. In particular, this bill and the design of the Nature Repair Market reflect our commitment to restoring public accountability and trust. In fact, transparency will be the core element of this scheme. Comprehensive information about projects and certificates will be made available on a public register, and additional information will be published by the regulator alongside active releases of relevant data by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water. This will help both the parliament and the public to monitor this scheme and allow for citizen oversight. This stands in stark contrast to those opposite, whose approach was guided by lack of transparency and hiding facts from the Australian people when it came to damage to our biodiversity, the rise in energy costs or the impacts of climate change. We saw on that side a decade of denial, delay and hidden information. The approach in this bill, consistent with the approach of this government more broadly, is about delivering transparency, openness and accountability.

As the Nature Positive Plan states, restoring public accountability and trust is not good just for its own sake; it provides key economic benefits as well. Restoring public accountability and trust is key to supporting certainty and value in the market and for investors. When coupled with the second principle—faster decision-making and clearer priorities—accountability and trust can be important to de-risk investments and promote sustainable economic development. Implemented as part of the Nature Positive Plan's recommendations, they have the potential to assist in long-term economic growth, increase employment, create jobs and support a greater capacity to invest in the environment and social priorities.

The Nature Positive Plan also states what we all know. It states the obvious: that a healthy and resilient environment is necessary for a vibrant economy. Over a decade, we watched the so-called better economic managers, as the coalition like to think of themselves, hard at work. But, strangely enough, they weren't hard at work delivering better environmental climate policies. They certainly weren't hard at work delivering budget surpluses or strong jobs growth. What they were was hard at work stoking the flames of climate war—rather than delivering on climate policies—and watching our environment degrade and our biodiversity decline.

In 2009, Tony Abbott said the science of human-caused climate change was 'crap', and he even went so far as to claim that climate change was 'probably doing good'. This is a former Liberal prime minister talking about the environment that we all rely on and will hand down to our kids. That same year Malcolm Turnbull admitted that his own party 'does not believe in human-caused global warming'. As he left office, Malcolm Turnbull said that his biggest regret was failure to secure meaningful climate policies. They're honest when they leave. It's a shame they're not as honest when they're in the parliament. Mr Turnbull didn't blame Labor for the lack of climate policies. He didn't blame a lack of business support. He didn't even blame vested interests. He blamed his own party, a party that he saw as having a reckless disregard for Australia and the global environment.

Over this decade, the coalition saw climate change as a political thorn in its side, an inconvenient conversation that needed to be shut down, pushed aside and silenced. But in doing so, they missed the voices of businesses across Australia who cried out for leadership—leadership on climate and leadership on the environment. For a decade, businesses had no certainty, no clarity and no incentive to deliver the investment and change that were solely required. The coalition failed to offer businesses the integrity, trust and transparency that Australia so badly needed and our environment so richly deserved.

Then the so-called party of business got left behind by their own constituency. Businesses started to recognise the value of environmental protection. They assumed the mantle of the ESG agenda. They started to make significant improvements in each business's environmental record. They started to adopt plans to get to net zero and to report on their environmental impacts. Businesses were taking forward the agenda that the Liberal government was failing to take forward. Because businesses knew it was important to their employees, their shareholders, their customers and their suppliers, they knew that protecting the environment was a critical part of Australia's future, and critical to the success of their own business models. They received no leadership or support from those opposite, but they did it anyway, and they did it because they knew it was the right thing to do and because they knew that without it they would not have a strong business future of their own.

So the coalition have been left behind. They have been left behind on climate and left behind on environmental protection. The community's expectations have moved ahead. Businesses' actions have moved ahead. Investors and superannuation funds have moved ahead. All are creating new standards and new practices to preserve Australia's important and rich biodiversity and our planet's precious climate. All of this has been done in the absence of leadership, and now the Labor government is here to assume the mantle and support Australian businesses, people, and community groups to deliver the leadership, the certainty, the accountability and the trust so that all Australians know the direction in which we're heading, which is to preserve and protect our environment for future generations.

Matt Burnell (Spence, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to join my colleagues in support of the Nature Repair Market Bill 2023, along with the Nature Repair Market (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2023. This is an important piece of environmental legislation. It reaffirms the Albanese Labor government's commitment to hitting pause on nine years of environmental mismanagement, although, frankly, to label the environmental record of those opposite as simply mismanagement is somewhat charitable. It implies ambivalence or apathy, rather than a wanton disregard for protecting Australia's flora and fauna.

Protecting Australia's biodiverse ecosystems, which are as varied as they are precious, should be of great importance to governments of all persuasions. I note that we have not seen a great deal of change in those opposite on the environment from when they were in government—and the same can be said about many other areas of public policy. At least you can't blame them for being on brand and on message.

I look at those amongst the crossbenchers that have made contributions to this debate, particularly those Independents elected to this place, like myself, at the most recent election. Almost by way of their presence in this place, I'd have thought the opposition might get the wake-up call they needed and realise that their old ways have caught up with them. I must say, though, that this bill doesn't concern itself with one seemingly threatened species from becoming extinct—that being the moderate Liberal. This bill does, however, take great strides in providing a means to protect Australia's fauna and their biodiverse habitats. Those opposite may not care about the biodiversity of Australian wildlife, but there might've been a glimmer of hope if it meant protecting the diversity of their party room.

The bill is quite voluminous, with many moving parts. But, on the whole, through this bill, the Albanese Labor government is making it easier for people to invest in activities that help to repair nature, which would make the short title of the bill somewhat self-explanatory in the broader sense. When the Albanese Labor government took office, it inherited a report that had conveniently been held back from the public view, despite being delivered to the Morrison government months prior to the election. It wasn't just the convenient delay of the default market, offered by the member for Hume, nor was it to be the only surprise after the incoming Labor government fully appraised themselves of the true state of the budget that was left to them by the Morrison government. As I alluded to earlier, one of the big shocks to the system was the 2021 State of the environment report.

It would be far easier just to say that those opposite either didn't know what they were doing in government or that they knew exactly what they were doing in government. In either case, it should not have been up to the environment minister under a Labor government to deliver a report that was handed to a Liberal-National government in 2021. Instead, the Minister for the Environment and Water, only six weeks into holding that office, fronted the National Press Club and gave a depressingly honest appraisal of what the state of Australia's environment was. It was one where we lost more mammal species to extinction than any other continent throughout the globe. Threatened communities had gone up by 20 per cent and the Murray-Darling had fallen to its lowest level in 2019. I pause at that last figure and lament greatly. The health of the Murray River is the lifeblood to communities along the South Australia part of the basin. Sadly, under those opposite, their definition of cooperative federalism was to allow the former New South Wales government to do whatever they wanted at the expense of tomorrow.

'Tomorrow' is a very important word when it comes to this, when it comes to why our environment should be protected and safeguarded. We can't take the approach that protecting our environment is no longer our respective problem or that we have no responsibility to maintain it for future generations just because we may not be there to share it with them in hundreds of years time. Even without looking that far into the future, looking to the present, it is horrendous to turn a blind eye to the many communities that are on the spectrum between thriving and surviving due to the dollars that pour through to them through ecotourism. If Australia's pristine wildlife becomes merely a figment of yesteryear, many prospective tourists from abroad and even from across Australia will simply just Google what it used to look like rather than visit a desolate version of what once existed.

This is, in part, why the Albanese Labor government has introduced this legislation before the parliament, as part of its major positive plan, a plan that establishes the Nature Repair Market—a marketplace where businesses, organisations, governments and philanthropic individuals work together to invest in projects that help to rewind the damage done to our natural environment—our many diverse pockets of nature that make Australia beautiful; that make Australia special. A nature positive plan was needed and the Nature Repair Market Bill delivers on this.

This is a bill where all landholders, including our First Nations peoples, conservation groups and agricultural landholders, can participate. They can undertake a number of nature-positive projects either on land or on water—projects such as planting native flora or pest control. They all help to maintain the integrity of the biodiverse environment that occupies their land. As you might imagine, the completion of many projects that have been approved through the framework of this legislation will, in turn, create jobs and additional economic opportunities that are tethered to nature-positive actions and activities. Our First Nations peoples using their connection to the land to design, craft and participate in projects that provide economic dividends to their communities will be just another benefit of the nature repair market.

Australia has committed itself to protecting 30 per cent of our land and seas by 2030, a goal adopted by many nations through the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity. It is a noble aim and one that I hope other nations are taking steps to achieve. But what do we do with our own natural environment? That is something that we do have an ability to impact positively.

If maintaining our reputation as good international citizens and keeping many species of flora and fauna that are unique to Australia alive and not solely confined to a textbook are not enough, just look to the billions in financial flows that are waiting to be tapped into by those individuals that invest in restoring our environment and by the communities built around those ecosystems. The demand to do so may be silent on the other side of the chamber, but the Albanese Labor government is listening to the demand and establishing this market to meet that demand. This market will operate alongside the carbon market, as it will have the same regulator for probity and oversight, given the confidence in the current oversight by the Clean Energy Regulator on its current remit. This complementary regulatory oversight will also have additional benefits attached whereby carbon farming projects can also look to deliver positive outcomes for biodiversity.

The emerging markets, especially the nature repair market as it is to emerge upon this bill passing the parliament, are aided by a number of recommendations that were made by Professor Ian Chubb in the Independent Review of Australian Carbon Credit Units. It is important to ensure that there is a level of surety in the integrity of any market, as it better ensures a greater level of investment through these markets. Confidence in a market will ensure participation by a wider range of investors, and it stands to reason that, in doing so, we can achieve better environmental outcomes as a result. The biodiversity certificates that are created as part of the nature repair market provide integrity in them not just as an investment but also as reflecting a genuine net benefit to the environment. People invest for a number of reasons: on behalf of themselves, their companies, their funds or a number of other entities. But, one way or the other, they can have a great degree of surety that this new market has legitimacy and accomplishes positive outcomes that achieve, as the bill would entail, nature repair—a genuine nature repair at that.

This isn't about making people feel good about investing towards green environmental projects; it is about investments that are backed by a regulator with the power to monitor and enforce that projects are conducted in accordance with a strong degree of probity. Restoring accountability and trust is important. This is why a transparent scheme will be in place, with projects and certificates being made available on a public register and with further information being released by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water. This is so the parliament and the public at large can retain their confidence in the scheme.

Our environment, our natural heritage, isn't merely a treasure to be admired in an intangible or disconnected way, because many of us have a strong connection to our land. So many rely on us to make the right decisions in this place so they can grow up and start a family in a town their family has lived in for generations. Many rely on us to ensure that they still have an industry in an area that people want to visit because of its uniqueness and its natural beauty—something where viewing it in a photo or in a documentary isn't quite as magnificent as seeing the majesty of it with one's own eyes. Our environment is a natural asset of our nation. Not only must it be maintained for future generations—those of our children, our grandchildren and our great-grandchildren—but we must also recognise that, if we do not take affirmative steps at maintaining and restoring our environment, we should care about maintaining it for our own generation, let alone those in the future.

We have already seen grave impacts of environmental degradation occur in Australia in our own lifetimes. I do not want to have to talk to future generations about how beautiful the Great Barrier Reef was. Accepting this as an inevitability is purely defeatism, and it would be truly alarming to see that coming from our political leaders. We do not inhabit a chamber, nor a building, where the too-hard basket is a credible excuse for inaction on the big challenges that we face. We must do better.

Given the fact that the Great Barrier Reef, a natural wonder of the world, is in the backyard of the Leader of the Opposition, you'd think that he would set aside his template stances when it comes to action on the environment and instead appreciate the need to protect the ecosystems that feed out into the reef and to protect the reef itself. But the grim reality is the chance of that happening is a truly remote one. Maybe his new pair of glasses and the media of him holding puppies were just for show after all. It's the same Leader of the Opposition that we know all too well.

Whilst we can't avoid the realities and the results of reports such as the grim reading of the 2021 State of the environment report, we can couple that with a plan of action to mitigate and repair the damage. In fact, let the State of the environment report be a wake-up call to us all, one that tells many what they already knew quite well. It is something that more need to be aware of in order to ensure that the Australian people know what is at stake, what the cost of inaction is, what we have to lose. We cannot throw our hands up and say that it's too late or things are too far gone.

All members in this place are likely to have a small piece of nature within their electorates that they know of—something worth protecting, something worth doing their bit and fighting for—from the St Kilda mangroves in my backyard, in my electorate of Spence, all the way to some truly breathtaking sites that exist within the electorate borders of a number of other members. Some have larger patches than others, I must admit, but, big or small, these diverse ecosystems are worth protecting, and they're worth coming into this place to support measures that aim to repair and safeguard them.

I commend these bills to the House and I encourage those opposite to join us in passing these bills. I say that particularly to the moderates on the other side of the chamber. If you're afraid of seeming woke in your party rooms by supporting a bill that is supporting our environment, there'll be plenty of teals eyeing you off come time for the next election. I'd encourage you to look at it as being one of those 'from the frying pan into the flames' moments. Then maybe your self-interest and instincts for survival might kick in to save the day. There are a lot of Australian flora and fauna that are hoping that your survival instincts will safeguard their survival moving forward. If that's not enough to convince those opposite, I'd encourage everyone just to close your eyes for a moment and just think of your happy place, a place where you, in nature, like to go to and relax with your family, by yourself, with your partner or with your dog. Imagine, when you open your eyes, that that place is no longer there. That's what this bill is here to safeguard and protect. That is the importance of this bill. That's why it is so important that we get this bill passed through this House, if not for me, for our children, for our grandchildren and for our great-grandchildren. I thank the House.

Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I'm pleased to speak on the Nature Repair Market Bill 2023 and the Nature Repair Market (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2023. Somewhere between Prime Minister John Howard and Prime Minister Tony Abbott, the Liberal Party and National Party stopped believing in markets. They once believed in taking action on climate change by pricing carbon. I listened carefully to those opposite, all the way through this debate, constantly railing against the concept of a market. These are the Liberal and National parties, who claim they're the parties of private enterprise and the market. But it's the Labor party who wants to take action on climate change through the safeguard mechanism. We did when we were last in government. The Labor Party, through this particular legislation before the chamber, is wanting to engage in nature repair through a market-based mechanism. But those opposite cannot bring themselves to believe in the market, which is a great irony for the party of Menzies, Fraser and Howard. The Liberal and National parties somehow cannot believe in the market and cannot believe in taking action to create a market, yet when they were in government previously, legislation not dissimilar to this was something they once believed in. They've had a sort of Damascus Road conversion experience in reverse on this particular legislation in the last 12 months or so, but on taking action on the environment and taking action on carbon pollution by using a market mechanism—somewhere in the last decade and a half they did it. They lost their faith in the market.

We are the Labor Party, the party of the collective and solidarity. We are the party of the market, and this particular legislation is taking action on the environment and nature repair using a market-based mechanism. For those who listen, when you hear the platitudes and the sermonising from those opposite about the market, look at what they actually do and how they actually vote, rather than what they say. Actions speak a lot louder than words when it comes to those opposite. The Albanese Labor government wants to make it easier for people to invest in activities that help repair nature. To that end this landmark legislation would create a national framework for a world-first, voluntary national biodiversity market. We want to protect our environment from destruction.

Those opposite—having lost the election and sitting all those teals and Greens up there; having lost the election with seats held traditionally by the coalition, like Higgins and Bennelong, now held by Labor—still cannot bring themselves to accept the outcome and the lessons about taking action on the environment. Our ambition for nature is very big. Just as the Hawke government established Landcare, we want to restore environments that have been impacted in the past and repair more of what has been damaged. That's how we can build a truly nature-positive Australia where we leave our environment in a better state for our children and our grandchildren.

Australians want to live in a nature-positive country, a country that stops environmental decline and repairs nature—a country that prizes the Great Barrier Reef in my home state of Queensland, the beautiful rural areas in my electorate around the Somerset Dam and the Wivenhoe Dam and the rural areas around Ipswich. One of our government's most important priorities is to see new private initiative and private investment in our natural environment. We want to tap into that enterprise and creativity and harness them for the benefit of nature. We see enormous untapped potential here, and we are determined to help unleash it not in place of government action—Labor governments always take governmental action—but in addition to it, a partnership between governmental action and the private sector.

That's why with these bills we are legislating a world-first nature market, establishing the measurements, integrity and property rights necessary to properly reward the restoration and protection of biodiversity, working side by side with the carbon market. We want to support landholders to carry out activities that repair nature by establishing a world-leading nature repair market. In a world-first scheme, landowners will be able to be paid by a third party for protecting and restoring nature on their land. It will make it easier for businesses, philanthropists and others to invest in repairing nature across our great land.

The legislation establishes a scheme to incentivise private enterprise in nature restoration by creating tradable certificates for projects that protect and restore biodiversity. This market forms part of our nature-positive plan to protect more of what's precious, repair more of what's damaged and manage nature better for the future. This new market could realise billions of dollars of investment, complementing the existing carbon credit scheme while improving our environment. Indeed, many people have talked about recent reports of $137 billion that this market could unlock to repair and protect Australia's environment by 2050.

The credits would be generated, for example, by supporting landholders, including farmers and First Nations communities, to do things like replant a vital stretch of koala habitat, revive a critical nature corridor, repair damaged riverbeds or remove invasive species. Examples of this include removing drainage ditches and excluding livestock and feral herbivores to restore a natural marsh, which would create critical habitat for diverse native frog, fish, turtle and wetland bird species. Indigenous rangers undertake great work in terms of feral animal exclusion, buffel grass removal, feral-cat control and cultural burning in the Central Desert. I've met Indigenous rangers all across the country, from the Kimberley to Maningrida in the Northern Territory, in Central Australia and in my home state of Queensland, and I see the great work they do.

The certificate generator for the project could support Indigenous rangers working on country for many years, restoring seagrass meadows permanently lost from historic poor water-catchment quality, providing habitat for sea turtles, dugongs, marine fish and seahorses. Monitoring can be provided by local commercial and recreational fishers who foresee increased local fish stocks. In my own community, three projects across Ipswich and Somerset recently received federal government koala community grants to support recovery and protection of koalas, including by improving habitat. I've had the pleasure of visiting two of these projects—the koala health and habitat rehabilitation project in the Esk/Somerset region, run by the Australian Earth Laws Alliance and Care4esk, and the Purga koala habitat restoration project being delivered by Forest Land Management. I'm really pleased to see the work and research being undertaken in relation to those koala corridors around Glen Rock in the Somerset region, and Purga and Peak Crossing around rural Ipswich. These projects involve tree planting, habitat revegetation and weed eradication in known koala habitats, so they would be likely to generate biodiversity credits under the scheme. I look forward to those opportunities in my local area.

There are also a number of local Landcare organisations in my electorate across the Ipswich, Somerset and Karana Downs regions. For example, Bremer Catchment Association have worked tirelessly to restore the banks of the Bremer River in central Ipswich, Cribb Park and other areas. I've seen the work that has been done over the years around the Allawah Scouts place, and around Basin Pocket with people like Darren Close and others who have been working in the area to restore the land and the vegetation, and get rid of noxious weeds along the Bremer River. It's very important. I commend organisations like West Moreton Landcare, who have made considerable progress in rehabilitating waterways and environmental corridors, particularly in places like Rosewood. The Rosewood Scrub project and Mason's Gully restoration—right on the fringe of the urban areas in residential areas of Rosewood near Cabanda Home Care—are great places for people to go and walk, with a number of different species of plant that have been put back in that area.

I commend the work that has been done in terms of flood mitigation and restoration after the many floods and fires that have impacted the Ipswich and West Moreton region, including the Somerset region. I also thank West Moreton Landcare for the great work they've undertaken in the Brisbane Valley Rail Trail around places like Lowood. They've got considerable funds that I've been seeking support on. I also thank the Brisbane Valley Kilcoy Landcare group for working with me on vegetation issues and tree planting in the upper part of the Brisbane valley along the rail trail. They've also done some great work—they've been involved in rainforest restoration and the recovery of koalas, ecological communities and species in South-East Queensland, up around Jimna and the state forest in the northern bit of my electorate. These Landcare groups make a significant contribution to our local environment. It would be great to see their work recognised and captured by this nature repair market. I'm really excited about this, I think it is a great opportunity for those Landcare groups to partner.

Finally, I'll mention some of the traditional owners from the Ipswich region, including Uncle Henry Thompson Jr, who runs a local business providing Indigenous land conservation services and traditional fire techniques. That's an opportunity I see for local First Nations people in the Ipswich region. In my electorate, about 5.5 per cent of our population is First Nations, so it's a growing part of the electorate. I think this will be terrific. I see a lot of synergies in the work that's been done together by people like Henry Thompson and the land care groups.

This new market will be regulated by the Clean Energy Regulator. The regulator will have monitoring and enforcement powers to ensure projects are conducted in accordance with rules. It won't be willy-nilly open slather; there will be monitoring, reporting and notification of delivery of projects and activities on environmental outcomes. An independent committee will provide advice to the minister about the methods to set the rules for the projects. Creating a nature repair market with proper integrity and transparency will give business, philanthropists and local people interested a way to invest with confidence and will allow them to buy a quality product—verifiable, well-regulated certificates—so they can ensure their investments in protection and restoration have environmental benefits that are long lasting.

The Nature Repair Market would include a public register of biodiversity certificates to track their status and ownership. These integrity measures will ensure that, if people are investing in repairing nature, they actually get the long-term benefits. We can't allow greenwashing. We see this in numerous projects that get government funding. We see from time to time that people put a flavour on things when it's not actually what is happening on the ground. We want to ensure that the benefits that are promised are realised. Let's be clear that, while nature credits will be available for companies, the need to offset unavoidable damage they cause to nature—for example, if they build mines or other developments—is not the point of the program in any way at all. It is not designed to be an offset scheme to give developers an opportunity to buy credits instead of protecting our natural environment. This is not an effort to make it easier to replace one bit of the natural environment with another bit of the natural environment. This is a way of getting additional private sector and philanthropic investment into nature, so we need to get the market design right.

Ten years ago, the Australian Labor government created the world's first national legislative scheme for accrediting carbon offset projects. Today millions of dollars of these carbon credits are being traded each year, providing an extra income for farmers and landholders and lowering Australia's overall carbon emissions. Like all markets, it is an ongoing task to make sure the scheme is done with impeccable integrity. It's an important part of Australia's climate strategy and for our long-term path to zero emissions. The lesson is that well-designed, well-functioning environmental markets, including the use of offsets, can be a powerful force for good and not evil. In contrast, a bad market can be worse than no market if it's poorly designed, underregulated, creates perverse incentives or just greenwashes bad behaviour. These schemes need to be built on solid ground. That includes timing; we hope the new scheme will be operating by next year. That's why it's important that we pass the foundational legislation now to allow all of that work setting up the market and developing the methodologies to commence. It's part of what we need to do to protect, restore and repair nature.

I know that personally from my electorate. We have been hit by three major floods since 2011. There were bushfires around Linville and Moore, Bundamba and Ripley Valley. We've seen in my electorate the impact of the ravages of nature. I've seen what floods can do in communities and how they can destroy whole families' livelihoods and prospects. I've seen the impact on Lockyer Creek, the Bremer River, the Brisbane River and so many parts of my electorate.

I'm so optimistic about this legislation. I fully support it and I commend it to the House.

Ged Kearney (Cooper, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Nature Repair Market Bill 2023. I want to congratulate the Minister for the Environment and Water, the Hon. Tanya Plibersek, for bringing this bill to this parliament. It's incredibly important, and she, in her short time as minister in this portfolio, has done a lot more in one year than that other side did in 10 long, sorry years.

I live in a wonderful electorate. I represent the electorate of Cooper. It has many environmental and climate activist groups. We have the local chapter of the Australian Conservation Foundation, who sit with me in my office and have done so for many, many hours while we discuss important issues, like how to make the safeguard mechanism the best it can be, and I thank them for their hard work and the dedication they have to making sure that climate change is halted in its tracks and that there is a future for this planet. I want to thank the Australian Parents for Climate Action, a group of parents coming from many schools across my electorate, who visit me with their schoolchildren and talk to me about caring for the oceans and our forests and looking after the many animals and species that are facing extinction, They bring me lots of pictures, they bring me cakes, they bring me stories of their travels, and, to be honest, they bring me hope.

I want to thank the Friends of the Earth, an amazing organisation that recently have been talking to me about their concerns to make sure that in our transition to a clean energy economy we don't leave anyone behind—that there is a fair transition for workers. So they were very pleased to see that this Labor government has established the Net Zero Economy Agency and advisory board, led by the incredibly able Greg Combet, somebody I know very, very well from a previous life. And the Net Zero Authority will work with state and territory and local governments, with existing regional bodies, with unions, with industry, with investors and with First Nations groups to help key regions, industries, employers and others proactively manage the transformation to a clean energy economy, so that no-one is left behind.

I have activists who are very keen on electric vehicles and come and see me very often about the infrastructure that is needed to make sure electric vehicles are affordable and can be used by everyone. I have wonderful community battery groups who know how to run community batteries and have worked very closely with us on our community battery policy. I am very pleased to say that Alphington in my electorate will actually have a community battery.

We have local groups and local people who form part of Extinction Rebellion, the true climate disruptors. Whilst many might question their tactics, no-one can question their passion and dedication to making sure that we have a clean energy future. We have the Tomorrow Movement, a group of wonderful young people in my electorate who come and meet with me often, and who sometimes stand out the front with placards and signs to make sure that the issue of climate action is not going away. It keeps me grounded and makes sure that I am accountable and responsible to them. There is the Youth Climate Coalition. We have the Darebin Climate Action Now group. These are an amazing group of people. They are leaders in our community—absolute leaders—who are dedicated to making sure that there is strong action on climate change from all levels of government—local, state and federal.

Speaking of local government, the Darebin Council has actually declared a climate emergency. They were one of the first, if not the first, local governments to declare a climate emergency. I want to acknowledge the hard work of Trent McCarthy and Jane Moreton for instigating that movement, where hundreds of local governments now have declared climate emergency, as have, of course, the Labor Party and the Labor government.

There is my own climate and energy reference group, branch members of the Labor Party and local individuals who meet with me on a regular basis and make sure that I keep them up-to-date with advances on what the government is doing around climate action, and they give me very honest—and sometimes hard—feedback. But they are extremely glad to see that they finally have a government that is moving on climate action.

I have to mention all the wonderful waterways groups, the Merri Creek groups, the Darebin Creek volunteers and management committees, the great people who work hard down at Edwardes Lake and on Edgar's Creek. These are amazing activists who have reclaimed our waterways from barren, polluted wastelands to gorgeous green urban areas, where we now have platypi. We have seen endangered native fish return to our waterways, amazing birdlife, including beautiful kingfishers, and now, thanks to the collaboration with First Nations rangers, we have had cultural burns along the Darebin Creek that have seen Indigenous grasses that have not been seen for decades re-emerge. We have many Friends of the Forest groups, especially the Newlands Friends of the Forest, and a big shout-out to the wonderful Cath Rouse, who took me on a trip to Toolangi state forest. I was lucky enough in the dark of the night to spot a greater glider. Now thanks to the Dan Andrews government, we know that those old forests will be protected.

Recently my daughter, her husband and her two kids set off around this beautiful country—doing a lap, as they say—in their campervan. My grandchildren are learning about the environment first-hand, and through their home schooling they do bird spotting, they do researching of local flowers and plants, they draw animals and they are learning about endangered species. Right now they are in croc country and, I can tell you, they are learning about dangerous creatures. I want my grandchildren, Isla and Jack, to be able to grow up and do the same with their kids. So you see, for my electorate and my family, care of the environment and action on climate change are paramount issues.

The Albanese Labor government is delivering with a huge suite of policies led by Minister Bowen and Minister Plibersek. The Nature Repair Bill sits in our environment policy framework that aims to protect and restore Australia's natural landscape. It is a market mechanism much like the CPRS—which we never managed to implement because of the Greens party, which voted against it, you will recall—and is much like ACCU and credit units in the Safeguard Mechanism, which have the support of the majority of this parliament.

The Albanese Labor government is making it easier for people to invest in activities to help repair nature. We want to leave nature better off for our kids and our grandkids. We are supporting landholders, including farmers and First Nations communities to do things like plant native species, repair riverbeds or remove invasive species, and we're making it easier for businesses and philanthropists to invest in these efforts. We need significant investment in conservation and restoration for a nature-positive future. Business and private sector investment can contribute to reversing environmental decline and, to be perfectly honest, they should.

This bill introduces a world-leading voluntary market framework to support landholders in protecting and restoring nature. It will do a world of good after a decade of bad from the previous government, who did very little in this area. It will include a tradable biodiversity certificate, assurance and compliance arrangements, a public register and a nationally consistent approach for measuring biodiversity outcomes. And it will mobilise private investment to protect, to manage and restore Australia's natural landscape. It will enable the Clean Energy Regulator to issue Australian landholders with tradable biodiversity certificates for projects that protect, manage and restore nature. These certificates can then be sold to businesses, organisations, governments and individuals. The bill includes a wide range of provisions to ensure that these certificates will have integrity, so the market can invest with confidence, and so people who care so much about environment can be confident that people engaging in this market do not engage in green washing.

The bill has been drafted with a strong focus on integrity and transparency. The biodiversity integrity standards will support the making of project rules, and the nature repair market committee will advise the minister on methodology determinations with these standards. There will be transparency in the market, which will be achieved through the advice of a committee being made public. Projects being publicly tracked through the register and ownership of biodiversity certificates being listed on the register will be there for all to see. All landholders including First Nations people, conservation groups and farmers can participate in the market. Landholders can undertake projects that improve or protect existing habitat as well as projects to establish and restore habitat. These can be on land, waterways or in marine and coastal environments.

So you see, the Labor government is absolutely committed to making sure that our environment is protected, not only for the wonderful burghers of my electorate in Cooper, who, as I mentioned, care so much about these issues but for my grandchildren, for their children and for future generations to come, and for our First Nations people as well to make sure that we respect the land as they have done for 60,000-odd years. This is an incredibly important bill. It's one that we must support. It's one that we cannot let slip by. It is there for the future of all to enjoy this country.

Debate interrupted.