Sophie Scamps (Mackellar, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is for the Minister for the Environment and Water. This week, Australia is hosting the world's first-ever Global Nature Positive Summit, focusing on private investment in nature repair. Meanwhile, research from the Biodiversity Council shows the government continues to spend $26 billion every year on harming biodiversity. How can we hope to be nature positive in this country when the government continues to invest in being nature negative, and shouldn't we first stop subsidising nature-negative activities like native forest logging?

Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Environment and Water) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Mackellar for her question. She is a diligent, thoughtful advocate for the environment, and I know her constituents thank her for that. Mr Speaker, the first-ever Global Nature Positive Summit in Sydney has attracted 1,000 delegates from around Australia and from over 50 countries around the world. I can tell you there is enormous enthusiasm at this meeting for a nature-positive future. It's an opportunity for us to share the fantastic things that Australia is doing and to learn from best practice around the world. Yesterday, for example, a range of Australian businesses and NGOs launched Nature Positive Matters, a really important initiative to change some of the economic settings that the member for Mackellar is referring to. We also saw yesterday that the number of Australian companies reporting on their nature impacts using the TNFD framework has in fact doubled in the lead-up to the summit—another important achievement.

Today we announced that the Albanese government is now the global leader in ocean protection. We protect more of our marine environment than any other country on earth. We've expanded the Heard Island and McDonald Islands marine parks to the areas that we protect. Today we announced an additional 310,000 square kilometres will be protected by the Albanese Labor government. That's an area the size of Italy. It is the largest addition to conservation anywhere in the world this year. And it comes on top of last year's expansion of the Macquarie Island Marine Park, which was the largest addition to conservation anywhere on the globe last year.

For two years running, we have been global leaders in conservation. I think that's something to be pretty proud of, and I can tell you that the delegates at this conference are so impressed by the fact that we've already passed our first tranche of environmental laws with a stronger water trigger and that we are hoping to set up Australia's first environment protection agency, if we can manage to get the Greens and the crossbench or the Liberals and the Nationals to vote for it in the Senate. We were just one vote away from it. We've doubled funding for our national parks. We've kept the Great Barrier Reef off the 'in danger' listing. We've started the work to get Murujuga and Cape York onto the World Heritage List, and we've done so much more. Australia has the right to be very proud.