David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

A nature repair market sounds positive but, without the right settings and safeguards, I fear that at best it may do very little good and at worst it will facilitate greenwashing on a grand scale. The first object of the bill before us, the Nature Repair Market Bill 2023, is to promote the enhancement and protection of biodiversity and native species in Australia. This is clearly a very worthy goal. In the words of EO Wilson:

There can be no purpose more inspiriting than to begin the age of restoration, reweaving the wondrous diversity of life that still surrounds us.

We are truly lucky to live on this continent, a megadiverse continent, but we know that we are failing nature. We have seen catastrophic declines in our lifetimes. In the last 40 years, there has been a decline in most bird species of 60-plus per cent.

To change this, to change the fact that one of the wealthiest countries in the world can't find a few billion dollars to implement what our ecologists and environmental scientists are saying, takes cultural change. It takes leadership. It takes making the case for why we can and should do things differently and talking about the fact that we are heading in the wrong direction by somehow believing that we exist outside the bounds of nature and that nature is something out there. We are part of nature, and if nature goes down we are going down with her. We're starting to see the impacts of a mindset, a way of making decisions, that treats nature as something out there, something that's a nice-to-have, rather than as critical to our very survival and to our physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing.

We are fortunate here to have some of the world's leading environmental scientists, and they've got solutions. They are putting forward a path to deal with this, to truly turn things around. Clearly, that starts with stopping the destruction of habitat—things like native forest logging which are now costing taxpayers money. We're paying to cut down native forests that are home to threatened species. We clearly need to preserve habitat. We also need funding for threatened species programs, and we're just so far off the mark. A group of Australia's leading environmental scientists calculated that we need to spend about $2 billion a year to do that. Two billion dollars is a sizeable amount of money but, for a country like Australia, it's very affordable. In the last few weeks we've seen Snowy Hydro get another $6 billion for costs blowing out and there was an extra $10 billion for the frigates project. If this mattered to us, if this truly mattered to us, we would be able to fund it.

We know that the government has committed to improving our nature laws, and this is long overdue—I welcome it. They need to be drafted and legislated in a way that actually protects nature and halts the catastrophic decline that we're witnessing. We also need to support better land management, including by this continent's First Peoples. We have commitments from the government to double the Indigenous Rangers Program this decade, but we also need to ensure that First Nations' knowledge is implemented and that First Nations people are actually allowed to manage the land. I hear too often from ranger groups, including here in the ACT, that they're sometimes viewed as a box-ticking exercise, 'Yes, we'll do cultural burning and all these sorts of things, but only if it fits in with our pre-existing approvals and bureaucratic way of managing land.'

This bill looks to create a market for biodiversity. There's clearly a range of issues here, starting with dealing with something that's not that fungible—it's hard to measure. But I'm also concerned whether this is something that shouldn't or couldn't happen until we're actually doing the fundamentals well—when we're taking care of nature and looking for additional money for the environment. That's not the case here in Australia. It's not the case; we've been underfunding it for decades. We have bold promises around no new extinctions, but we're not seeing those backed up.

Clearly, this is not a new issue which humans have been grappling with. Almost 100 years ago Aldo Leopold wrote what was later published in Round River:

Considering the prodigious achievements of the profit motive in wrecking land, one hesitates to reject it as a vehicle for restoring land. I incline to believe we have overestimated the scope of the profit motive. Is it profitable for the individual to build a beautiful home? To give his children a higher education? No, it is seldom profitable, yet we do both. These are, in fact, ethical and aesthetic premises which underlie the economic system. Once accepted, economic forces tend to align the smaller details of social organization into harmony with them.

The task of developing a land ethic here in Australia is critical—having a government that's willing to go out on a limb and say: 'We need to change the way we think about our place in nature. We need to think of land not as something that belongs to us but of us belonging to the land.' I fear that this legislation is the other way round: we're simply trying to use the existing system rather than acknowledge that it hasn't been working.

What are some of my concerns with this bill? Firstly, it sets up the potential for future links to an offset market—to offset damage to the environment. We've seen the disastrous consequences of this; just look at the report on the scheme in New South Wales. It's not good! It seems to me that when you're left with a couple of per cent of temperate grasslands and box gum woodlands, it's incredibly hard to offset that. Where are you going to find that offset? There are just too many examples of offsetting gone bad. Take the Whitehaven Maules Creek coalmine. They ended up extending the offset period for a decade because they couldn't get the right offsets. Then they somehow managed to wangle their way to getting them accepted, but anyone who has seen some of those offsets will tell you that it's very hard to argue that they're like for like.

Secondly, I'm concerned about some of the integrity provisions. This is set up in a way that's parallel to the Emissions Reduction Fund. It's managed by the Clean Energy Regulator, who specialise in managing carbon projects. We've seen the issues around the application of methodologies. I'm sure this will be up for debate in this place, but clearly it seems to me that there are integrity issues, and yet we're just going to give them a whole other body of work. It's very hard to say that carbon is similar to biodiversity in terms of managing it, coming up with methodologies, enforcing those methodologies, issuing credits. I have real concerns around that. Based on those concerns, I will be putting forward an amendment that would add third-party open standing provisions. These are standard provisions in many modern acts, including the EPBC Act. These would allow third parties to initiate enforcement proceedings to uphold the law and seek judicial review of administrative decisions. If the government are comfortable that the CER will do the job well, then I'm very hopeful that they will have no problem with third-party standing.

Thirdly—and this goes back to my earlier point about the sequencing of this—there doesn't seem to be a clear pathway for government investment in biodiversity. We've seen $50 million here and $100 million there. It's very unclear if that's new money or if it's just coming from the trust.

Fourthly, the bill creates no role for First Nations peoples in the governance and integrity provisions of the nature repair market. This is a concern to me. I think there should be a requirement for a First Nations person on the committee, given that I'm hearing that a lot of this is aimed at Indigenous protected areas. Again, I will be putting forward an amendment on this.

Clearly, when we're talking about biodiversity, we can't not talk about climate change. Climate change is having a devastating impact on our biodiversity, from the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef to mass die-offs of spectacled flying foxes in Far North Queensland, to many of our very heat-sensitive species like gliders, which are in a lot of trouble when you look at habitat fragmentation and a warming climate. I would like the government to take that seriously. It's obviously not in this bill, but it very hard to talk about one without the other.

I'll be moving a second reading amendment highlighting some of my recommendations for actions to get better outcomes from this bill. These include creating a government investment strategy, which is something that came up a lot in the roundtables I held on this bill when it was in front of, I think, the first Senate committee that looked at it. I believe that the government should give a firm commitment to and time line for implementing the recommendations of the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures. If you're going to set up a market, you've actually got to ensure that you're creating some demand there by ensuring companies are disclosing their nature risk. It's been something that we've done in Australia for decades, where we've just externalised the cost of production, of extraction, onto nature. Nature has picked up the tab for too long. With TNFD, we now have a structure to be able to put that in a report, put it on a balance sheet and show how exposed companies in Australia are, and drive some change that way. The third thing called for in my second reading amendment is a review of the governance of the nature repair market, once the EPA is legislated and up and running, as to whether or not that is a more suitable place for the governance of a biodiversity credit market.

I can see what the government is trying to do with this bill but, again, as such a wealthy country, we've got to start to fund biodiversity and threatened species, rather than not giving them funding but pointing to a market mechanism where there may be some demand but where, from all the consultation I've done, it's very unclear just how much demand there will be. On top of that, we don't have a firm commitment that the government will kickstart demand with funding for that, as they did with the carbon market.