The Australian government has committed A$25 million ($15.8 mln) to fund conservation work on privately held land, as the minister for environment on Tuesday laid out details on the consultation process for its environmental law reforms.

Minister Tanya Plibersek told the Australia Land Conservation Alliance (ALCA) conference in Canberra on Tuesday that the new cash would encourage private and philanthropic investment in projects like purchasing land to protect it from development, alongside pest and weed control work.

She said the funding would be delivered in partnership with conservation organisations, community groups, First Nations groups, and state and territory governments.

“Nature doesn’t begin and end at the border of our national parks. Private land is where a large percentage of critical habitats are found, it’s where some of our most endangered animals live,” she said.

“Which means it has to be a central focus of our conservation.”

The first partnership of A$1.5 mln will go to Trust for Nature to protect critical habitat in Victoria, supporting 600 hectares of land, and will be jointly funded by the state and federal government, as well as sponsors from the private sector, including clothing-brand Country Road, Plibersek said.

She said the new funding boost would “supercharge” efforts to reach the country’s target to protect 30% of its land and 30% of its oceans by 2030.

LOCK-UP

The Minister emphasised that the funding was just one part of the much broader reforms the government was pursuing by overhauling the country’s environmental laws and the establishment of the nature repair market.

Last week, the government announced 30 stakeholders from conservation, legal, and industrial backgrounds would be invited to an initial consultation of the 1,000-page draft reforms of the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Act (EPBC).

Plibersek Tuesday confirmed that ALCA would be one of the 30 invited to scrutinise the draft legislation, however participants at the conference told Carbon Pulse there was some confusion around how this selection process would work.

The minister said the “targeted review” would take the form of a budget lock-up style event, with the legislation and standards available for a period of two days to selected groups in person, before inviting further stakeholders to assess the draft every few weeks after that.

“We’ve got 1,000 of pages of drafting to do, this is the most enormous piece of legislative reform you can possibly imagine,” Plibersek said.

The Greens party and the Wilderness Society are reportedly concerned that the government is no longer planning to release the legislation for public consultation.

“No public consultations means that vested interests will be able to do their bidding behind closed doors with no oversight,” Wilderness Society spokesperson Sam Szoke-Burke told the Guardian Tuesday.

“In large part, only elite and connected actors will have access.”

Plibersek defended the decision not to release the full draft online, as is usually the case.

“We know that the risk of that is people will look at one piece of it without looking at the context, and they’ll have no one to answer their questions,” she said.

“So, the way we’ll do it is we’ll bring people in, we’ll go through it with you, we’ll have lawyers, and policy experts on hand to make sure that we actually get this right. We need to fix what is currently a dysfunctional system.”

The Department of Climate Change, Energy, Environment and Water’s website currently states that “everyone will be able to have their say on the proposed new laws that will implement the commitments in the Nature Positive Plan”.

OFFSETS

While emphasising that they should be used as a last resort, Plibersek reiterated that federal-level biodiversity offsets would feature as part of the reform work, and their standards would be strictly enforced by the newly created agency, Environmental Protection Australia.

“[Offsets] should involve active restoration in the same region, with the same type of habitat, and under our system, that’s what we’ll deliver.”

She went on to defend the government’s track record on the environment.

“No government has invested more in nature than we have,” she said.

“We’re getting the architecture right, and we’re matching it with work on the ground, in local communities.”

However, independent Senator David Pocock told a panel discussion following the minister’s address that the government’s work so far had been overly focused on market-based mechanisms.

“The talk of spending more than we ever have before just doesn’t cut it … and it was really worrying that the first thing that the government proposes is a market mechanism … that clearly looked like a pipeline for offsets,” he said.

“The government has to step up, this is important, the market stuff can be the icing on the cake, but there’s a lot of work to do in actually investing in nature, in monitoring, in projects, and in national parks, in management – it’s so underfunded across the country.”

Plibersek argued that the nature repair market would be critical to funding conservation work on privately held land, noting that 60% of Australia’s landmass was privately owned.

“The purpose of our legislation is to promote and reward landholders for their good environmental work,” she said.

“Making it easier for businesses, philanthropists, and other Australians to invest in activities that repair and protect nature.”

The Senate committee currently examining the draft nature repair market legislation has until Nov. 1 to report its findings, according to the committee’s website.

The government has also previously highlighted its plan to hold a global biodiversity summit this time next year as a way to encourage further investment and collaboration.

However, Alexandra Banks, Oceania partner, climate change and sustainability services at EY, told a separate panel that such a conference could highlight Australia’s environmental shortfalls as much as its strengths.

“I think the summit next year is a really good example of how the world sees Australia in this space … [they’ll say] if you want to lead this thing go for it, but you’re not going in the direction that you need, the state of your environment is nowhere near where it should be, considering the economic opportunity that you have, and your economy is so dependent on nature,” she said.

Conservation groups have estimated Australia needs to spend around A$2 billion per year to halt new extinctions in the country, one of the government’s targets, with Pocock saying more direct spending from the government was needed.

“They have to step up with some cold hard cash,” Pocock said.

By Mark Tilly – mark@carbon-pulse.com

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