Statement on international environment leadership

What a difference 30 months makes.

Australia has moved from the margins of international environmental leadership – right to the front.

And we're delivering results for the environment at home and abroad.

My second report card on Australia's international leadership highlights this.

I'd like to take you through some of the achievements of the Albanese Labor government since we took office – and the incredible work we're doing on the land and at sea.

The situation we inherited in 2022 was critical, but in the last 30 months we are protecting more of what we love.

We're helping nature thrive.

We're doing this through strong leadership.

Greater protection for the environment.

More investment in programs that work.

Stronger relationships with our neighbours, including in the Pacific.

Working with industry to drive change.

Backing science.

Amplifying First Nations voices.

And a targeted collaborative response to problems that have been allowed to go unchecked for too long.

At the end of 2022, Australia, along with 144 other countries, agreed to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

Australia can be very proud of the role that we played in those negotiations.

The Australian Conservation Foundation called it 'one of the most consequential decisions for nature this decade'.

The Secretary-General of the United Nations called it a 'peace pact with nature'.

The Framework sets out a global nature-positive vision where we act to halt and reverse biodiversity loss to put nature on a path to recovery.

That is a mission that we have been working hard to deliver.

We joined the Canadian-led Nature Champions Network, which aims to get ministers from all over the world together to help implement the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

We hosted the world's first ever Global Nature Positive Summit in Sydney in October this year, and I was very pleased that King Charles gave a shout-out to the summit when he was in Australia recently.

As the King said, “Australia's international leadership on global initiatives to protect our climate and biodiversity is of such absolute and critical importance”.

We delivered the Summit – a commitment I'd made in Montreal – to leverage Australian scientific expertise and experience with environmental markets.

Our mission: to increase investment in nature from government and from private and philanthropic investors.

To that end, I'm very pleased to report that in June the government issued $7 billion in green bonds in a first and major milestone for Australia's sustainable finance market.

Money raised through these bonds will back projects that have nature repair and restoration and energy transformation at their heart.

We also saw Australian businesses— more than 20—join up to Nature Positive Matters on the eve of the Global Nature Positive Summit, and I look forward to more Australian businesses joining that great movement.

I'm proud to say that the Summit was a resounding success and that next year we will be opening Australia's first ever nature repair market, making it easier for people to invest in projects that repair and protect nature.

There was an enormous amount of international interest in our nature repair market, which will be the first national market of this type in the world.

The market is underpinned by science, integrity and transparency, giving businesses and philanthropists a way to invest in nature with confidence.

It'll be a win for the environment, a win for landholders, a win for First Nations peoples and a win for investors.

We're working on projects right across Australia right now to help inform the nature repair market, like the Blue Heart conservation project on the Sunshine Coast in Queensland.

The Blue Heart conservation project is one of those blue carbon test projects for the nature repair market which will open in the new year.

The project will demonstrate how land can be managed to improve water quality, biodiversity and carbon sequestration while supporting landholders and local communities to develop new land management practices.

It also provides an opportunity for the Traditional Owners, the Kabi Kabi First Nations people. They are the project owners. They are restoring wetlands to improve the biodiversity of the wetlands, to improve carbon sequestration and also to tackle flood mitigation.

Kabi Kabi Elder Auntie Cecilia Combo said that being part of this work was so important to her.

She said: “We're working side by side. Not behind, not forward—side by side. That's coming from my heart.”

That's what leadership through partnership looks like, and it's working.

Of course, it's very important that we have strong underpinning measurement of these improvements, and that's why we are legislating a definition for 'nature positive' – the first country in the world to do so.

It's why we are setting up Environment Information Australia to report on progress towards this national goal.

In October, we submitted Australia's strategy for nature that sets out what we'll do to implement the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, and it sets six goals for Australia, with three enablers.

They're the areas that we'll focus on because they will make the biggest difference in our domestic context, and they are: 

• protecting 30 per cent of our land and 30 per cent of seas by 2030
• restoring priority areas
• no new extinctions
• tackling pests and weeds that wreak havoc on native plants and animals
• addressing the impacts of climate change on biodiversity
• a more circular economy
• mainstreaming nature in decision-making
• ensuring equitable representation in decisions that relate to nature, and 
• ensuring that environmental data and information are widely accessible.

I'm very proud to report that these goals are shared by all of the states and territories and we're making strong progress.

Since we have come to government more than 70 million hectares of Australia's land and sea have been added to our national estates or provided with stronger protections.

That is an area larger than Germany and Italy combined.

We've doubled national parks funding.

We've passed strong new laws to protect the ozone layer.

We've saved Toondah Harbour, an internationally significant wetland.

We've stopped Jabiluka from being mined for uranium and the Labor government wants to add it to Kakadu National Park instead.

We're world heritage listing Murujuga in Western Australia.

We're setting up Australia's first environment protection agency.

And there is still more to come.

Australia now protects more ocean than any other country on Earth.

This year I signed off on a massive 310,000- square-kilometre expansion to quadruple the size of subantarctic Heard Island and McDonald Islands Marine Reserve.

That means that for the first time ever more than half of Australia's oceans are now protected 52 per cent, blitzing our 30 per cent target signed up to in 2022.

That is the biggest contribution to ocean conservation anywhere in the world this year, and last year, when we tripled the size of Macquarie Island Marine Park, another wonderland, that was the biggest act of ocean conservation anywhere in the world last year.

We have been world leading two years in a row.

We've also recently announced we're strengthening protections for 73,000 square kilometres of seas in Australia's south-east, an area bigger than Ireland.

This cements our lead on ocean conservation.

We know it's not just our domestic waters that we have to look after.

In October I was proud to announce that Australia has joined the Global Ghost Gear Initiative, the world's largest marine alliance committed to tackling ghost nets, and announced a $1.4 million partnership with Indonesia and Papua New Guinea to reduce the amount of abandoned fishing nets in the Arafura and Timor seas.

After two decades of effort, we have been delighted that Australia has been able to sign up to the UN High Seas Biodiversity Treaty, or the BBNJ as it's known.

This treaty sets up for the first time how we protect marine waters in international waters.

The Australian government signed up for the treaty the day it opened.

We've also provided $3 million that will assist Pacific countries to ratify the treaty.

At the most recent International Whaling Commission meeting in Peru, Australia's representative Dr Nick Gales was elected as a commissioner and to lead the commission, reaffirming Australia 's commitment to a moratorium on commercial whaling.

We will host the next whaling commission meeting here in Australia.

As part of these global efforts to protect our high seas environment, I was very pleased to announce that Australia accepted Chile's invitation to join the leadership for High Seas Marine Protected Areas collaborative initiative. This is a new group that will champion that work on the high seas.

To further demonstrate this leadership, in October I announced $100,000 for a research symposium on the south Tasman Sea and Lord Howe Rise in partnership with the High Seas Alliance's Deep Ocean Stewardship initiatives and WWF.

This is a unique underwater landscape and we need more science to describe it and to truly value it.

Back on land, we're also making huge strides on conservation and restoration.

We are on track to meet our 30 by 30 target, our government's national target to protect 30 per cent of our land by 2030.

At the moment we're at 22 per cent of our land and we can expect to increase this to 25 per cent of our land by 2026.

We're working closely with First Nations groups to conserve and restore land.

Indigenous Protected Areas are areas of land and sea that Traditional Owners have agreed to manage for nature conservation, and they're one of the best ways we have of protecting and caring for country.

So far, we have established 10 new Indigenous protected areas and expanded two existing areas, adding a further 7½ million hectares of land – an area the size of Tasmania – to our national reserve system and to our 30-by-30 target.

That's on top of the 90 million hectares of land and sea that are already protected by IPAs. We're also investing $1.3 billion in Indigenous Rangers Programs.

This will include a doubling of the number of Indigenous rangers from 1,800 to 3,600.

These rangers do absolutely incredible work in managing the feral animals and weeds that are killing our native species. They undertake cultural burning.

They use their knowledge in so many different ways to protect and care for country.

It's a great source of pride for those Traditional Owners.

It's a great economic investment in their communities.

And it gives us the very best outcomes for nature.

Australia has also adopted a national framework for the definition of 'Other Effective Area-Based Conservation Measures'.

What this does is help us set a high standard for land that has other uses but can also be used for conservation outside our national parks and reserves.

As one example, and this has been a great partnership, we're working with Defence and Traditional Owners to recognise 150,000 hectares of the Yampi Sound defence training area in Western Australia as Australia's first OECM in that area of 91,000 square kilometres in particular.

Located in Western Australia, with Broome at its southern end, it's an incredibly biodiversity-rich area, with savanna woodlands, rainforest, scrublands, grasslands, wetlands, coastal vegetation such as mangrove forests, and seagrass meadows.

Of course, Defence will continue to use it for the reasons it has used Yampi Sound in the past, but when we manage the weeds and feral animals and burning risks, we can also protect that area for nature and add it to the areas that count towards our 30-by-30 target.

We're investing more than half a billion dollars—$550 million—to protect native animals and plants and to tackle invasive pests.

This will include $224½ million specifically through our Saving Native Species Program.

This program has done incredible work to protect 73 individual species, such as the swift parrot, the Australian sea lion and the southern corroboree frog, that are at risk or endangered.

We're tackling invasive pests like yellow crazy ants. We're eradicating destructive weeds like gamba grass.

As my colleagues would know, if gamba grass catches fire, it burns really hot and does incredible damage.

We're getting into the feral animals—the pigs and goats, as well as the deer, which I know are a huge problem in the Tasmanian wilderness area, and, in particular, the cats.

Cats have contributed to two-thirds of Australia's mammal extinctions, and they are a risk to a further 200 threatened species, including the greater bilby, the numbat and Gilbert's potoroo.

So we've ramped up our investment in feral cats, with an additional $60 million investment in innovative projects to tackle them, in response to our feral cat threat abatement plan, which we're working closely with states and territories to deliver on.

We want to make sure that feral cats don't send other animals extinct.

Of course, we've also got to be scanning the horizon.

I'm very pleased that the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry is here.

She has shown phenomenal leadership in helping prepare Australia for HPIA H5N1, the most recent strain of bird flu, which is an enormous risk to our wildlife, as well as to the agriculture sector.

This is the most recent strain of bird flu.

If it gets into the wild in Australia, we are in big trouble, because what we've seen overseas is that millions of birds have been killed in the wild.

Many thousands of sea mammals have been killed as well, because it can affect sea mammals.

So we have invested about $100 million in preparation towards better protecting our agriculture sector and our native wildlife from this emerging risk. 

When Labor came to government in 2022 we needed urgent leadership to protect the Great Barrier Reef.

UNESCO was set to list it as in danger, endangering the billions of dollars of economic activity and the tens of thousands of jobs that depend on the reef.

By investing $1.2 billion to protect the reef we have managed to show what we all know – that no-one cares more about the reef than Australians – and that we can be trusted to protect it.

From Cape York to Mackay, we know that a healthy reef is connected to healthy communities. 

We've invested in water quality projects, in land restoration projects that also improve water quality going onto the Reef, and in dealing with Crown-of-thorns starfish.

We've doubled funding to the scientists who look after the Reef.

We've blocked Clive Palmer's big coalmine that risked putting dirty, contaminated water onto the Reef.

And we will always look after our special places.

That's why we're also working to protect places like the cultural landscapes of the Cape York Peninsula, which have been added to Australia's UNESCO tentative World Heritage list.

We've worked very hard to deliver on the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.

To deliver a more circular economy, because we know that a more circular economy is not just an incredible contribution to Australia's environment, keeping more rubbish out of landfill, but also a huge driver of jobs.

There are three jobs in recycling for every job in landfill.

We've worked very closely with international partners on the global plastics treaty, which is being negotiated in Busan at the moment.

We know that reducing the amount of waste we produce in the first place, particularly plastic waste, is absolutely key to reducing its environmental impacts.

In Busan right now, the Australian Government is pushing for a strong, binding international treaty to end plastic pollution by 2040 and to ensure strong Pacific voices in these negotiations.

The Australian government is providing almost $2.5 million to support Pacific Island countries to prepare for and participate in those negotiations.

We're transitioning from the old forms of high-polluting energy to cleaner energy.

It's one of the biggest transformations in the last 50 years.

So far I've ticked off 65 renewable energy projects—enough to power more than seven million homes.

And we're doing that right now, not in 20 years’ time.

To conclude, Australians want to protect and repair nature.

There's no Australian I meet who doesn't want to be able to go fishing in a clean river or go for a swim at the beach or take their kids for a bushwalk and see a koala or an echidna in the wild.

We need to work now to protect nature for our kids and for our grandkids.

We are very proud of our unique plants and animals and our unique landscapes, and Labor will continue to work to protect them.