Wednesday, 1 November 2023

 Ellen SANDELL (Melbourne) (17:00): Today I would like to spend some time speaking about biodiversity and nature here in Victoria, because it is something that rarely gets talked about in this Parliament. This is a grievance debate, so I guess what I am doing is grieving for what we have lost and talking about how we might be able to protect what we have left. Here in Victoria we now have a new Minister for Environment, Minister Dimopoulos, taking over from Minister Stitt and Minister D’Ambrosio before her. I would like to welcome Minister Dimopoulos to the position, and I really hope he is excited about taking on this new role, because there really is a lot of important work to be done that could make a big, positive impact.

Nature is something that Victorians value really incredibly highly. It is not for no reason that homes next to the beach or on the edge of a park are more expensive than those that are not. It is not for no reason that our beaches, national parks and campgrounds are chock full during holidays. It is no accident that our top tourist attractions are seeing the little penguins or seeing animals at the zoo or driving along the Great Ocean Road. It is clear evidence that Victorians value nature and the wonder of our biodiversity. More than that, we need nature. We need everything that it gives us: clean air, water and other essential elements of life, not to mention how it feeds our souls.

But the sad thing is that by all indicators we are still making decisions here in Victoria that destroy nature at record pace. The last Victorian government VictorianState of the Environment report was in 2018. Back then none of our biodiversity indicators were classified as good, more than half were classified as poor and the rest were fair or unknown. In the latest update, last year, 2021, several indicators were moved from fair to poor, so things are getting worse. In the parliamentary inquiry into ecosystem decline a few years ago it was revealed that 2000 species and communities are now at risk of going extinct in Victoria. This year we are due for a new State of the Environment report, and I am worried that this report will show an even greater decline, because over the last nine years since I have been in Parliament I have seen time and time again decisions made by this Labor government that deprioritise and defund the environment and biodiversity and, worse than that, decisions that actively destroy nature, often to support vested interests or money-making ventures. But as the Cree saying goes:

Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realize we cannot eat money.

So today I want to put on the record some of the policies and programs that Victoria could fund and implement if they wanted to reverse the trend and start to not only protect but actually restore our beautiful biodiversity here in Victoria. I want to start by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land we now call Victoria and their custodianship of this land for tens of thousands of years. For tens of thousands of years people lived in harmony with the land, taking what they needed but understanding how to ensure that humans did not take too much from country which sustained them and their culture. For much too long we have not listened well to our First Nations peoples and their deep knowledge about country, and it is something we need to do a lot better.

To start off I want to talk about our nature laws. The Wildlife Act 1975 sets the laws for how people interact with wildlife in Victoria and how wildlife is protected. These laws have not been updated in 45 years. Three years ago, in 2020, the government promised to review them, notably after some serious breaches, such as mass killings of Bunjil, wedge-tailed eagles, and reports of wealthy overseas tourists being enticed to Victoria to shoot wombats for fun, which then was legal.

The Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act 1988 is also a piece of legislation that governs how governments are required to protect our threatened species. It is also not working and urgently needs updating. We understand this has been part of the review. However, three years on and the government is yet to respond to this review or make any changes. What is the hold-up? These pieces of legislation urgently need updating, yet the government seem to be sitting on their hands even after many, many people have put in thousands of hours of work. The government need to release their response now. The Parliament also held its inquiry into ecosystem decline and made some very useful and important recommendations, but the government is yet to respond to these, and I am hoping the new minister will make these a priority.

Secondly, I would like to talk about funding. Biodiversity 2037 was launched in 2017, six years ago. It is the government’s road map for improving biodiversity in Victoria. It is a good road map, but so much of it relies on the government actually funding the things in it, from invasive species management to research programs for the protection of threatened species, and a plan is no good unless it is actually implemented. Unfortunately that is what we are seeing here in Victoria: a plan that looks good on paper but has very little funding behind it. And it is something we are seeing again and again.

When it comes to decisions from this Labor government about funding for nature, nature is consistently deprioritised. One example of this is the Nature Fund, a fund that was set up to help biodiversity projects on private land, which is the large majority of land that needs conservation in Victoria. Before the election it was given $10 million – not a lot, but we were happy that it was set up, and we hoped that it would receive more funding in future rounds. But then in the last budget there was nothing. A few months ago an announcement was made for $3.5 million – I am sorry, but that is a pittance, especially when you look at what other states are committing to their similar funds. New South Wales has committed about 100 times what Victoria has, and Queensland about 10 times, to similar funds. It is not just this project that lacks funding. I hear again and again from people, including inside government, that biodiversity programs get knocked back again and again at budget time. We even had an Auditor-General’s report recently which showed this too. That is because the government does not want to fund protecting biodiversity over things like new train stations, where they can cut a ribbon on something tangible and get a lovely photo in the paper.

The Victorian Labor government needs to change its thinking. Protecting our biodiversity is vitally important. I would argue nothing is more important than sustaining life on earth. Yes, the government has committed some money to individual programs, for example, captive breeding programs at the zoo and the anti-predator fence at Wilsons Promontory. They are all very good programs; there is no question about that. But this needs to be scaled up significantly, and we cannot just focus on one small area or a few animals released into the wild. We need a change in thinking and a change in funding prioritisation to reverse the decline in biodiversity across the board. We need significantly more funding for invasive species management, for example, which is probably the biggest cause of biodiversity decline after climate change and habitat loss and which we are doing very poorly on in Victoria, from deer to pigs to rabbits to invasive weeds and new threats about to reach us like fire ants. We are not putting enough money or regulation towards stopping these, and we are being overrun. We need to get in early, and where we have not, where emerging threats have already taken off, we need governments to significantly scale up their efforts, not just throw up their hands and give up. We need properly funded recovery plans for endangered species to protect and restore remaining habitat as well.

On habitat, I want to acknowledge the momentous end to native forest logging and talk about what needs to happen now. Earlier this year the Victorian government brought forward the end of native forest logging, which means we will not see large-scale commercial logging from 1 January next year. This is momentous. The work of thousands of activists and community members over decades led to this decision, and they should be commended. As a student I became a forest activist. It is ultimately what led me to get into politics, because I simply could not see the sense – and Victorian governments, both Labor and Liberal, did it – of allowing the wholesale destruction of our beautiful biodiverse native forests, all to make cheap paper to profit a small number of large companies, when it was actually subsidised by the Victorian taxpayers. We were paying to log our own forests. The scale of the destruction was unfathomable, and I am so glad that we finally won this fight.

But as with most decisions this government makes, the devil is in the details to come. In many parts of the state, like the forests in the west, such as the Wombat State Forest and others, logging continues under forest licences and often under the guise of storm debris clean-up or fire preparation work. But the science shows that a lot of this logging actually makes our forests more fire prone as well as killing threatened species and their habitat.

What needs to happen from here? Firstly, VicForests needs to be disbanded immediately. VicForests are the government-owned agency that have been found repeatedly to have broken the law and logged illegally and even illegally spied on ordinary citizens who stand up to them. They must have no role in forest management going forward. Instead our forests need to be permanently protected for their biodiversity and cultural values, and this must be done with First Nations communities central to their ongoing management and protection.

We need to end commercial logging of native forests across Victoria, not log them under the guise of something else, and fix the way that fire is managed in Victoria. Under intense political pressure both Labor and Liberal governments have ramped up hazard reduction burns over the years since Black Saturday in 2009. Make no mistake, the Greens support evidence-based, planned hazard reduction burns to protect life and property from fire, but burning has often become more motivated by politics than evidence. Good scientific evidence now shows that large-scale burning in our native forests actually makes forests more flammable, not to mention it kills threatened species and destroys habitat, affects our health and air quality and pours carbon into the atmosphere. We need to rely on science to set our burning regimes and on cultural knowledge from our First Nations communities who have managed fires in the landscape for tens of thousands of years. We need to look critically at what will protect us from fire, including better investment in our rapid detection and firefighting capacity. Luckily many of our forest logging workers have the skills we need to protect us from and prevent fire and can be redeployed to do this vital work.

A lot of what I have spoken about today looks at systemic issues, at changing our laws and prioritising nature more, but there are also some fixes that could be done immediately that would make a big difference, and I am hopeful the new environment minister will move quickly on some of these. For example, currently in Victoria you can walk into a Bunnings or supermarket and buy rat poison. There are several different types – it is really hard to tell the difference – but some of them have ingredients that are killing our wildlife. When rats or mice eat them, these rats and mice are then eaten by birds such as owls and birds of prey. The poisons build up in their bodies, eventually killing them. It is a huge problem and killing many, many animals and birds in Victoria. Some of the poisons do not do this – they do not build up – but some, the second-generation rodenticides, as they are called, do. They need to be banned from sale in supermarkets and in Bunnings and only used where necessary, for example, in agriculture. They have already been banned in Europe from sale in supermarkets, for example. Why not here? It would be a simple measure with a big impact.

The way that permits are issued for killing native animals, for example, is another important thing that needs fixing, with the government having seemingly very little oversight over who gets permits to kill animals like kangaroos or koalas and the impact this is having on those populations. We can fix this system.

It does not escape me that the biggest threat to nature and biodiversity is climate change, and it is no secret that the Greens have been fighting hard to stop the biggest cause of climate change, fossil fuels. Yet an independent report just released shows that the Victorian Labor government provided $70 million in fossil fuel subsidies last year, and Labor are actively supporting many fossil fuel projects: approving gas drilling near the Twelve Apostles, lifting the ban on conventional onshore gas drilling across Victoria, extending the life of our brown coal power stations and signing secret deals to keep them open and operating long after the market is likely to close them – the details of which are kept secret from the public – and now the Treasurer is travelling to Japan to provide support for a new brown coal project to make dirty hydrogen in the Latrobe Valley.

The government is allowing seismic blasting to look for more oil and gas off the west coast of Victoria, killing sea life like whales and lobsters and deafening whales – a deaf whale is a dead whale – not to mention desecrating sacred sea country against the wishes of local First Nations communities. We need to stop seismic blasting, and the Victorian government have the power to do so if they have the political will. It goes without saying that none of this support for fossil fuels can happen if we want to protect ourselves from climate change and protect our biodiversity. Labor needs to stop supporting new fossil fuel projects or any projects that support them. It is that simple.

I could do a whole speech just on the issue of Victoria’s terrible decisions on the Murray–Darling Basin plan, where so many decisions have been made in favour of vested interests and against putting more water back into the river, as is needed, even putting them at odds with Tanya Plibersek, the Labor environment minister at the federal level.

In conclusion, Victorians care deeply about our environment. We are nurtured by it. We want our governments to protect it, and people will vote for it. I hope today I have provided somewhat of a road map for what the government could and should do differently, and I hope with the new minister that they will.