Wednesday, 29 July 2026

 Sarah MANSFIELD (Western Victoria) (10:30): I move:

That this house:

(1)   notes that:

(a) the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office (VAGO) delivered a thorough assessment of the state government’s response to biodiversity decline in 2021;

(b) VAGO’s Protecting Victoria’s Biodiversity report found that the former Department of Environment, Water, Land and Planning (the department) could not demonstrate if, or how well, it is halting further decline in Victoria’s threatened species populations;

(c) the department accepted all nine of VAGO’s recommendations, including recommendation:

(i) 8, that the department ‘provides updated, comprehensive, scientific and evidence-based advice to the government on the ongoing resources required to improve the net outlook for all threatened species listed under the Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act 1988’;

(ii) 9, that the department ‘provides advice to the government about the investment required to protect and recover prioritised critically endangered species at extreme risk of extinction’;

(d) the department has since fulfilled both recommendations and provided advice to the government on the investment required to manage Victoria’s threatened species crisis and protect and recover critically endangered species;

(e) the government has not made this advice public; and

(2)   in accordance with standing order 10.01, requires the Leader of the Government to table in the Council, within 60 days of the house agreeing to this resolution, departmental advice developed pursuant to recommendations 8 and 9 of VAGO’s Protecting Victoria’s Biodiversity report regarding the investment required to manage Victoria’s threatened species crisis and protect and recover critically endangered species.

I rise to speak on motion 1528 in my name. Back in 2020 the Victorian Auditor-General investigated the management of biodiversity loss and the decline of threatened species in Victoria. Victoria has lost around 80 species since colonisation, with almost 2000 facing extinction. But six years later things are looking worse in Victoria. The latest state of the environment report rated 26 of 42 biodiversity indicators as poor, with 20 deteriorating since 2020.

To understand why, it is worth drilling into that first audit. VAGO acknowledged that this was not a crisis purely of this government’s making. The final report notes that our native flora and fauna and their habitats have all been declining since European colonisation. It also acknowledges that current and future threats such as land clearing, the introduction of new pest plants and animals and the impact of climate change continue to put our native plants and animals at increasing risk of decline and extinction. VAGO’s conclusions were ultimately damning, finding that the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action could not demonstrate if or how well it was halting further decline in Victoria’s threatened species populations. Among its critiques of the government’s monitoring tools, its data collection and its overall transparency, VAGO found that funding for the department to protect species fell significantly short of what it predicted was needed. Basically, the government did not care enough about combating the extinction crisis to fund the department doing the work. However, VAGO also noted the department had not provided detailed evidence-based advice to the government about the costs and benefits of protecting and monitoring threatened species to support further investment. To its credit, the department accepted all nine subsequent recommendations, including two recommendations to advise the government about genuine funding needs and species prioritisation.

We understand the government has held up its side of the bargain and costed what it would actually take to manage Victoria’s extinction crisis, yet Labor has not released those costings. It has not delivered the funding required to address the biodiversity crisis. Again, 20 biodiversity indicators have actually gone backwards since 2020. Instead, in the years since the VAGO report was released the government has actively cut funding from the environment department. After the Silver review Labor announced it planned to cut a further 350 jobs from the Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action. The thing is they had already reduced DEECA to a shell of itself over years of austerity budgets and the machineries of government. Since 2023 Labor has been quietly but consistently slashing jobs from Parks Victoria, the Victorian Fisheries Authority, the biodiversity division and other DEECA teams and agencies. The government is even facing extended industrial action from Parks Victoria staff, because after starving the agency of funding, Labor cannot even pay park rangers the same as their public sector counterparts. Other environmental agencies have been abolished entirely, including Sustainability Victoria; the Victorian Environmental Assessment Council, or VEAC; the Victorian Marine and Coastal Council; the Mine Land Rehabilitation Authority; and Recycling Victoria.

While attacking nature experts, the government has actually bent over backwards for game hunters. They have opened up tens of thousands of hectares of national parks for recreational deer hunters, they have rejected their own inquiry’s recommendation to ban duck shooting and they have even rejected commonsense ideas like listing deer as pests. That is right: Victoria is the only mainland state in Australia to classify deer as protected species, all because game hunters want to keep their game alive and well so that they can hunt it into the future. That is a ridiculous decision, and it is why we have seen farmers and environmentalists team up for what should be a pretty straightforward demand: classify deer as pests and fund multistakeholder eradication plans.

Throughout all of this, Labor has failed to do any actual conservation work. They have failed to fix our hodgepodge of decades-old wildlife laws, which were designed in the 1970s mainly to regulate the killing of native wildlife. They have failed to prevent developers destroying critically endangered grasslands in Melbourne’s west – land that the government was meant to have purchased by 2020. They have also let developers destroy native forests on private land in East Gippsland shire, instead passing responsibility to the local council, and they have failed to futureproof the end of commercial native timber harvesting in Victoria. Instead they have handed millions of dollars meant for transition support for workers to companies that have used that money to prop up native timber logging in Tasmania and then send timber here to be pulped by mills in Victoria, which is why the Greens have developed a bill to close the logging loopholes and protect our precious forests once and for all.

But this disinterest from Labor really makes sense when you realise that no-one in Labor actually wants to be the environment minister. There has been a lot of talk this week about musical chairs when it comes to party leadership from both Labor and the Liberals, but did you know we have seen four environment ministers in the past five years in Victoria, usually tacked on to a bunch of other very significant, substantial portfolios? Seriously, if no-one in Labor cares enough about nature to do the job, why would anyone have any faith in this government? Today we are calling on Labor to show the true scale of what it would take to actually manage and reverse the extinction crisis in Victoria, but we are also demanding that the government do something with those costings. That means funding, and that means actually caring about nature.

 Sonja TERPSTRA (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (10:36): I rise to make a contribution on this motion in Dr Mansfield’s name. It is a short-form documents motion calling on the government, in accordance with standing order 10.01, to table in the Council within 60 days of the house agreeing to this resolution departmental advice relating to recommendations 8 and 9 of the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office’s Protecting Victoria’s Biodiversity report et cetera.

It is a great pleasure to rise to speak on this motion. I want to thank Dr Mansfield for bringing this motion to the house. It is the government’s position, as usual, that we do not oppose documents motions in regard to seeking the tabling of documents. But the substance of this motion is more than just talking about the tabling of documents, it is about Victoria’s biodiversity. Despite what Dr Mansfield has outlined, the Victorian government has invested a lot of money in protecting Victoria’s environment. There was a seminal report done on Victoria’s 20-year biodiversity strategy. It was launched in 2017 and titled Protecting Victoria’s Environment: Biodiversity 2037. There was a lot of work done in that report. It is a very important report. It sets the framework, or the blueprint, for how Victoria will be approaching protecting its biodiversity.

By way of example I will go through and highlight some of the things that the government has invested in. There is an annual investment of $20 million in the protecting biodiversity program, which delivers on-ground action and improves decisions, support systems and biodiversity reporting. It also empowers traditional owners and protects private land and marine conservation projects. There is $77 million for BushBank. This is a targeted program to revegetate 20,000 hectares of private and public land by 2035 to benefit a range of species and to sequester carbon. It is the largest such program in Victoria’s history. We have significantly invested in parks and public land and further supported other strategies for pest eradication, with $18.25 million over four years ongoing for pest species eradication.

The government gets just 5 minutes to talk on these documents motions. There is a lot more I could say, but time is against me and unfortunately I cannot go into great detail about the investment that cuts across a whole range of areas. I might just say that following the severe 2019–20 bushfire season we committed $517 million over four years and $108 million ongoing to protect Victoria from bushfire risk. The 2026–27 budget delivers a further $146.8 million for critical aviation firefighting resources and $44.6 million to maintain essential emergency services management assets and frontline firefighting vehicles.

In terms of Victorians enjoying our natural environments, $30 million over four years has been allocated for keeping 1.8 million hectares of state forest open, healthy and accessible. This includes the $4 million in the budget for community-driven healthy forest plans, $42 million for recreation infrastructure improvements and $7.2 million for additional rangers to support on-the-ground management. Then there are further programs like BushBank, Landcare and of course the conservation regulator that are delivering practical action on biodiversity, habitat and wildlife across the state. These are all important investments. But also, in protecting Victoria’s biodiversity, everyone can play a role, and everyone has a stake in this as well. In terms of non-government investment into biodiversity, the government recognises that it cannot do this alone. There is $13.67 million in the Nature Fund that was invested in 2022, and it has attracted a further $23 million in co-contribution investment to protect a range of threatened and culturally significant species and deliver habitat restoration. We are also investing $30.9 million in our habitat restoration program. I could go on and on. There is loads more, but again time is against me. As I said, the government’s position is that we will not be opposing a documents motion, but nevertheless it is not right to say that the government does not take protecting our biodiversity seriously.

 Melina BATH (Eastern Victoria) (10:41): It is very clear to many Victorians that the greatest threat to vulnerable species, to threatened species, is out-of-control bushfires, and our state has suffered in the last decade from more than we ever want, need or should. I understand almost 3 billion faunal species were incinerated or were maimed and had to be put down because of the bushfires in 2019–‍20. If this government wants to talk about its record, then its record needs to be of slowing, mitigating and forward planning and preparing for bushfires. Now, I support this documents motion, as we do, and indeed I would like very much to see, and the Liberals and Nationals would like to see, what is going on with this government. We see this is in their DNA; it is an increasingly regular occurrence. There is a significant problem. There is a review, and it can be an Auditor-General’s one – we saw only recently the Victorian Auditor-General’s follow-up in terms of bushfire preparedness, and it was a damning report on the government. We see advice from bushfire royal commissions. We see advice from the inspector-general for emergency management and others. We see these reports.

We even see there is an unreleased Parks Victoria report. Only recently Parks Victoria investigated. The minister said, ‘Let’s have a look at what’s going wrong in Victorian parks’. The public does not know. It is an internal document that does not get down to the nitty-gritty. We do not know what is in there about the flaws in this government’s management of our public spaces. They have stripped back the bushfire reporting, and that is very clear. They have watered it down. It used to have great detail about fuel-driven risks, the preparedness, the number of burns and where they were located. What this government has done over the last five or six years is that now it is a vibe. Now we get a document that is called the ‘management report’, and it is far more just, as I said, the vibe. That is not sufficient. It does not talk about fuel breaks. It does not provide depth and quality to Victorians. Surely Victorians deserve to know how at risk they are.

To this point, surely our environment needs to be understood better, and that includes threatened species. I have gone on record a number of times talking about the importance of understanding threatened species. Indeed only recently the Victorian government put forward apparently a vermin-proof fence across the top of Wilsons Promontory. Well, guess what, it has got more holes in it than Swiss cheese. The wombats can go under it, the foxes can go through it, and it finishes metres before the edge of the landform before it goes into the sea. This is what this government is doing. We see that the government is stripping back and editing a clear document that was put forward in a public inquiry – how manipulative is that – in relation to bushfire preparedness. I put this on record. It is a public document. Go and look at our minority report that provides two documents. One is about the unfiltered CFA response to questions on notice, and the other one is a highly sanitised government version.

The Greens and I may have differing views on the drivers of the decline in ecosystems. We know that it is not the timber harvesting. We know that it is not the need to remove trees. We need to actively manage our forests in this state. This government has called for a lock-up of tenure – ‘Let’s transfer a name, create a different title’ – and apparently it serves as conservation. We understand that we need active management. We do need to see these documents. We do need scientific evidence of what is happening in this state, but we certainly do not need more subterfuge, more of a culture of secrecy and more putting it in the bottom drawer, because what is good for our environment and what is good for threatened species is also good for communities and all Victorians. I put on record to this government that if there is another devastating wildfire in the next few years, we are in dire straits.

Motion agreed to.