00:00This is the third Parliament to try to fix Australia's broken national environment laws
00:07that have been around for 25 years and I think on this occasion there's a very good chance
00:13that the Australian Parliament will fix the laws and that will make a big difference to
00:18the protection of Australia's environment and also to the achievement of our net zero
00:23goals.
00:24To follow the legislation or have followed the operation of the legislation closely over
00:31the past 25 years have all been aware that the legislation contains a glaring loophole
00:36when it comes to deforestation and the impact of that glaring, I mean basically it doesn't
00:43apply to most of the deforestation that is occurring in Australia and the impact of that loophole
00:49is that every year in Australia several hundred thousand hectares of vegetation continue to
00:54be cleared and that clearing of vegetation, it's mainly forests of course, the clearing of that
01:00vegetation does enormous damage to environmental integrity, it destroys fragile ecosystems,
01:08it puts threatened species at greater risk of extinction, in fact renders some extinct and
01:14at the same time it releases more carbon into the atmosphere rather than drawing or sequestering
01:21carbon out of the atmosphere which is something that the Australian landscape has to do if we've
01:25got any chance of meeting net zero. Indeed it's well understood now, at least by some, that the Australian
01:33landscape is going to have to draw out of the atmosphere by 2050 two and a half times as much carbon as
01:40it presently draws out of the atmosphere each year. That's a massive increase in carbon sequestration in
01:47the Australian landscape and right at the moment we're heading off in the opposite direction clearing vegetation.
01:53Without a healthy natural environment there will be no economy. I mean it is often said that the two are
02:04necessarily in conflict that we have to destroy the environment in order to enjoy economic growth and Australia's experience though
02:14so far this century has been that we have accelerated the rate at which we're destroying the environment
02:20and at the same time our productivity growth has slowed to something which is barely measurable.
02:26So we have not achieved faster economic growth, we've not achieved higher productivity
02:32by ramping up the rate at which we destroy the natural environment and it's about time that we
02:38understood that unless we pay attention to the way in which the environment supports everything else we do
02:44we won't have anything else. We won't have an environment, we won't have anything else.
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