Environment, Resources and Development Committee: Biodiversity

Adjourned debate on motion of Hon. T.T. Ngo:

That the report of the committee on biodiversity be noted.

(Continued from 29 March 2017.)

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK (16:19): I rise to support the motion to note the 78^th report of the Environment, Resources and Development Committee on the subject of biodiversity. The Environment, Resources and Development Committee (ERDC) commenced this inquiry towards the end of 2014 and earlier this year was able to provide what I think is a reasonably comprehensive report. Its opening comment is that biodiversity is everyone's responsibility, which may come across as a little bit trite, but I think there are a number of themes in that that are worth exploring.

A lot of people assume that it is the responsibility of the environment department, national parks and wildlife or those various bodies, or the volunteer groups that have been referred to earlier by the Hon. Mr Parnell, to maintain biodiversity, but there is a great deal that everyone can undertake in a practical sense. It is a comprehensive report with a number of recommendations, which start on page 36.

One of the issues that has been of great interest to me in my former role as shadow minister for the environment is the concept of having a biodiversity and conservation act. That has been implemented by Liberal governments in Western Australia and New South Wales, and we have had a commitment to have a look at that over several elections. Part of the reasoning behind that is that we have a patchwork of pieces of legislation that have come into force several decades ago, including the National Parks and Wildlife Act. The penalties, and probably the concepts in them, reflect the times in which they were implemented, so they are quite inconsistent.

One of the things that I think is not well understood is that there is a great amount of biodiversity on private land, which is therefore covered by native vegetation and NRM legislation rather than parks and wildlife. I think it was, in fact, Mr David Speirs, as a citizen prior to his election to parliament, who took me down to one of the parks in his area where damage had been done by an adjoining landowner. It was probably not worth using the penalties in the parks and wildlife act. They would have been better off if it had been on private land because the native veg act would have had greater enforcement provisions.

There are a lot of inconsistencies that need to be looked at in a comprehensive sense. Because of my interest in these matters, I thought it logical to let the committee undertake a lot of this work. They did so willingly, and I thank the other members of the committee for participating in this. The terms of reference were drafted in consultation with minister Hunter's office, and I think he was quite supportive of the inquiry taking place.

Coming back to this concept of biodiversity being everyone's responsibility, I think a lot of people assume that national parks act as the wildlife reserves or refuges, if you like, for a lot of our biodiversity. There are also issues of abundance of certain native species, such as possums and magpies. When people see a lot of possums and magpies and all those sorts of species, they make assumptions about the health of their environment, when in fact the diversity of a range of species and what are often referred to as ecological communities are much better indicators of the health of biodiversity and, therefore, the environment.

For many years, we have had from this government what I think can best be described as a slogan of 'No species loss', which has had no genuine commitment to protecting biodiversity and reducing the loss of species. It has made no effort to actually address these issues. It likes to talk about the number of hectares that have been added to the national park system but, at the same time, we have had a massive loss from about 300 to about one-third of national parks' managers.

At one end of the spectrum, we often have attitudes from people in the community who say that properly managing the environment can be equated to turning back the clock to 1788. It is a sort of hands-off approach, if you like, which misunderstands that our modern landscapes are modified, particularly through land clearance. We have a lot of invasive species, which are not just in the more built-up areas and those cropped areas, they are also in the wilderness. We are in a situation in Australia where we need to have effective land management, and therefore the rangers are incredibly important in the system. There is a sentence in this executive summary that is very pertinent. It states:

…biodiversity conservation needs to occur across both public and private land with actions coordinated at a landscape scale.

What that is referring to is that national parks and private properties need to be looked at in a holistic sense, and that involves private landowners and any of the volunteer organisations that are able to provide assistance in reducing invasive species and so forth.

There are also important concepts about connectivity between various species, both flora and fauna. Some of us have been privileged to visit the arid land recovery project, which has been funded for many years by BHP, and originally by Western Mining. They have been able to fence off from species like cats and foxes and reintroduce a number of species like quolls and quokkas. You can see that the reintroduction of burrowing species has enabled seeds to be redistributed and so more plants have been able to take hold in those areas. Thanks to Nature Foundation, we have also seen in the Flinders Ranges the reintroduction of brush-tailed possums and quolls. Similarly, I expect there will be impacts by the quolls, which are predators. Carnivores will help to reduce some of the smaller pest species.

There are also issues with abundant native species. A number of members would be familiar with corellas, which strip any range of trees that they come into contact with. They are not particularly discriminatory, whether it is natives or introduced species. I congratulate Landcare South Australia on securing the Landcare funding in last night's federal budget. Some of their members have been forced to fence off areas from kangaroos because they are in such high numbers at the moment that they will feed on a lot of the endangered vegetation. There are also the fur seals, which eat every species that they can get their teeth into in the Coorong.

There are questions for the government and the community to ask what the priorities are. There are two areas that are really important to have some discussions about. The first one is preserving what we still have left—those areas of biodiversity that are most intact and are most able to continue to germinate themselves and remain in a healthy state—and also restoring degraded biodiversities. I think there can be a tendency to say that we have to put efforts into saving everything—and we do—but resources have to be prioritised.

One thing that has not been done well in South Australia—and this probably applies most to native vegetation—is where there is a lot of very similar native vegetation. That should not be as highly valued as the vegetation that is under threat of extinction or endangered in any way. We have seen this issue raised many times by Professor David Paton in relation to Adelaide Hills' birds. He is doing his utmost to try to alert the community that there are species that we have loved and enjoyed and taken for granted and some of them are likely to disappear without some urgent action.

If people actually understood some of the things that they might be able to do in their own gardens to assist Jacky Winters or Flame-breasted Robins, they would probably plant other species in addition to the ones they have at the moment. It is an area that does need a lot of work for the community to understand what the value of biodiversity is to us and how we can best preserve it into the future.

I actually do hold quite a lot of optimism about this subject and with educating people about how they can do it themselves. I think they would do so quite willingly, but I think those efforts have not gone particularly well so far. It has often been the people who are already interested who get involved, but I think it is certainly something in which South Australia could do a lot better.

In closing, I would like to particularly congratulate the consortium who were involved in the drafting of the report: Seed Consulting Services, Dr Mark Siebentritt, Dr Andy Chambers and Dr Jenni Garden, and environmental law consultant, Ms Megan Dyson, and commend the other members of the committee for their interest in this subject. I commend the report to the chamber.

Debate adjourned on motion of Hon. G.E. Gago.