Page 1377 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 3 May 2016
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MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Deputy Chief Minister, Attorney-General, Minister for Capital Metro, Minister for Health, Minister for Police and Emergency Services and Minister for the Environment and Climate Change) (10.54): I move:
That this bill be agreed to in principle.
The government is presenting the Nature Conservation Amendment Bill to the Assembly today. The Nature Conservation Act 2014 commenced on 11 June last year. The focus of this amendment bill is to make minor changes to the way threatened species are listed in the ACT to reflect national agreements.
In April 2014 environment ministers agreed to the national review of environmental regulation to identify opportunities to harmonise and simplify regulations while maintaining environmental protection. The streamlining of the assessment and statutory listing of threatened species and ecological communities was identified as a key area for reform.
Statutory listing of species and ecological communities is a key foundation for helping to conserve biodiversity. All states and territories provide legislative protection for the wildlife within their respective jurisdictions. Currently state, territory and Australian governments all use slightly different criteria and categories for assessing and listing threatened matters.
Most jurisdictions have agreed, or are in the process of agreeing, to an intergovernmental memorandum of understanding: agreement on a common assessment method for listing of threatened species and threatened ecological communities, which sets out the reform measures and provides an implementation framework.
The government anticipated many of these reforms and included relevant provisions in the Nature Conservation Act 2014. However, the government could not anticipate all of the reform measures required until after the MOU was finalised. The MOU was finalised by officials in July last year. On behalf of the territory, I signed the agreement on 15 November last year, soon after the commonwealth and Western Australia. I understand that Tasmania and the Northern Territory have now also signed the MOU, with other states still considering their position.
The main reforms agreed at a national level to harmonise and simplify regulation are: all jurisdictions to adopt a common assessment method to assess nationally threatened matters based on the International Union for Conservation of Nature—IUCN—categories and criteria; mutual recognition of other jurisdictions’ assessments and listing decisions for nationally threatened matters, supported by enhanced information exchange and sharing between jurisdictions; and a single operational list of threatened matters whereby national and regional lists are mutually exclusive and the same species or ecological community on different jurisdictions’ lists must have the same threat category.
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