Page 1733 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 7 June 2016
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thank members for their support of this bill, which has been developed to provide, as members have observed, greater consistency between the threatened species listings of the ACT and those of other jurisdictions, in particular with species listed under the commonwealth’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, more commonly referred to as the EPBC Act.
To put this reform in some context, collectively states and territories have listed more than 5,000 species as threatened with extinction and there are some 1,700 listed under the commonwealth legislation. Some of these species are, of course, the same, but not all of them. In this situation, a species may be listed as endangered in one jurisdiction, vulnerable in another, and not listed at all in some.
By way of background, the term “threatened” is used as a generic term for any listed species, whereas the terms “critically endangered”, “endangered” and “vulnerable” are specific subcategories for threatened species.
I would like to give a couple of examples. The smoky mouse is a small marsupial mouse that favours dry forests, especially along ridge tops with a heath understorey. It occurs in Victoria, New South Wales and the ACT. It is listed as endangered in the commonwealth and the ACT, critically endangered in New South Wales, but only threatened in Victoria. Further, the action plan for Australian mammals, which is a non-statutory advisory listing, says that it is vulnerable.
To give another example, the painted snipe, a waterbird species with wide distribution across Australia, is listed as endangered by the commonwealth, New South Wales and Western Australia, listed as vulnerable in the Northern Territory, Queensland and South Australia, but listed as threatened in Victoria. It is not listed in the ACT as yet, even though it does turn up here from time to time.
This situation of differential listings is confusing for both conservation stakeholders and the broader community. Some of the variation in listing has arisen because of different standards and criteria applied to the listing process. This reform, together with some included in the Nature Conservation Act 2014, aims to address this. For example, in the ACT, until the Nature Conservation Act 2014 commenced, the act did not have the category of critically endangered while the commonwealth did. This meant that many of the species listed by the commonwealth as critically endangered were only able to be listed on the ACT list as endangered.Similarly, while the ACT and commonwealth both list the ecological communities of natural temperate grassland and box gum woodland, the name of the ecological communities and their descriptions differ. This has meant that mapping of the vegetation communities has had to be shown for both the ACT and commonwealth listed ecological communities. To make it even more confusing, New South Wales uses a different description again for box gum woodland communities and does not list at all natural temperate grassland.
As members have observed, in April 2014 all state, territory and commonwealth environment ministers agreed to identify opportunities to harmonise and simplify
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