Biodiversity Bill

Biodiversity Bill

03 June 2025

Mr McBRIDE (MacKillop) (17:18): It gives me great pleasure to speak on this Biodiversity Bill and the wide spectrum of what this bill represents. Perhaps before we even start and acknowledge it, this is a wide-reaching piece of legislation covering many areas and obviously it would have been quite challenging.

I think, in general, as someone who comes from a regional area like MacKillop, from our regional southern high rainfall areas, I think that it is a bill that appears to address perhaps a narrative from a city-based population's perspective, which I cannot argue and I am never going to win that debate because we are outnumbered. But as a bill I think it is looking to reinforce, protect more, create a greater level of penalties, including fines, moneys, dollars, rehabilitation—and I even hear that there is change to jail sentences in this regard to extended periods.

First of all, from the perspective of MacKillop, my constituents and how we battle native vegetation/biodiversity, we live and work in this area with trouble and perhaps with difficulty. It is cumbersome, slow and my constituents have to have a tremendous amount of patience working it in around their life, their investments and the opportunities that come up. Over the next 20 minutes, I am going to highlight some of these challenges that the Biodiversity Bill may not touch on, but perhaps could have touched on, and maybe they could even address them later on. I would say that that could be an opportunity.

My endeavour here is not to ridicule or to throw this bill out the window and say how ridiculous it is. That is not my intent, because obviously there are people who have constructed this, who are going to be affected by this who may be very pleased, satisfied and happy with where they have landed. It may be more workable and there might be some great results out of this bill. It might be great for them to be able to say that they were part of this process. In 10, 20 or 30 years' time, the community in that period of time may look back and say, 'What a life-changing and huge impact this bill has had on where we have landed today.'

I want to emphasise a comment that was said to me when I was out in the northern parts of my electorate at Lameroo and Pinnaroo. I was talking to a trucking businessperson who runs trucks and transport. I said, 'How are you finding the southern Mallee Highway?', and he said, 'They've done some major works on it.' I said, 'Yes, I've heard.' He said, 'It's really good now. They've taken some bumps and lumps out and they've put some shoulders on. It's not smooth, but it's good enough.' I said, 'Well, geez, I hear a lot of complaints.' He said, 'You've got to give people something to complain about, so don't worry. Leave it there and they'll be talking about that rather than something else.'

In regard to this type of legislation, that is probably what I am really going to allude to. By living in regional and remote South Australia, we represent a population of around 400,000 people in a state of 1.7 million, so we are the minority. I think if the 400,000 were able to put a biodiversity bill up and tell the 1.3 million people in Adelaide what to do with their biodiversity bill, this would not read like we are reading today, because they have a different perspective around biodiversity.

This is the one thing I will say: if we were all to pack up as humans or Homo sapiens and say, 'We're going to leave South Australia and never populate it again,' it would return back to its natural state at one time or another in the future. I do not know whether it would be a thousand years or a million years, but it will go back without our watch. It might have some introduced species that we stuffed up and let in and so forth, because they were not here in the first place, and there might be some other things that might be there that do not look like they did before we arrived.

However, in general, if you could flatten everything down, take the houses away and rip the roads up, and not even replant or reseed, it would go back to where it was. This is the bit that I think is lost for city folk, when they put up their high-rises like they are going to alongside here at 32 storeys, they lose sight of the gum trees and the native vegetation, that it actually is growing out there beyond the city perimeters and it is something we have to work with and we have to battle with.

I have worked with the minister and her staff and we brought up some issues. I will give you a classic example where we already know in our regional areas that we have a housing problem. Actually, we have an economic failure around housing in regional areas because it is not happening fast enough and the economics around it actually says, 'No, if you want to build houses and you want to make maximum money and have a great investment, do not build it in the regions because you will make more in the city.'

On top of that, we could stick five gum trees on a block in the little town of Naracoorte that likes to build in a north-south direction, and this will add you $150,000 to that build just like that. Those five gum trees are worth $30,000 each to the builder and the developer to turn that block into housing. There are trees all out beyond Naracoorte. There are some beautiful big red gums out beyond Naracoorte. These are not red gums, yet these trees are the difference between that block of land being built and no houses being built there today because of the cost of those trees. This is where I hope this Biodiversity Bill addresses the difference between city life and how they do want to see a greater, greener Adelaide.

I have been very privileged to sit on the Environment, Resources and Development Committee, chaired by the member for Badcoe. She does a fantastic job and puts her heart and all the inference that she can into the Environment, Resources and Development Committee. We are looking at greater greening Adelaide, we are looking at forestry of Adelaide, we are looking at tree management of Adelaide, and we are talking about the leafy green eastern suburbs of Adelaide and how we would love to transfer that over to the western suburbs, northern suburbs or the southern suburbs.

I get it. I know that that can mean a greater, more liveable suburb. I know it can be a greater, more liveable life, it can be cooling, it can be aesthetic, it can be mental health, it can be livability, it can be the prices of houses, it can be the prices of suburbs. I understand.

So then I made a suggestion—I do not know whether they will take it up, but I suppose what I am going to say and ask is—that when we look at the Native Vegetation Council, which is now going to become the new Biodiversity Council, I am hoping and I have my fingers crossed that there is some sort of representation for our regions on that council. This is not saying there will not be, but if there is I will endorse it and I will say thank you. If there is not, please consider, because what goes on beyond Adelaide is a tough life and it is a different world to the city of Adelaide. We do have these struggles.

I have talked about housing being an issue with native vegetation. I could then go on and say the Biodiversity Bill touches on the Mining Act, only in an ever so slight way. It might be about rehabilitation; it does not matter, it just touches on it. The Mining Act does deal with native vegetation in a really tough way.

Down in our region, we have low-cost quarries and mines that have pits of sand, which is used for cement and filling and house blocks. We have pits of rubble, which is used for roadworks and foundations and the like. We have black metal, which is used for highways. We have dolomite, which is used for agriculture. We have pits of lime, which is also used for agriculture. I am not really sure if there are any more; they are to name just some of the quarries and things that we do dig up in our region that is made very hard to extract out of our region—so hard that we actually find it easier to go to Victoria and buy these products rather than in South Australia because the native vegetation rules are too tough to work with.

They are too expensive. To knock over native vegetation, e.g. virgin, it would be prohibitive for a mine to expand when digging up the products I have just said, because they are only worth about between $20 and $50 a tonne. They are of low value. This is very important, as if they were more expensive we would not bloody use them. But it does not allow that mine to actually expand and work with the Native Vegetation Council, which will be the new Biodiversity Council.

These are the sort of inputs I am hoping, with this amendment and this bill here, will actually see some changes to recognise the different economic environments that we are talking about: that regional South Australia is not the same as Adelaide.

The other one I would like to touch on is that it does talk about our Indigenous Australians. It is allowed to and I hope it works well. I hope that they are engaged, I hope it is respected, I hope it gives them traction and I hope they feel that they are being recognised as the original landowners who arrived here 60,000 years ago.

However, here is a classic. We have recently heard in my electoral office that there is land south of the dog fence up in the arid lands of South Australia (the south means it is a dog-free zone) not far away from Roxby Downs—I think it is even owned by BHP—that is harbouring and looking after around 400 dingoes. These dingoes should not be south of the dog fence. Yes, I can understand they are a protected species where they are meant to be protected, but this is not part of that zone.

I hear landowners know about these dogs being a problem; they are predators. They actually have sheep businesses surrounding these leases and this land, and they need to put up their own dog fence: a second dog fence inside the dog fence area. Yet that is being made very hard in terms of Indigenous access and making sure that they work with the Indigenous owners, elders and communities.

It is hard to get them on board. They say yes one day—a property owner who was working with one gentleman does not see the end of the project. I think this property owner has 150 kilometres of dog fence to do and has 50 more kilometres to go, and the representative they were dealing with no longer belongs to the Indigenous community and committee as a representative. He has been pushed aside. A new gentleman comes in and says, 'No, you may not put that fence up.' So we now have a hole of 50 kilometres in the fence that is not dog proof, and so there are dogs coming through this area and attacking sheep on properties beyond this property. I hope that when we look at this Biodiversity Bill—and I see a number of points made around Aboriginal communities and the Aboriginal biodiversity committee—it has the traction to go well beyond that.

The other problem that I also hope the bill covers and gains traction in is that there is a huge opportunity in the arid lands for carbon capture. This is where we are going to keep sheep off property—or off the areas that are going to be capturing carbon, not necessarily the whole property. We are going to keep goats off the property and we are going to keep cattle off the property and the paddocks and then allow the regrowth to take place. It has to grow to two metres. This could be quite lucrative for landowners in the arid lands in what are now very tough times. It is really hard to make these arid lands work at the moment. With the shortage of labour, costs, the tyranny of distance and seasonal conditions it is now costing us $17 a sheep to bring sheep from 400 kilometres north-west of Port Augusta to Murray Bridge to be slaughtered. So, before we even start, there is $17 just in freight and transport.

These sorts of things are getting harder and harder, and there might be this really good opportunity to have carbon capture. But in carbon capture you have to deal with the Indigenous communities. In the example that I know of, we have a boundary between two tribes or communities, and they will not talk to each other. If you deal with one community they say, 'Yes, it's alright, you can go along and capture carbon,' and we will look after them and pay them an amount for the privilege. But if you then talk to the other one they are not happy because we have done a deal over there already, and so we do not get a deal. So we go back and start again and we talk to the other community, and they will say, 'Yes, we are all happy with that,' and then you go and say to them that you have a deal and they say, 'No, it's no good. We can't do a deal,' and so we get nothing.

I am hoping that this is the sort of traction that this new Biodiversity Bill will actually capture: that we do need recognition of communication strategies, that people do turn up and sign-off and that we can invest and move forward in these areas.

Moving more into my neck of the woods, in agricultural terms this bill talks about the penalties going up exponentially. I have to say that I think they are already quite onerous. I think they are very expensive if you get caught out, and I think it is up to the courts to consider jail time. May I say that I think that is reaching too far in this field. It is a huge deterrent, but what gets lost when you potentially start putting people in jail according to native vegetation acts and laws and breaking those laws and rules? It does become really quite fearful. It is a fearful type of process for operators. I really hope that this sort of thing is there in writing but potentially may never be used and just stays with the fining system.

We have landowners who would like to put in centre pivots, and the removal of trees for massive irrigation circles, as they are called, is so expensive. It is so expensive to put these circles in that the cost of the removal of native vegetation rules out the development, and the development then does not take place and the irrigation is lost. They might have a water licence, but too bad. I heard of one centre pivot where there could have been, I think, about 40 to 100 poorish old trees, which the landowner would claim have a limited life span, for which you would have to remediate 60 hectares for a 40-hectare pivot. What does that mean? You have to lock-up 60 hectares of native vegetation—bushes, rushes and reeds—to be able to water 40 hectares and knock over trees that are not native vegetation; they are isolated paddock trees.

We are not dropping a circle down in pristine native vegetation and saying, 'We are clearing this area for good.' It had never been touched and it was what they called virgin native. That is not happening. But these are the sorts of things that we are struggling with in our electorate. We know that landowners, people who try to grow lamb, beef, wool, crops, seed crops, are all suffering under the current rules. I am not saying that this Biodiversity Bill is absolutely going to put the nail through this and it is not going to happen. What I am asking is can it make it easier? Can it work with these landowners better than it is today? Do we have to have such onerous rules?

There was a big housing development in Robe, and I think they have had a really good win. Robe lives on the sand dunes right on Guichen Bay, and in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s the sand dunes were all grazed by sheep. If you can remember the heydays of sheep in the 1950s—pound for a pound—they were running sheep wherever you could run sheep. This country was all cleared—barren, it started to blow, perhaps deteriorated. It was not the greatest practice in the world. It has certainly stopped. It is now a national park.

Robe is really beautiful, pretty and attractive and it attracts a lot of people for retirement and their holidays. It has growing pains. We had an area of land that had low-lying bush, two metres high maximum, maybe three—not virgin—yet they found it really hard to expand and actually get approval to build houses on this native vegetation. I know there are growing pains there for the Robe council in water and wastewater and the like, but I am hoping again that if we have good representation by this Biodiversity Bill, if this Biodiversity Bill brings in people who actually understand this dilemma, understand the opportunities that may be out there in our regions and gives it fair consideration, that these developments could and should take place.

We are not losing our pristine environment and the native vegetation that has never been touched and was virgin. It is regrowth. The town is really desperate to grow and have people develop more houses, and the council is looking for greater developments to be more viable in a really changing landscape. So this will all depend on the reference of what this Biodiversity Bill can achieve and what it should achieve.

The other point I would like to touch on is feral animals. We know we have wild dogs—and I do not say dingoes—foxes and rabbits. We know that we can try to obviously remove them from the landscape. I did ask the question whether this Biodiversity Bill had any traction with the landscape boards and apparently it will not touch them. I think that is a little bit of a missed opportunity because a lot of people say that the landscape boards do a wonderful job talking about all the problems, writing down all the problems, but they are very, very thin on the ground for action. I am talking about roadsides with native vegetation, I am talking about roadsides with weeds, I am talking about roadsides with vermin, I am talking about rail corridors with fire control and weed control, and I am hoping that this Biodiversity Bill is able to consider, look at or hopefully bring better management of what our native vegetation has to offer.

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