Biodiversity in New South Wales is on a serious and steady trajectory of decline.

The NSW Minns Labor Government committed to halting the biodiversity crisis, but so far they have just tinkered around the edges. 

In the last few sitting weeks in 2024, the Labor Government introduced and passed changes to the biodiversity offsets scheme in NSW. The offsets scheme allows for the trading of credits to allow development - but it also allows developers to pay money for lost biodiversity when they can’t find equivalent biodiversity to protect.

Labor’s laws allowed this system to continue, so that irreplaceable biodiversity can be destroyed even when we know that it doesn’t exist anywhere else on Earth.

This is why your Greens representatives in NSW voted against these laws.

There are almost 1,000 threatened species in New South Wales, and only 50 per cent of those are expected to survive the next 100 years. Almost one-third of New South Wales' vegetation has been substantially altered, and what remains only has approximately one-third of its original capacity to support native flora and fauna. Some species have experienced population declines of nearly 75 per cent, and 72 species are already extinct in New South Wales.

Our job in the Parliament is to make bad things better - this is what we did with Labor’s Biodiversity Laws. We secured significant changes to make sure the system can’t slide backwards, and to limit how developers can game the system to their advantage.

Until the Government realises that tinkering with the systems destroying our environment is not enough, the Greens will not support bad law making.

If you want to stay connected with our work in this space, sign up so we can keep you up to date. Rest assured, we will keep working everyday to make the Government a little less terrible, and to get laws that actually prioritise the environment over developer profits.