The Government’s environmental law reform package was passed on 28 November 2025, including consequential amendments to the Nature Repair Act 2023 to require methodology determinations under Nature Repair to specify whether biodiversity certificates issued for relevant registered projects can be used as environmental offsets under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act 1999.
As key stakeholders, the agricultural sector plays a central and critical role in ensuring the success of this initiative. The NFF supports the development of a high-integrity Nature Repair framework and accepts, in principle, that it may become one pathway for supplying environmental offsets. It is essential that final policy settings are designed around the practical realities of agriculture – landholder consent must remain real and informed; participation must remain commercially rational for farms; costs must be proportionate; and long-term stewardship, reversal and compliance risks must not be shifted onto landholders without a workable risk-allocation framework.
Currently, the proposed policy settings to enable the Nature Repair framework to supply environmental offsets falls short of Government’s intended vision. There are several instances where significant improvements can be made across policy settings to drive voluntary participation and reduce the administrative burden on landholders.
The NFF’s full submission can be found here.