SUBJECTS: The State of the Environment Report, Conservation Practices 

WALEED ALY, HOST: And the Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek joins us now. Minister, you assumed the role as Environment Minister six weeks ago. Presumably this was on your desk when you got there. What was your first thought when you read it?

TANYA PLIBERSEK, MINISTER FOR THE ENVIRONMENT AND WATER: Well, it was really shocking, Waleed. I mean, as the report said, it's well over 2000 pages, the executive summary is about 280 pages, and on every page there are stories that talk about how our environment is in a terrible state and actually getting worse. So it's bad and deteriorating. And if we keep doing what we've been doing, if we head in the same direction, unless we change our laws, change our systems, we're going to keep seeing this environmental destruction continue. It's a very strong call for action on climate change and action on our environmental laws and institutions.

CARRIE BICKMORE, HOST: Well, you've set a goal of protecting 30 per cent of the land by 2030. Currently, I think it's 19.75 per cent of land mass is protected in the National Reserve System. How did you come up with the 30 per cent figure?

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Yeah, overall it's a bit over a quarter of our land that's protected. And the 30 per cent of land and 30 per cent of oceans protected by 2030 is an international target that we are signing Australia up to. We - globally believe that we can protect 30 per cent of land and 30 per cent of oceans by 2030. This is a really important thing for Australia to support at home and internationally because we know, for example, that if we protect part of our ocean, that's where the fish breed, that's where the animals recover. It's not just good for the environment, it's also good, for example, for the fishing industry to have those protected areas. When we're talking about protecting 30 per cent of our land, that's absolutely critical for giving threatened species the habitat they need to survive. As your report mentioned, we've seen massive mammal extinction in Australia, the worst in the world, really. And unless we have habitat for those creatures, they're going to keep being threatened or becoming extinct. And that's a terrible legacy to leave for future generations.

JULIE BISHOP, HOST: Hi, Tanya. It's Julie here. What kind of land will be included in the additional protections?

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: Well, we're looking at World Heritage Areas, national parks, indigenous protected areas. There's a range of different kind of ownership structures, I guess. But the important thing is to have a broad cross section of land types or ecological communities. So of course we need rainforest and we need desert. We need cool climate and hot climate. We need to have a kind of representative cross section of our Australian landscapes because we don't want to see any of our landscapes lost, any type of landscape lost.

ALY: I'm interested in the ocean aspect of it. You mentioned 30 per cent of ocean being protected. That's the international target. The reporting around this says though that currently we protect 36 per cent. So that sounds like actually we're setting a target that's lower than what we're currently doing. Why would we go backwards?

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: No, we wouldn't go backwards. We're saying 30 by 30 is a minimum and we are doing well in terms of protecting area of our ocean. There's still more that we can do. We of course - Australia has been campaigning for some time to see the East Antarctic Ocean area included in the protected areas because we know how important those Antarctic Oceans are for the whole ecological system of Antarctica. From krill to giant whales, we need to make sure that our oceans are protected from overfishing. But, yeah, when Labor was last in government, we actually added really substantially to our marine national parks. Unfortunately, when the Liberal Government then came in, they took the largest amount of conservation area ever removed from protection in Australia. 

BISHOP: Tanya, is the Government considering embracing more Indigenous land use practices in the wake of this report? It seems like a golden opportunity.

MINISTER PLIBERSEK: It's a great question, Julie. I mean, we've got 65,000 years of land management practice to learn from. First Nation Australians have managed this country and our oceans and waterways really effectively and thousands of generations have passed down that knowledge. And of course, any sensible modern conservation programme should take on that knowledge. And a couple of things we're doing, we're doubling the number of Indigenous rangers that do such a great job in our national parks. There'll be 3,800 by the end of the decade and they'll make a huge contribution to those land management practices and water management practices that you're talking about. We're also very substantially increasing funding for Indigenous Protected Areas. It's a really great way of adding to that area of protection that we're talking about. So we have to add to the area of Australia that we're protecting, but we also need to make sure that we're effectively managing those areas that we protect. We have national parks at the moment where we've got feral animal problems, where we've got invasive weed species taking hold, so it's both we need to add to the land and we need to better manage that land.

ALY: It's a massive space to watch, Tanya. There's the looming fight on emissions reduction targets in Parliament. There's a lot to going through. You've got a huge portfolio, we'll no doubt speak to you again about it. In the meantime, thank you very much for your time.