Australian Conservation Foundation

Should the government be nervous? Can this new Greens leader capture some of the excitement around left-wing leaders like New York City Mayor's Zohran Mamdani or Greens leader Zac Polanski in the UK? And what might that take? Well, Adam Bandt led the Greens for five years before losing his seat at last year's election.

He now leads the Australian Conservation Foundation, and I'm keen to hear what he thinks the direction of his party should be.

On David Speers, on Ngunnawal Country at Parliament House in Canberra, welcome to Insiders on Background.

[upbeat music] Adam Bandt, welcome to the program.

Like, it's-

It sounds...

Yeah, listening to what you just said there, Adam Band, about music festivals and training people to have these conversations and organizing other climate groups to work together on this, it sounds like you're bringing to the Australian Conservation Foundation this much sharper political lens and political edge.

Is that fair?

Like it's important you build community, but to actually get an outcome like this, we're still reeling from it and super excited about it.

But when we heard this idea, after Dave went on to win the election, I'd been involved in a community group with Australian Conservation Foundation.

Fantastic thing to do, but real challenges with community organising with climate on the ground.

And I thought, oh, I reckon we should get behind this.

Yeah, right.

So I spent time, because at the time the Australian Conservation Foundation were very vocal about negative issues surrounding golf.

Mm-hmm.

you know, environment and also it being an exclusive use of land and elitist, all those sorts of things.

The move was welcomed by the Australian Land Conservation Alliance, which pointed out that land restoration is important because about half of Australia's economy, or GDP to use the technical term, is reliant on nature.

While we're talking about nature, the Australian Conservation Foundation has released an expose report on the amount of deforestation that is occurring in Australia because land is being cleared for beef cattle production.

And this report is impressive, partly because of the way it was done.

It involved Australian Conservation Foundation investigators and thousands of citizen scientists scanning more than 10 million hectares of satellite imagery and detecting 150 cases of deforestation.

We'll put

a link to the report in the show notes, which is, you know, a wonderful little rabbit hole to explore how to look today.

And we'll also put a link to the open letter that you can sign urging Coles and Woolworths to keep their promise to stop sourcing beef that is linked to land clearing.

The Australian Conservation Foundation is doing a lot of work on this issue and it's great to see.

They're also endemic to Australia, found in rivers, streams and lakes along the eastern edge of the countries.

Species sighting data indicates that platypus distribution has shrunk by nearly 25% over the last two decades, according to the Australian Conservation Foundation.

The organisation is calling on the government to better track and protect platypus populations.

For more, I spoke with AFC national forest campaigner Jess Abrahams.

Hi Jess, thanks for joining us today.

Real pleasure to be

They're such elusive and mysterious creatures.

And I really hope that future generations can have that same experience that I've had.

Which is more the left, right? Yeah.

I'm really interested in the politics, Dame, because I've always felt that the politics of environmentalism generally is quite confused and it's not an obvious left, right? Like on one level, you know, the ACF, the Australian Conservation Foundation was, I think its original trustee was Sir Garfield Barwick, who is like a, you know, a doyon of the Liberal Party and that whole idea of conservation conservatism makes sense.

And then you've got the climate movement that's seen as a left-wing movement and a market intervention.

I don't know.

We have set up a high-level multidisciplinary team under the leadership of the Deputy Provincial Commissioner to lead this investigation.

The Australian Conservation Foundation is calling on the federal government to fund a national platypus survey to track species distribution and decline.

AFC runs a citizen science platypus project which suggests distribution has shrunk by nearly 25% in the past two decades.

Platypuses are not protected under national environment law, but are listed as endangered in South Australia and as a vulnerable species in Victoria.

Jess Abrams is the National Forest Campaigner for AFC.

She says inconsistent classifications have impacted platypus protection.

If the platypus were to be listed as threatened, it triggers a whole lot of legal protections under Australia's national environment laws.

The concern here is that we've never seen an El Nino like this.

And there are remarks by, for example, Australian Conservation Foundation CEO and former Greens leader Adam Barnett said, people can see the weather pattern is changing in front of their eyes.

He talked to Yahoo News Australia, saying that right now the government needs to work to protect Australians from worsening climates.

What can the government do? What is suggested on the television, Jeremy?

She's also Project Director for the Materials and Embodied Carbon Leaders Alliance.

Prior to that, she held roles at the Australian Conservation Foundation, Greenpeace, and the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

She's a leader helping accelerate the uptake of new technologies toward a zero carbon future.

Well, Monica, welcome to the show.