16th October 2025
A delegation of leading environmental organisations, scientists, legal scholars and community advocates have met with NSW politicians to call for urgent legislative reform to unlock large-scale nature restoration across the state.
Despite mounting evidence of the ecological and economic costs of inaction, outdated planning laws continue to block or delay projects that would restore degraded wetlands, rebuild fish habitats, and protect communities from climate change.
The delegation, coordinated by the Nature Conservation Council of NSW (NCC), is advocating for a two-tiered reform approach: immediate and easy targeted amendments to streamline approvals processes for private restoration projects, alongside a longer-term push for a dedicated planning pathway for restoration.
Statements attributable to Sam Johnson, Coastal Wetlands Campaigner, NCC:
"Despite all the focus right now on streamlining the regulatory system, we've yet to see any reform for nature restoration laws that would allow us to restore nature more easily.
"We know it's important for climate change resilience, for climate mitigation, for primary industries, and for accessing private investment that's coming from around the world to support nature restoration efforts. We're missing out in New South Wales, and these people here are evidence that the laws in this state are not fit for purpose when it comes to nature restoration."
Statements attributable to Carolyn Hall, CEO of the Mulloon Institute:
"The need for regulatory reform for landscape restoration is clear. In order to repair and restore our landscapes and save our threatened species, we need support from our politicians.
"At Mulloon, we've watched what appears to be a local extinction event of the green and golden bell frog because of the delays and the costs associated with getting a project like that through."
Statements attributable to Rupert Home, former Chair of the Yarrahappini Wetlands Reserve Trust and representative of Save Our Macleay River:
"We started to restore Yarrahappini Wetlands Reserve in 1996. We've been absolutely given the runaround through legislative pathways, having to go from part four to part five, and even then, it was a battle.
"It's taken since 1996 to 2025 - that's almost 30 years to get Yarrahappini restored, and it's now come back to life with the removal of the levy and the re-inundation of tidal flows, which has covered the acid sulfate soils, reintroduced fish nursery habitat, and stopped a lot of acid sulfate going down to interrupt the oyster industries, the fishing industries and the tourist industries."
Statements attributable to Zoe White, Richmond Riverkeeper:
"The sad thing is, whilst we're waiting decades for these approvals and spending sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars, there's fish dying - hundreds of thousands, major fish kill events keep happening, and then we're losing all of our habitat.
"It's not enough to just protect nature. We need to restore it. And right now, the legislation doesn't allow for that."
Statements attributable to Dr Paco Martinez Baena, Project Manager the Sydney Institute of Marine Science:
"Ecosystem restoration in Australia, and the existing degradation in Australia, is rapidly increasing. We need to stop that.
"Currently, there's ecosystems that are protected under federal and state law, such as seagrasses or salt marsh, yet their restoration is incredibly difficult. We're hoping that with our changes that we're proposing, we can streamline the process of restoration in New South Wales."
Quotes attributable to Professor Justine Bell-James, University of Queensland Law School.
"Restoration has to occur within a legislative framework that's designed to control and prevent harmful interferences with the environment. Unfortunately, the byproduct of this is that it treats any intervention with the environment, whether positive or negative, as something that needs to be scrutinized through the same lens as harmful development.
"As we've seen, there are certainly amendments that can and potentially will be passed soon, to streamline particular types of development that are seen as important by the government. There are sound reasons why we could do the same for restoration, and there are some fairly low effort but high value changes [...] that can streamline restoration and allow for these really important projects to happen without the immense regulatory burden that my colleagues here today have talked about."
The group's message to Parliament is clear: do nothing, and NSW risks losing restoration investment to other states that are making these projects easier to get off the ground.
