The Biodiversity Council welcomes the opportunity to provide feedback on the draft National Environmental Standard for Environmental Offsets (Offset Standard).

Our understanding

The consultation includes a policy paper and legislative instrument. The legislative instrument formalises the standard as law under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act). The policy paper explains how the standard is intended to work.

The development of National Environmental Standards formed the centrepiece of the Samuel Review recommendations. The Review concluded that the Act focussed too heavily on process and that standards which set clear outcomes and requirements provide benefits to the community, businesses and government.

The Review noted that precise, quantitative standards for MNES will “provide for effective environmental protection and biodiversity conservation and ensure that development is sustainable in the long-term.”

This is the second round of public consultation on the MNES Standard. The first round of consultation ran from November 2025 to January 2026.

Overview of our findings

Critical weaknesses in the November 2025 version of the offsets standard remain in current drafting. We outlined those critical weaknesses in our response to the 2025 version. In summary, they include:

• Any offsets delivered by the Restoration Contributions Holder (which will likely be the vast majority) are not bound by the same principles, outcome or objective in the Standard and can deliver offsets that are not ‘Like-for-Like’.
• The standard does not define the required outcome for an offset and net gain remains undefined.

Additional areas of concern emerge in reviewing the current version of the offsets standard, including:

• Substituting process for outcomes - A new Clause 7 enables the objectives and outcomes of the Standard to be ignored if the high-level, process-based principles are met. This mirrors the changes to the MNES Standard and represents a grave retrogression from earlier commitments by this government to develop “outcomes-based standards” in line with the recommendations of the Samuel Review.
• The security principle has been weakened.
• The feasibility principle has been weakened.

Overall, we find that the current version of the standard suffers from most of the weaknesses we identified in earlier drafts, and some new weaknesses that further undermine the value of the standard for achieving the objectives of the Act and the EPBC reform process. This is very disappointing and will likely lead to ongoing biodiversity loss at the current or an accelerated rate.

We make recommendations to improve the Standard in the following areas:

• constraints on the Restoration Contributions Holder and restoration contributions payments
• improving the objective, including clarifying net gain
• securing offsets in perpetuity
• tightening feasibility considerations.

For more detail and recommendations, please read the full submission.