A submission to the Senate Inquiry on the Nature Repair Market Bill.
Over the last decade, I’ve worked with community organisations to discover ways to address climate change and species extinction. My efforts have resulted in several articles that can be found at https://kevin-34708.medium.com/. I began this work after leaving a company I founded and helped fund, now known as GreenID-GBH. It is the largest identity provider in Australia. My experience there inspired me to spend twelve years researching and trialling financial markets to find ways to fund initiatives to keep the planet livable for humans. My research and development have shown that the root cause of gross inefficiencies in financial markets is the institutionalisation of unfair and unethical Capital Markets. The Nature Repair Market will institutionalise another unfair, unethical and potentially illegal Capital Market.
I strongly oppose the Nature Repair Market Bill as it is impractical and counterproductive. Allocating funds to such an initiative will impede progress towards preserving biodiversity and repairing Nature. Moreover, the prospect of a market for Nature Repair will incentivise further harm to the environment so some can profit from its restoration.
There is no evidence of Money Markets addressing non-monetary value. Money Markets are agnostic about how they create more money. Their unapologetic purpose is to create more money as distinct from creating value.
The Bill, spanning 288 pages, needs definitions of the traded goods and Nature. Its objective is establishing a systematic extraction of money from the environment while pretending that some funds may move towards restoring what was damaged.
Solutions to Nature Repair are not to cause damage in the first place and to assist Nature in regenerating itself. These solutions are available now and can be paid for by changing the financial system so that Banks, including the Reserve Bank, share the profits (interest) with borrowers.
The borrower generates the funds to pay the interest. The bank does not provide the funds for interest. However, the bank provided the funds to generate the interest, so borrowers and the bank worked to create the interest, and it is only fair that it is shared. It is fair and will also improve the bank’s productivity in creating money. It means less money is spent making new money, improving productivity in running the economy.
The productivity improvement will filter down through the system. For example, it will reduce the interest paid on home loans by at least 30%, making more housing affordable without lowering the price of houses.
The government can use a small fraction of the funds released by the productivity improvement to prevent Nature from needing repair and can spend money on repairing the damage. There is NO NEED for an expensive Nature Repair Market that will suck money out of the real economy without addressing the problem.
The productivity improvements in borrowing will also enable the Reserve Bank to control the money supply and halt inflation by changing the share going to bank borrowers while leaving interest rates fixed.
What can be done
Creating a Nature Repair Market is unnecessary and expensive. Instead, the government can allocate existing funds towards underfunded community groups addressing biodiversity. Implementing a Government Institutionalised Balanced Reciprocal Funding approach supports the government efforts and those initiated by the community. This will effectively tackle the issues that the Nature Repair Market aims to solve at a much lower cost. The strategy can help prevent further biodiversity loss and reverse the trend.
The first step is to reject this bill and send it back to be rewritten with the involvement of community groups throughout Australia working on practical solutions to address biodiversity.
