Tanya Plibersek has told a G20 environment ministers' meeting in Bali that Australia hopes to create its own "Green Wall Street", where businesses from around the world can come to invest in environmental action.
She argued that by commodifying positive environmental work through "biodiversity/nature credits", Australia could potentially reverse the environmental crisis that was so starkly presented to her in the State of the Environment Report when she took office this year.
"Ultimately, I would like to see the market truly valuing nature, so that protecting forests is more valuable than destroying them," she said.
"And maybe one day Australia will house its own Green Wall Street: a trusted global financial hub, where the world comes to invest in environmental protection and restoration."
In its simplest form, the idea is this: If a farmer, conservation group or other business restores or protects the environment, they would receive credits for that work, which could be sold to others in a market.
When the move was first flagged last week, it got a mixed reception from environment groups, ranging from enthusiasm to outrage.
The National Farmers' Federation was "delighted" by the announcement and some leading academics on biodiversity credit schemes were cautiously optimistic.
Let's break down what we know about the plan.
How would the credits be created?
In a bill introduced by former agriculture minister David Littleproud earlier this year, the Morrison government designed the program so that only farmers could generate biodiversity credits.
It flagged possible projects like planting trees on bare land, reducing pollution into waterways, and commitments to protecting endangered existing habitat.
The Albanese government says it will expand the program to apply to any landholder, including traditional owners.
In her speech in Bali, Ms Plibersek raised the possibility of credits being generated by replanting koala habitat, restoring damaged waterways, reviving critical nature corridors and reviving wetlands, mangroves and seagrass.
Who would buy the credits?
Carbon credits are usually bought to "offset" other emissions a company produces. Most are not bought voluntarily.
But while Ms Plibersek said the "nature credits" would be available for companies that need to "offset" unavoidable damage they cause to nature when they build mines or other developments, she told the ABC that was not the point of the program.
"This is not designed to be an offset scheme to give developers an opportunity to buy these credits instead of protecting the natural environment," she said.
"This isn't an effort to make it easier to replace one bit of the natural environment with another bit of the natural environment.
"This is a way of getting additional private sector and philanthropic investment into nature."
The market is designed as a voluntary one — nobody will be forced to buy the credits.
Will there be demand?
Nature credits used as offsets raises its own problems (see below). But why would a business, with profit as a primary motivation, choose to spend money on the environment?
"Because their investors, their shareholders and their customers demand it," Ms Plibersek said.
She said businesses have told her they want to spend money to protect and improve the environment, but doing so without a credit scheme is difficult.
"Without certificates, businesses wanting to invest in nature have to enter into long-term contracts with landholders, or they need to buy land and become landholders themselves," she said.
"It's much easier to trade certificates or credits, in the same way it's easier to trade with money than to barter."
With a new global push for companies to declare what their total impact on nature was — as they are now doing for climate — Ms Plibersek said companies would increasingly look to voluntarily invest in nature restoration.
Basha Stasak from the Australian Conservation Foundation was sceptical there would be a lot of demand.
"We certainly haven't seen it yet but it's an outstanding question. It hasn't really been tested in Australia," she said.
Could it go wrong?
There are lots of ways a "nature market" could go wrong, which could be worse for the environment than doing nothing — something Ms Plibersek was frank about.
"A bad market can be worse than no market — if it's poorly designed, or under regulated, or if it greenwashes or creates perverse incentives," she said.
"These schemes need to be built on a solid ground."
Firstly, there might simply not be enough demand for the credits, and very little work gets done, despite significant investment from the government and landholders.
But worse still, if implemented badly, the credits themselves could be dodgy. Exactly that criticism has been levelled at Australia's carbon credit system by former insiders.
If measurements of the environmental benefits of the work that created the credits is not done well, then they could be given out for projects that have no real environmental benefit.
That would waste limited money from investors who are trying to spend on real environmental benefits. But even worse, if those credits are used to offset real environmental damage (as happens with carbon credits), then the environment goes backwards.
Exactly that could have happened with biodiversity credits in New South Wales, according to a report by the government's independent Audit Office of New South Wales released this week.
It found the NSW scheme had not been well designed and raised concerns around its transparency, sustainability and integrity.
The former government commissioned pilot programs for the federal scheme, which were run by Andrew Macintosh and his colleagues from the Australian National University.
He told the ABC they were not designed to create credits that can be used as offsets at all - and credits used for that purpose needed much stricter checks and balances.
The government has opened up a period of consultation, which will run for under three weeks, and will inform the development of new legislation.
Mr Littleproud said he welcomed the news that the Labor government would adopt the previous government's biodiversity scheme, and would re-introduce legislation to create the structural certainty for a market for biodiversity to operate.
The Nationals leader and Shadow Agriculture Minister said the Prime Minister was "not creating a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity as it had already been done by the previous government".
"The concept, the trials with farmers, the trading platform were all funded and delivered by The Nationals in government," Mr Littleproud said.
