Ms Ellen McMahon:

The Senator asked about the interim protections I touched on earlier. We need a list of the features, habitats and species we want to designate within an MPA network and we have the criteria that would make it an ecologically coherent network. We have an awful lot of data, both at a national level and from citizen science, about what features we need to protect. We would like them to be listed and identified by location, with an assessment of the pressures to these features. That is where interim protection measures can be provided in the absence of the MPA legislation, which is so far down the line. That is how we would go about getting the interim protections in place in the meantime.