Oral opened by clarifying the gathering's location on Bilia Wudja, historically a wetlands system, a men's law place known as Bujirrap. He framed Indigenous First Nations representatives as "First Law holders," referencing the First Law as nature's law, created for nature by the Creator. He emphasised humanity's need to reconnect to this greater authority. He noted that the site's senior law men had not practiced or passed on secret law there for over 100 years, leaving places spiritually unwell.

His projects have restarted "singing to country," which prompted country to reveal six sacred sites and invite law holders back. He named modern disconnection as the erosion of relational capability with nature, replaced with attempts at power and control that he argued are ultimately subordinate to the Creator's law.

800,000 annual visitors connecting with around 1,300 animals. Breed-for-release programs include the Western Ground Parrot (fewer than 150 remain globally, first surviving hatchling four months old), the world-leading Numbat program (seven pouch young), Western Swamp Tortoises and frog species. Research underway on ghost bat roosting furniture and fairy penguin audiology.

Ollie Bolton recounted founding Earthly with Lorenzo six years ago, having screened over 1,000 nature-based projects worldwide. Through Founders Factory's nature tech program he came to Perth and was struck by Australia's uniqueness and the 60,000 year Indigenous heritage of WA. His framing for the room: the expertise exists; the challenge is convening the right collaborations.

Nicole shared the lifelong environmental thread sparked at age ten by an ozone-layer project, channelled through infrastructure as a Trojan horse for environmental outcomes. After helping bring Founders Factory to WA and establishing the nature tech stream, she aligned with Bolton's vision. The conjunction that shifted it from a global fund to a WA focus: degraded land, abundant capital, and deep First Nations knowledge. She named Glenn Kelly's ability to forge authentic connections as essential.

Glenn Kelly introduced himself. Native title practitioner for 25 years, environmental science roots, upbringing on country near Pemberton. He affirmed that restoration of country IS the primary driver for Noongar people. Economic mechanisms have only recently emerged to make this work pay for itself. He named the four common barriers: capacity, market access, investment, and bridging resources.

Heidi on the Swan Coastal Plain. Cultivating Noongar food and medicine plants for restoration. Salvaged 350 to 400 velvet plants from planned bulldozing. The big milestone: purchase of their own 115-hectare property settling this week, enabling 500 yaks planted this month and a trust structure for permanence. Connecting personal and cultural continuity (burying her granddaughter's umbilical cord on Ngangam country) with social role: safe place for first-time visits, reintegration after prison, recovery from addiction. Profit-for-purpose model, building generational wealth and confronting intergenerational trauma.

Oral McGuire's 18-year journey on Ballardong Nyungar country. From early 2000s Aboriginal engagement structures, to authoring "Here to Country Here People" to document elders' histories, to acquiring land through ILC. Now: over one million plants established, all endemic, all sourced from Ballardong. Wildlife returning. Birds, owleys, echidnas, emus, hundreds to thousands of kangaroos. Daughter Stephanie aspires to reintroduce dingoes.

Recent partnerships: University of Newcastle hydro harvester via the Future Drought Fund (1,000 litres per day from air using reverse osmosis). Malloon Institute commencing a five-year creek rehydration effort. Native seed enterprise, with trees producing around 100 tonnes annually. Engagement with Mark Reisley on soil health innovation. Cultural burning reintroduced. Chemicals ceased. Two-thirds of the property previously leased to farmers now rests. Second season without cropping after 170 years.

Justin opened by setting the day's structure as three parts: Vision (now), Barriers (after lunch), Unlocks (solutions). The instruction for Vision was strict. Focus on possibilities and optimism, resist drift into barriers. Each table to produce a concise vision statement plus answer four questions: what's going well, what made the difference, what does success look like, what gives you optimism.

• Resourcing and capability across the full lifecycle: design, implementation, evaluation, adaptive management. Not just upfront funding.
• Genuine, enduring partnerships and trust with landowners and rights holders. Not one-off co-design.
• Secure, equitable land access and tenure.
• Time and relationship-building. The phrase that stuck through the whole day: "time, tea, and Tim Tams."

• $65 million sitting unspent in the Pilbara Environmental Offsets Fund due to tenure complications.
• 320,000 hectares returned to Traditional Owners via the Southwest Native Title Settlement. As Crown land rather than freehold, limiting control.
• Aboriginal ranger teams nationally face a funding cliff at end of FY28 (NIAA).
• Mining tenure routinely overrides other tenures.
• IDA's desert work named as the cleanest exemplar. Robust resourcing, deeply respectful partnerships, exclusive possession native title.
• Soil repair innovation underway. Shifting from 1 ton per hectare to 30 kg per hectare, potentially 5 kg per hectare over five years (Narrogin and Popanyinning trials).
• Capitals Coalition methodologies, Westport environmental economic accounting, Vale Brazil Land Banking pilots, all named as models for natural capital integration.

• "A world where everyone values nature, sharing responsibility to protect and restore it through long-term commitment to future generations."
• "Co-creation of nature-positive action embedded into everyday processes, yielding cumulative and exponential impact to care for Country, becoming the new normal where spirits are strong and biodiversity thrives."
• "A future where nature recovery is woven into everyday decision-making, where collaboration replaces fragmentation, and where thriving ecosystems, communities and economies grow together as one."
• "Connected thriving landscapes that continue to grow beyond political cycles. Restoration is integrated and transparent, with power sharing at its core, delivering intergenerational regenerative action."
• State of nature improves with nature's value properly understood: "long-term blended community-led commitment from government, industry, philanthropy at scale."
• Mission: "Nature-based investments skewed by Country." Design models tailored to local ecological and cultural contexts ("no emperor penguins in the Kimberley or coconut trees in Esperance"). Leverage IPAs and Founders Factory.

Universal emphasis on valuing nature. People and nature connectivity including spiritual ties. Intergenerational equity anchored in response to Country and place. WA-specific strengths: exceptional people, scalable projects and tailored tools, emerging structured investment pathways. Long-termism beyond electoral cycles resonated at every table.

Agriculture surfaced as a microcosm of the market failure. Farms operate on 1 to 2% margins and depend on rainfall, making 10 to 15 year investments hard to sell without near-term economic returns. A technologist claimed capture of up to 10 tonnes of carbon per hectare. WA's 8 million hectares of broadacre land are a real opportunity, but change agents encounter resistance and perceived attack. Framing must centre combined business and environmental impact.

Capital dynamics mirror this. Investors anchor on 3 to 7 year horizons, discount value beyond 10 years, expect simplicity, scale ($100M+ minimum), fast payback. All misaligned with biological growth cycles where trees need 10 to 15 years. The reef "probiotic" example surfaced the deeper structural problem: nobody "owns" the reef, so monetising environmental goods without a clear asset holder is impossible.

• Government described as unwilling to make trade-offs on land use, or to adopt enabling policy without multi-year internal policy development.
• Mining's supremacy as a policy position, not statute, was named as particularly obstructive. Companies avoid placing offsets on rivals' leases.
• Pastoral leases of 20 years conflict with program terms of 25 years.
• The Pilbara Environmental Offsets Fund, well-intentioned but blocked by practice-level hurdles.
• Calls for outcomes-based monitoring rather than "activity counting."

The "valley of death" was named directly. Many projects are too large for philanthropy but too small for institutional capital. Funders demand rigour, complex MRV protocols, extensive design, evidence of impact. Yet the transaction and readiness costs exceed proponents' capacity. Only one nature repair project has reached the market, undermining investor confidence.

Trusted relationships are indispensable and time-intensive. And chronically underfunded. Neither government programs nor philanthropy reliably pay for the "tea and Tim Tams" phase. Elders' knowledge should be recognised in publications and remunerated at professional rates. Token travel stipends are inappropriate.

Aboriginal Lands Trusts in SA (aided by perpetuity obligations) suggest tenure can align with long-term stewardship, though WA's divestment dynamics differ.

Public sphere saturated with cost of living, housing, climate fatigue driven by abstract negative messaging. In the 1980s and 1990s, recycling provided a tangible behaviour. Comparable calls-to-action are scarce today. "Plant a tree" resonates selectively and risks maladaptation. The room urged a pivot from doom to value. Communicating co-benefits with personal relevance. Warning that accusations of greenwashing chill corporate risk-taking.

1. Valuing nature. Measurement, fragmented ESG standards, aligning scientific, commercial and cultural knowledge.
2. Capital and commercial incoherence. ROI mismatched to ecological processes, valley-of-death financing, need for patient flexible capital, demand for $100M+ pipelines.
3. Policy, regulation, politics. Leadership deficits, policy inconsistency, mining dominance, inflexible compliance regimes, tenure misalignment.
4. Project delivery. High MRV cost, data-sharing barriers, skill and supply chain constraints, fragile models under climate variability.
5. Information, knowledge, capability. Weak data interoperability, fatigue, poor storytelling of co-benefits.
6. Demand formation. Underdeveloped, accountable demand signals. Unclear standards limiting market uptake.

• Time horizon mismatch. Commercial investors expect returns in seven years. Nature projects often take 25+ years. The long-term funding gap is real. Support may wane long after capital is spent.
• Market certainty. Biodiversity projects look similar to carbon (long-term, outcome-driven, upfront costs) but lack government-backed demand signals. Unlike the American wetlands market where policy created demand, Australia relies on a fragile voluntary system.
• Superannuation regulation. The "Your Future, Your Super" performance test prevents super funds from making concessionary investments. Canadian pension funds have the flexibility.
• Insurance. Project insurance is unavailable without government partnership.
• Risk aversion. Investors hesitant without government intervention or underwriting. Similar to the initial support needed for the carbon market.

Aggregate WA projects into a $100M pipeline to address scale. Institutional investors like Perpetual have expressed interest but require large-scale opportunities individual projects ($10M to $20M) cannot provide. Bundle them. Present a diversified high-value proposition.

The collaborative model:

• Biome as the neutral convener bringing WA project proponents together.
• Earthly as the independent third-party assessor ensuring projects are credible and investment-ready.
• WABSI as the measurement group quantifying outcomes and collective impact (not just activities).

Diversification baked in. Different project types, methodologies (carbon, biodiversity, fire management), geographic locations. Deadline named: ready for investor presentation by COP31.

• Government underwriting of the nature market. Mirroring UK biodiversity or AccuScheme. Government as buyer of last resort, or financial backing to mitigate early-stage risk.
• Dedicated upfront capacity-building funding. Siphon a portion of the forthcoming federal nature repair fund to "front-load" the system.
• Blended finance. Combining private capital with government and philanthropic support.
• Reform "Your Future, Your Super." Needed to free super funds.
• Insurance solution. Government-backed intervention.
• "Reverse shark tank" forum. Where investors first state their requirements.

Biome convenes but does not lead the investment pitch. Project proponents, specifically CEOs, must "put egos aside" and stand together. The unified voice is also a powerful advocacy tool to government.

Embedded in the pipeline: "enabler" projects like native species breeding programs that are critical but struggle to attract funding alone. Possible brokers and supporters named: Climate Investor Forum (Peter Costellas), Carbon Market Institute (CMI).

The participants converged on a precise framing. Multiple viable parallel strategies exist: the $100M aggregated fund, the reverse shark tank model, leveraging sustainable bonds. All converge on the same dependencies: market certainty, coherent planning regulations, and a unified voice to drive government action.

Without a "systems transition broker" to connect these efforts, individual initiatives risk remaining isolated and sub-scale.

• $100M aggregated fund (carried forward from session 4).
• "Reverse shark tank" model (investors line up first, projects align to demand).
• Blended finance. Public, philanthropic, private capital woven together.
• The LNG jobs taskforce was named as an operational model for getting competitors to collaborate without needing to agree on every detail. Worth studying.

• Formal government-linked pilot program. Independently run, trialling multiple approaches and refining to a proven standard.
• WA Treasury Corporation Sustainable Bonds Framework. The breakout new idea. The framework's "enhancing and protecting our natural capital" pillar could be expanded explicitly to back large-scale restoration. Proven mechanism already in place. Strong link to state-significant projects as an offset strategy.
• Nature Assessment Tool. Proposed data tool as positive baseline. Challenge: translating data into actionable calls to arms.

• Land tenure and planning incoherence. Conflict between land tenure laws, native title, and EPBC reforms in WA. The Pilgrim Offset Fund was named as a mechanism that could unlock land for restoration in the short term.
• Cultural and behavioural shifts. Educating "the adults." A tangible individual action: actively applying ESG and nature-positive filters to personal superannuation funds.

• The framing of Biome's role is being defined right now. "Systems transition broker" is the language that landed. Worth getting in front of how Biome publicly positions this in the coming weeks. The foundational identity move.
• The WA Sustainable Bonds Framework opening is the kind of overlooked lever that gives Biome an asymmetric advocacy win. It is already in place, just under-used for nature. Worth a direct conversation with WA Treasury Corp.
• The COP31 deadline sets a real timeline. Working back from there, the pipeline needs to be substantially assembled by Q3 2026 to allow for assessment, packaging and investor engagement.
• The cultural ask (proponent CEOs putting egos aside) is the softest part of the strategy and the part most likely to slip. Worth Biome holding the line explicitly on this.
• First Law as foundational, not symbolic. Oral McGuire and Glenn Kelly between them made clear that this work is structured by Indigenous law, not coloured by it. The investment strategy needs to hold this with integrity.
• The $3.50 to $4.00 ranger ROI stat paired with the $65M Pilbara fund sitting unspent is the kind of pairing that makes the case for itself in any Treasury meeting. Worth deploying.