What it does
This instrument is a ministerial declaration made under s 209 of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999. Its operative sentence is the Minister’s declaration that "a list of migratory species to that Act shall be deemed to be established by inclusion of the following migratory species" and then it enumerates taxa across mammals, birds, reptiles, fish and insects. The declaration is signed, in the text provided, by "ROBERT MURRAY HILL, Minister for the Environment and Heritage", who “hereby declare[s]” the list under s 209.
Mechanically, the document does three discrete things in the text provided: it (1) identifies particular taxa by species name, population subset, genus or family heading to be treated as included within a migratory-species list, (2) uses the statutory device in s 209 of the EPBC Act to make that list part of the Act’s instruments, and (3) records certain population qualifiers and notes (for example the note that "The Orcaella heinsohni (the Australian Snubfin Dolphin) was previously included as part of the listing for the Orcaella brevirostris (the Irrawaddy Dolphin)"). The form of inclusion varies: some entries are individual species (for example Carcharodon carcharias, the Great White Shark), some are populations of species (for example Stenella attenuata, "eastern tropical Pacific population, Southeast Asian populations"), and some are open-ended family- or genus-level inclusions qualified by "for which Australia is a Range State" (for example "All species in the family Accipitridae for which Australia is a Range State").
The instrument, as framed, therefore expands and/or records the set of taxa that the EPBC Act will treat as migratory species by explicit inclusion. The document itself does not reproduce the substantive prohibitions, permitting processes, or offence provisions of the EPBC Act; the declaration is an administrative specification of which taxa are included in the migratory species list the Act references. The declaration repeatedly uses the phrase "for which Australia is a Range State" when applying family- or genus-level coverage, which operates as a geographic qualifier included in the ministerial text.