The federal environment department has admitted it does not know whether recovery plans meant to prevent extinctions of threatened species are actually being implemented.

In responses to questions on notice from Labor during recent Senate estimates hearings, the department said it “does not have data on the total number of conservation plans – recovery plans and conservation advices – being implemented”.

Labor’s environment spokesman, Tony Burke, said the admission “reinforces the need for new environmental laws”, something Labor has promised but not yet released the policy detail on.

Burke said: “What’s the point in listing threatened species if there’s no plan for the species to recover? Even a species as iconic as a koala, which I listed more than six years ago, still doesn’t have a recovery plan.”

Burke said when the Coalition won government it had promised the appointment of the threatened species commissioner would make Australia’s wildlife a priority.

“All they’ve delivered is neglect and species moving closer to extinction,” he said.

Environment groups say the admission raises questions about the government’s national threatened species strategy and suggests that it has “no clue” which actions are being taken to prevent species extinction.

“Australians should be shocked to learn their federal government isn’t tracking whether national threatened species recovery plans are being implemented or not,” James Trezise, a policy analyst at the Australian Conservation Foundation, said.

The reality is the government has no clue what’s happening. James Trezise, Australian Conservation Foundation

“We’ve heard plenty of political rhetoric about getting threatened species recovery plans off the shelf in recent years. But the reality is the government has no clue what’s happening.”

Australia has the highest rate of mammal extinction in the world. More than 500 animal species are currently at risk of extinction, a number that is increasing but which is also likely to be an underestimate of how many are truly vulnerable.

A Senate inquiry into fauna extinctions is currently examining why successive governments and Australia’s system of environment laws have failed to reverse the trend.

Scientists and conservation groups have complained about Australia’s approach to protecting endangered wildlife and say that unfinished, expired and unmonitored recovery plans are an example of a “fundamentally broken” system.

Last year, Guardian Australia revealed fewer than 40% of Australia’s threatened species have recovery plans in place to try to prevent extinction.

National recovery plans are documents designed to get wildlife off the threatened species list. They are established and registered under Australia’s Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act.

Ministers must not act inconsistently with a national recovery plan when approving developments but there is nothing in Australia’s environment laws that compel governments to actually implement the actions contained in the documents to secure a species’ survival.

Recovery plans used to be mandatory for all species listed as threatened but changes to the law in 2006 put registering a plan at the discretion of the minister.

Since then, governments have favoured what is known as a conservation advice, a weaker document that ministers only have to consider before making a decision about an environmental approval.

Separately, state governments can also draft recovery plans for species listed as threatened at a state level.

In its responses to questions from Labor at the recent Senate estimates hearings, the department suggested part of the reason it had no data tracking progress on national recovery plans or conservation advices was because the implementation of plans “is led by state and territory governments”.

But environment groups have rejected this response because the documents are registered under federal law.

Lyndon Schneiders, the national director of the Wilderness Society, said it highlighted the need for a root and branch review of Australia’s national environment laws.

“All that our laws do is enable us to produce a series of lists [of endangered species],” Schneiders said. “We produce ever growing lists which have no effective action behind them.

All [the government has] delivered is neglect and species moving closer to extinction. Tony Burke, Labor environment spokesman

“We don’t even know what actions have been taken or what the status of these plans are. If the department doesn’t know whether that’s being done, what hope have these species got?”

The department also told the Senate it was in the process of developing a national database for tracking recovery plans. A database was promised as an item to be delivered in year one of the government’s national threatened species strategy, which was released in 2015.

The department wrote on its website last year that an electronic annual progress report on recovery teams was being trialled in the first half of 2018.

It has not posted an update since that time and it is unclear if the database has been developed.

When asked why it didn’t know which recovery and conservation plans for species were being implemented, the environment department did not provide Guardian Australia with an explanation.

A spokesperson said plans were collaborative and involved “multiple stakeholders including all levels of government, regional natural resource management bodies, scientific institutions, recovery teams, industry, Indigenous communities and community groups”.

With regards to the database, the department said a national reporting framework had been established but reporting to track progress on recovery plans was reliant on recovery teams formally registering. It was doing work to promote this over the next six months.

“The department is trialling the reporting framework with some teams to assess feedback on the template’s application, ease of use and alignment with other reporting requirements, such as state and territory reporting processes,” the spokesperson said.

An online reporting tool was still being developed, the department said.

Last year Guardian Australia also revealed departmental documents that show the government’s $255m in threatened species money had been used for generic environment programs and projects that appear to be unrelated to threatened species work.

At the time Labor accused the federal government of overstating its spending on threatened species projects and the Greens called for an urgent auditor general’s review of all threatened species expenditure by the Department of the Environment and Energy.

Comment was sought from the environment minister, Melissa Price.