Greg Combet (Charlton, Australian Labor Party, Minister Assisting the Minister for Climate Change) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for bringing the House to order! The minister, of course, is not empowered to direct the authority on individual cases such as the allocation of emissions units to a particular person or company. This is a common approach in Commonwealth legislation dealing with independent regulatory bodies and it ensures that the authority’s operational independence is preserved while providing scope to ensure that the authority will act consistently with Commonwealth policy. Under the legislation, the minister must table any direction. That means he or she will be accountable to the parliament for any directions given. For those reasons, the government is obviously satisfied with the current provision in this bill. Amendment (9) moved by the member for Lyne proposes that the minister must appoint authority members for a period of five years. While the government anticipates that full members will be appointed for this period, we believe some flexibility is desirable in the case of acting members. There may also be cases in which an excellent candidate is only prepared to take on a shorter role, and we believe some flexibility is required to cater for such circumstances. For all of these reasons, the government strongly prefers to retain the current discretion to appoint members to the authority for periods of up to five years, and we do not support the amendment.

Question negatived.

Bill agreed to.

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