Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for New England for the question and acknowledge the role he has played in advancing within this parliament the many concerns about the potential impact on water resources of coal seam gas and other developments.

He has not been the only member to raise those concerns. Members like the member for Page and the member for Lyne have as well. But certainly the amendments that are referred to have been very much part of the negotiations and discussions that the member for New England has been leading. Those amendments resulted in two issues where there have been two different delays, which are referred to in the question. The first is a delay in arriving at a protocol with the New South Wales government. The second delay that the member refers to is a delay in setting up the finalised committee. I will just explain the reasons for each of those delays.

The first delay with New South Wales has been that they wanted to base their protocol on their aquifer interference policy. That policy was not resolved until quite recently. There has been a fair bit of public discussion about the merits of that policy, and I will not get into that now. But the protocol has been designed to match that policy from the state government. So that is the reason that that delay has happened. We want to make sure we get a protocol that is right, and that is why that has taken a bit longer.

On the establishment of the committee, we did have an interim committee in place immediately. We were not able to put a finalised committee in place until the legislation was through the parliament. That took a lot longer in the Senate than we expected. I blame nobody within this House, but it is true that a number of coalition senators went on a frolic that was entirely unexpected. They formed a unity ticket with the Greens and massively tried to expand the legal environmental powers that I had to go to every single land-use decision. So, for all the one-stop shop arguments and other arguments about how environmental law should be run in this country, interestingly we ended up in a situation—

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