Josh Wilson (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for the Environment) Share this | Hansard source

This is another amendment that I'm grateful to the assistant minister and the government for giving their consideration to. It is an important change, again. There's a big difference. It may not seem like a big difference out there in the world when you change the word 'may' to 'must', but there is a big difference. Certainly in this case we had a priority list in the past that hadn't been tremendously effective. Now we have a priority list that adds specific actions and a specific timetable, but, obviously, if the stopwatch gets to the end, as the assistant minister has described, and the minister has the wriggle room to embark on some further delay or some further consideration or to um and ah one way or another, the stopwatch doesn't really generate all that much. In this case, the addition of the word 'must' does at least mean that, where the minister has put on the minister's priority list a recommended action and got that stopwatch ticking away, at the end of it, the minister is required to do something. I think that, without that, the minister's priority list wouldn't be a very effective mechanism. That's why we asked for this amendment, and we certainly support it.

Question agreed to.

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