Ted O'Brien (Fairfax, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Hansard source

I'm delighted to stand to speak about the Ozone Protection and Synthetic Greenhouse Gas Management Reform (Closing the Hole in the Ozone Layer) Bill 2022. As we well know, there is much about which we disagree in this place, in this chamber, on many topics, and we have seen that on display very much today. It is a pleasure, therefore, to be standing to speak about a bill on which we agree with those on the government benches. So indeed today, as we speak about this piece of legislation, we do so with a real sense of bipartisanship. And it's probably a reminder that, despite the fact that parties such as the Labor Party and the Liberal and National parties of the coalition have very different political philosophies, when it comes to the big picture on things such as the environment everybody wants the same end goal. Everybody wants to ensure that they leave the planet a better, safer and indeed cleaner place than they found it. I think it is that aspirational drive or a cleaner world that, at the highest of levels, can unite everybody in this chamber.

What often divides is the question of how we go about it. But here today we have a bill where we also have unity on the question of how. And we come at this as a coalition, as Liberals and Nationals, very proud of our history on things relating to the environment, to management of biodiversity and also to issues of conservation. Indeed, you could argue that the conservative side of politics are the original conservationists. It was Edmund Burke who talked about his version of being a conservative, that it is a calling of protecting, a calling of an organic society, guided by intergenerational responsibility. That means responsibility to the land, to the water, to the broader atmosphere. It is why, when you're at a branch meeting for fellow members of the Liberal and National parties or in Queensland the LNP, you will have people around those tables who are very well versed, because they have the lived experience of working on and protecting the land and the waterways. And it is why we are so proud as a coalition of our track record when it comes to matters of the environment.

What we have today, though, is something that goes beyond just the coalition; it is indeed bipartisan. We are building on the signing of the Montreal Protocol by the Hawke government some 33 years ago. Since then we have seen successive governments of various political stripes building on and supporting that basic agreement signed up to by that government. Indeed, it was the Abbott government that decided to trigger a review into the programs that are being legislated for today. Tony Abbott did that as Prime Minister on the basis, again, of building on it and improving it. It was then the Turnbull government that picked up some of those recommendations from the review and legislated for them, and now we are in the 47th Parliament and the Albanese Labor government is seeking to legislate to enact some of those other recommendations coming from the Abbott government's review.

The bills before the House very much mirror what the coalition had put before the election and of course the lapsing of parliament. We now have the new government putting them forward, but they very much mirror what the coalition was looking at, and they are in three parts, the first part being the Ozone Protection and Synthetic Greenhouse Gas Management Reform (Closing the Hole in the Ozone Layer) Bill 2022. That principally looks at improving the program for synthetic greenhouse gas management, with that program to be modernised with greater compliance and enforcement arrangements, inserting into law various obligations that are currently imposed only by licensed conditions, better clarifying licence and exemption requirements and increasing the time permitted for businesses to submit and report and pay levies.

Then there are two other bills that have come before the parliament bundled together, and they are the import levy bill and the manufacture levy bill. This is all about ensuring that we have improved efficiency in the management and the administration of those two levies, which are used to recover the costs associated with the operation of the program to which I just referred. This includes removing the caps on the levy rates for the program, the creation of a capacity for the manufacture levy rate to be more flexibly set, delegation to senior departmental officials of the power of the minister to grant exemptions to levy payments, and the abolition of the levy applied to the importation of ODS equipment.

In summary, the coalition is happy to stand with the Albanese government on what has become, over decades, a bipartisan approach to ensure that we protect the ozone layer and ensure that we better the environment. In these times, when there is much disagreement in the policy areas of climate and energy, it is indeed a pleasure to stand here today with the government on this bill with a sense of real unity.

(Quorum formed)

See this speech in context