Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Environment and Water) Share this | Hansard source

I want to thank the member for Goldstein for proposing these amendments and the member for Calare for his contribution. The government will not be supporting amendments Nos (1), (4) and (5) as proposed by the member for Goldstein. The amendment suggests that there would be a requirement for at least one of the five statutory members of the Clean Energy Regulator to be an expert in agriculture or biological or ecological science. What we are doing instead of requiring that one of these must be a member is we are amending the Clean Energy Regulator Act so that members may have qualifications in agricultural, biological, ecological sciences and so on.

Really, the reason why we can't support a requirement that there be a person on the board of the regulator at all times, as this would require, is because a legal risk is created about the integrity of projects or validity of decisions if, for example, a member of the committee dies and we have not replaced that member. There is a legal risk about any decisions made about the scheme during that time. So I think it is perfectly right of the member for Goldstein to seek assurances about the expertise and performance of the Clean Energy Regulator. That is absolutely standard and absolutely fair. The regulator will need to build up its expertise and recruit staff who have additional skills to administer the scheme. This is a new area of operation for them, and they will need people who know how to do it.

The Clean Energy Regulator Act allows officials from other government agencies to support the Clean Energy Regulator in their functions, and the regulator has begun discussions about this with my environment department. We are supporting the separate amendment proposed by the member for Goldstein to include a specific requirement for the regular statutory reviews of the bill to include the performance of the regulator.

I just want to respond to the proposal that the reviews become more frequent. The bill already provides for a statutory review every five years. We are saying that the statutory review provision is already built in to the bill. In addition to that five-yearly regular review, the amendment expands the scope of that review to include the performance of the Clean Energy Regulator in administering the scheme. Already, the Clean Energy Regulator has a broad suite of skills and systems that can be efficiently adapted to the new scheme. This includes compliance processes, IT systems, deep knowledge of land and vegetation development and, of course, environmental markets. One of the reasons that we wanted to locate the new scheme side-by-side in the Clean Energy Regulator with the carbon credits is because we expect that a lot of the projects will have carbon plus biodiversity benefits. In the example we were using earlier about tree plantation, you will have an obvious carbon benefit. But if you choose the right types of trees you will get a better biodiversity benefit. Having those projects administered by one regulator rather than by separate regulators makes a lot of sense.

But I completely accept what the member for Goldstein has said about learning from the Chubb review about how to ensure that this scheme has integrity. I think it is absolutely vital that we take the lessons of some of the low-quality carbon credit units and how we fix that problem, make sure that we are taking those insights from the Chubb review and from other information available to us now, to make sure we don't repeat those mistakes.

I'm not proposing to agree to the amendment to reduce the review period to three years, in particular because, as I've said, it'll be a year before the scheme is opening its doors for the first projects; it would really be too short a period. But what I have said is that the statutory review period is at least every five years. That means there can also be an early review if there are any concerns. The review can be brought forward if concerns arise about the scheme.

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