Madeleine King (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for the question. I do want to clarify—and I'm sorry if there has been any confusion—I absolutely respect the court process. I don't object to people taking objections to administrative decisions, and I've always said that through other parts of my portfolio as well. We saw court cases about inadequate consultation around the storage of low-level radioactive waste, and I certainly do not mind the TOs going to court.

What I think is objectionable is that it goes on forever. Instead of having a proper consultation process, which means you wouldn't need to go to the courts all the time to have your voice heard, we instead have embedded adequate requirements within regulations from the very start so that these consultations are undertaken not within the court system. But, again, if at the end of a fulsome consultation process someone is still dissatisfied and if that is a matter up for review, of course they would be most welcome to take it to the courts. I have a great concern that only a few are able to access the courts to have their voices heard. They are supported by other groups, of course, but that might not be the case for other TOs, other traditional owners, that are affected. I don't want anyone to think that I don't respect the court process or people's ability to go to court if they want to challenge decisions.

With regard to different items being within this bill, it is because this bill is the appropriate place for them to be. The safety parts of the bill were the predominant parts of the bill for me, as the Minister for Resources, and for the workers themselves, of which there are tens of thousands. Those take up the bulk of the bill, so that's more of a nuance around nomenclature and nothing much more than that.

Again I also reject a lot of other accusations that have been made about me 'slipping things through', or hiding things. But again I note all the spam email I'm getting on this as well, so I take that as part of the misinformation campaign that's generally running. There's no such thing as that. It's hard to 'slip through' something when you actually pop it in a bit of legislation that everyone sees and is tabled and can be read and on which you can get briefings.

I've also had accusations about the inadequacy of the briefings provided. I take that on board. I'd thought that we, and my office, did a lot of briefings to a lot of people, trying to explain what was going on. As I said before, I know this is not perfect—I absolutely know that. And it won't ever be perfect, to be honest, because of the complexity of the bills and how they interact.

So this part of the bill, to do with the technical amendment to allow for the consultation process to be improved, was the ordinary course of business in a bill that was about the offshore regimes. So it seemed the right thing to do—and I still think it is, as a matter of efficiency—for the parliament to consider it in this one bill.

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