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 her amendments. I really do understand her very good intent here. I think all of the amendments come from absolutely the right place and the right instinct. The reason that we're not accepting these amendments is that we believe that Environment Protection Australia should be subject to all of the same forms of oversight and regulation that you would have for equivalent agencies, rather than a separate, new system. It will be subject to Audit Office requirements. It will be subject to budget estimates or review through the existing Senate environment and communications committee. It's able to have inquiries either from that committee or from select and ad hoc committees.

In our system, the power to appoint the CEO should remain with the Governor-General, in our view—obviously, on the recommendation of the government. In Australia we don't have a system where parliamentary committees ratify positions in the way that they do in the United States, for example, where people are grilled by committees before they're approved, and I'm not proposing to change that. I expect there will be a Senate inquiry into this legislation, and I, of course, will consider the recommendations of that Senate inquiry when we come to debating this legislation in the Senate.

See this speech in context