Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I think this highlights the point I have been making throughout: what this legislation does is entrench a disintegrated, multijurisdictional approach to the oceans that has artificial boundaries and delegated responsibility. We would have hoped that we would get real integration with marine regional planning, and the fact that we have not—the fact that this legislation is pertaining to oil and gas outside the context of other jurisdictions and authorities that have responsibility for oceans—means we are going back to something that was current 40 years ago. This act was written 40 years ago as a policy framework and set of underpinning assumptions, and the rewrite of this act does not in any way challenge the assumptions on which that act from 40 years ago was written. Now we are getting into a total tangle here because it is not integrated. It is a single-user approach to what we now know is a highly complex, integrated ecosystem. This is a critical issue for me: to determine whether, in the hierarchy of legislation, the parks and environment legislation will take precedence over this act, rather than the other way round.

Progress reported.