Chris Ellison (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Justice and Customs) Share this | Hansard source

It will be introduced tomorrow in the House of Representatives and then referred straightaway for consideration by a committee with a reporting date of 17 November this year. This is the plan that the government has. It is a reasonable one, and I would remind Senator Carr and those opposite that when Labor was last in government—I remember as a senator in 1993, when I came into this place—we had a Friday committee and we used to have a turnaround of just a couple of weeks to consider most bills. That committee sat on the intervening Friday when there was no parliament. That is the sort of scrutiny we had then. I think that Senator Carr ought to take a cold shower and look at the time period we have here. We have two up weeks, which are available for Senate hearings, and also a further three weeks for people to make submissions. Five weeks is not an unreasonable time at all.

Let us turn to the urgency of this bill, because this is a very important environmental bill. It implements the government’s decision to make the legislation more effective and efficient and it allows for the use of more strategic approaches and provides greater certainty in decision making. I would have thought Senator Brown would have supported that wholeheartedly. In particular, this bill is going to reduce processing time and costs for development interests and also provide enhanced ability to deal with large-scale projects and give priority attention to projects of national importance through the use of strategic assessment and approval approaches. I would have thought that the opposition would be in support of this as well. They are trying to say they are an alternative government. What is their approach to this, which makes eminent sense when you are dealing with large-scale projects?

But this bill will also enable a better focus on protecting threatened species—