Lyn Allison (Victoria, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

We were not afforded any opportunity prior to this bill coming forward to give the minister our views, our opinion or comment on how this affects the agreement that was struck with the government. I think that is a real disappointment. One of the problems is that the government does not seem to realise that, in the future, it may rely on other parties in the Senate to get its legislation through and it may find itself in another position of negotiation. I have to say that I would be far less inclined to enter into a negotiation of that sort knowing what I know now about how ready this government has been to dismiss those agreements previously struck, just because it has a majority in this place.

An example is a trigger in the EPBC Act for greenhouse. This was part of our discussions. An undertaking was given by Minister Hill at the time that a good faith negotiation process would be commenced with the states to talk about a trigger. We saw little evidence that that had happened. Even though there is heightened awareness of the need for us to take serious steps on greenhouse emissions, there is still no admission by the government that this would be a good move. In fact, we have gone backwards in that sense, with the minister attacking the judgement made in Queensland earlier about a coal-fired power station, as I recall, and coming to the defence, again, of the coal industry in a way that is not helpful in dealing with the necessity for us to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by 50 per cent by 2050. The minister should be working on ramping up those reductions, because two per cent a year needs to be sliced off our emissions if we are going to reach that target by 2050. A trigger in the EPBC Act, as we knew then and know now with greater urgency, would have helped us to achieve that. But that has not been the case, and it is a great disappointment that we now have a major review of this bill that does not do that but which in fact waters down what we currently have.