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

There is a deliberate misrepresentation there. What I was talking about was infrastructure to support those developments, not digging up and mining the communities within the boundaries of those communities. That is clearly not what I was talking about. I was talking about developing a node or point, if you like, in infrastructure. That is the point I was making, so please do not misrepresent that as suggesting anything to the contrary.

In relation to having dealt with this previously, the government did not provide an opportunity through a Senate committee process for a proper length of time to allow people to come before it and to tease out what it actually meant. My colleagues and I have tried to establish, throughout this debate, what is meant by it. I have heard what the minister had to say, and it will be noted. In terms of privatising the land, I would argue that that is precisely what will happen, because there is communal ownership now and it will go into lease arrangements—and, at the end of five years, I will be very surprised if that privatisation process is ever reversed.