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

I cannot understand why a minister ought to be able to have a discretion at that point. This is for an application for a site. Why would you need the discretion to approve that site if you knew that it was unsuitable? Why would you do that? I can think of a hundred reasons, with a lot of pressure on governments and so on to actually go ahead, that a minister might think: ‘Gosh, I’ve got a few suspicions about whether this site is going to be suitable but I’ll sign it anyway. I won’t be here in five years time when they finish this, so it will be somebody else’s worry.’ That has been said to me before by ministers on various things—though not of course on this matter.

So the issue to me is: why would a minister need that discretion if they know at the point of application for a site that there is a high risk associated with that site? It just seems to me that that is giving political discretion. The very point I am making about all of this is that, if it becomes a political judgement about the suitability of sites, the urgency of signing off on sites and the question of a subjective judgement about significant risk, then we might as well just accept that we are going to have the outcome of dubious political decisions.