Senate debates

Thursday, 17 September 2009

Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage Legislation Amendment Bill 2009; Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage (Safety Levies) Amendment Bill 2009

In Committee

4:56 pm

Photo of Rachel SiewertRachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I am going to try and keep this short. I am not trying to drag it out. As we know, the plan deals with the incident, the clean-up of the incident and a number of other things. It does not deal with the environmental impacts. It does not deal with the environmental response. That is under separate agencies. As I have articulated already, there are a series of agencies involved here. There is some coordination but there are also some gaps. It does not deal with those issues. It does not deal with the various government jurisdictions and the various government agencies. That has been made pretty plain from the responses and the way we are getting briefed. I appreciate the briefings that we are getting, but we are getting them from separate agencies and there is no one person that you can go to and find out what is going on across the whole of the government response. How is that going to be assessed? Can I be guaranteed that these provisions will enable that and that that is what the government will refer for investigation?

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