Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Climate Change and Water) Share this | Hansard source

I thought you were in the chamber for the discussion I had with Senator Xenophon on this issue, but perhaps not. The key difference between us is how you define ‘additionality’. If you read Senator Xenophon’s amendment, in subsection 4, it says that you can ‘apply for and receive units in respect of activities connected to a legacy waste’ et cetera without regard as to whether the infrastructure of the facility was in place before the CPRS ‘was installed specifically to create offsets’, was ‘installed to meet regulatory requirements’ et cetera or ‘meets the requirements of any abatement regime which is in force.’ It is a different additionality test. Our test, which we traversed and passed earlier—and I think you were in the chamber because you were having a discussion about, perhaps, land use—is section 259K(2)(c):

… the project would not have been proposed or carried out in the absence of the issue of free Australian emissions units in accordance with the domestic offsets program …

In other words, that is a general principle of additionality. We had a long discussion about this and, for everybody’s sanity, I would really like it if we did not go back into it again. There will obviously be methodologies that will differ depending on which offset, but the difference between the view of Senator Xenophon and that of the government is in what the overriding principle of offsets is.