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

I think I can go to the next part of your question. Your question, Senator Milne, essentially proceeds on the basis that the only way to determine additionality is by taking a temporal snapshot. One of the key reasons why we have an integrity committee with a general principle which is set out—and I will come back to it—in 259K(2)(c) is so that we do not have a situation where you get the sort of perverse outcomes that you just postulated. You need to ensure there is genuine additionality. How you achieve that and how the baseline is constructed may differ from sector to sector. For example, if we had put in this legislation, ‘The baseline will be what you were going to do as at 1 July 2010,’ some of the difficulties you raised may well have arisen—what if someone then went and got a permit to clear land et cetera? The general proposition is at 259K(2)(c), which sets out the test:

… 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 …

It will be a matter for the committee to determine how best that test is met by particular activities.