Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for the Murray Darling Basin) Share this | Hansard source

I will bark a little longer. Minister, I appreciate your outlining the mechanism under the existing act and outlining the mechanism for the process of self-regulation. But this bill appears to provide you and future ministers with an unfettered capacity to impose government regulation on the industry in this space. You may choose not to go down that path. You may choose to simply apply the regulation developed by the industry through the mechanisms you have described. Or you or a future minister may choose under this bill to do whatever they want and to disregard that process for the application of self-regulation. My concern is not with how the current act works; my concern and my question are how this bill will work—and you can give us assurances at present about how you as minister will treat the matter, but as I said before you will not be the minister forever—