Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Finance and Deregulation) Share this | Hansard source

I am very happy to respond to the question. I again make the point, though, that the opposition seem to be all at sea about what their position really is on this issue. In relation to who is going to pay the carbon price directly, this has been based all along on an objective threshold—that is, the fact of whether or not a facility emits more than 25,000 tonnes of pollution a year. That has been the same factual position for a lengthy period of time. We have always been clear that that is the threshold which will apply in terms of large polluting entities being responsible for payment of a carbon price.

We did make a decision last year to exclude smaller landfills from the carbon price—something I would have thought, given their campaign, that the opposition would welcome—and more detailed analysis of larger landfills has resulted in fewer liable sites than first expected. It is the case that the Clean Energy Regulator is required to publish a Liable Entities Public Information Database. This is a database of persons that the regulator has reasonable grounds to believe are liable entities for the relevant financial year. To date, the names of 294 entities have been published. I will come back to this in the supplementary.