Nick Xenophon (SA, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I do want to get to Senator Milne's specific amendment in a minute, but these are preparatory matters that from my point of view are essential to lay the groundwork for the context of Senator Milne's amendment. What does the government say in relation to the comparison between this bill and the EU laws that will be in place by March 2013 and the Lacey Act in the US? Does the government say that this bill is more stringent or less stringent than the legislation in the European Union or, indeed, in the United States? What are the key differences between those pieces of legislation? I know that the Gibson guitar case has been referred to in the United States as to how that law has operated there.

In terms of being able to measure the success or otherwise of this piece of legislation, what auditing, what benchmarking, what analysis and what approach will be taken to measure this? If we pass a piece of legislation, and there is no way of knowing how effective it will be or not, you will have criticism from both sides of the fence on this—from the Australian Greens, who say that it is nowhere near stringent enough, and from the opposition, who say that it is tying up businesses in red tape. I am just trying to establish how we are going to measure the effectiveness of this piece of legislation. What auditing processes will there be to measure it? Or is it, to quote a former US defence secretary, a known unknown or an unknown unknown?