Nigel Scullion (NT, Country Liberal Party, Deputy Leader of the Nationals) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you for that clarification. As I said, I can assure you that certainly the Northern Territory—and that will be the first amendment that takes place—will be well and truly enacted before then. This is why I cannot understand why we are in this position today.

In any event, I would just like to go to a couple of the technical details of the legislation. I suspect the original legislation relied intensely on the corporations power. But forget about what it relied on: it appears that the legislation talks about corporations. It talks about offences by corporations and it does not talk about offences by other bodies or people. For example, in part 2 are these requirements related to fuels for low-aromatic fuel areas and fuel control areas. It pretty much sets out the principal offences: you should not supply it, you should not transport it and you should not have it. These are the fundamentals of substance control in anything related.

The first one says that a corporation must not supply and that a corporation must not transport et cetera. Now, let's say we have two blokes—a pastoralist, 'Jimmy Giraffe', who owns 'Giraffe Vale Station' and, of course, he is 'Giraffe Enterprises'. He is an incorporated body. His brother, 'Simon', lives just down the road. They are both in the transport business—one runs his transport to pastoral properties around the place as does the other, to a slightly smaller degree. One is a partnership and the other one is an incorporated body.

As I read this legislation, it only seeks to capture those people who are an incorporated body. Can you just qualify whether my reading of this legislation is correct or otherwise with regard to the supply, possession and transport?