George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

The coalition supports this bill. The bill amends the Offshore Petroleum and Greenhouse Gas Storage Act 2006. It strengthens the offshore petroleum regulatory regime with respect to compliance, safety, integrity and environmental management objectives. The amendments are largely in response to the report of the Montara commission of inquiry. They clarify and strengthen the compliance monitoring, investigation and enforcement powers of the National Offshore Petroleum Safety Environmental Management Authority—NOPSEMA—and ensure that enforcement measures for contraventions of the act are appropriate in application and severity in the context of a high-hazard industry. The coalition believes that it is important that the oil and gas industry in Australia operates not only within its permits and licences, but also within its social licence. The bill ensures that Australia not only has a regulatory regime which provides the safety and integrity and environmental management that we need, but also that we have regulations in place to ensure that the public have confidence in the industry. What we saw with the Montara incident was extraordinary, and, while the industry had operated for almost 30 years without incident in Australia, public concern has increased.

The Montara commission of inquiry recommended a series of amendments to the offshore petroleum regulatory regime. The government consequently undertook a review of the legislation and this bill amends the act to implement a number of the findings of the review. The amendments will see the introduction of a civil penalty regime and an increase in the current criminal penalty levels under the act. This change will bring about some consistency with compliance offences in other major hazard industry legislation. The amendments also ensure that penalties, including custodial penalties, for occupational health and safety offences under the act will be harmonised with the Work Health and Safety Act 2011. Redrafting the NOPSEMA inspectorate powers will provide greater clarity and consistency between the various powers of each category of inspector and remove unnecessary procedural requirements that are likely to impede NOPSEMA's ability to effectively perform its enforcement function.

The bill also implements a decision to remove the responsible state minister for Tasmania—which I understand is that state's preference—from the joint authority arrangements in the offshore regulatory regime. The bill does not complete the process, and I understand that the minister has already signalled his intention to introduce further amendments later this year. The coalition will support these amendments as we believe they are sensible and necessary to improve a regulatory regime that was seen to be plainly inadequate in its present form. It is our strong view that we must ensure that the industry is able to operate not only effectively and efficiently, but also with the highest degree of safety and integrity, and at the same time ensure that environmental protections are in place. This is an industry which provides a great deal of wealth and employment to Australia, and we must, as I said before, ensure the public has confidence in it. Because these measures are designed in a sensible and measured way to engender that confidence, they have the opposition's support.