Claire Moore (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Women) Share this | Hansard source

Labor will not be supporting this particular Greens' amendment. We are concerned that there has not been a lot of consultation around the development of the wording for this particular amendment and there is some confusion about 'multiple users' for infrastructure. As the minister pointed out, there could be multiple users of infrastructure—for example, a railway. While Labor generally believes that mining projects should be able to pay their own way, if that is the intent of the amendment, this particular amendment does not make that as clear as it should be.

Further, we note that Infrastructure Australia will be consulted as part of the mandate. In my earlier contribution, I talked about the importance of having Infrastructure Australia involved in the process. We note that Infrastructure Australia's recently released priority list does not place a high priority on the sorts of projects in northern Australia that are discussed in this amendment. The mandatory and non-mandatory criteria in the draft mandate also make the recommendation of such projects under the NAIF unlikely.