Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

No, it does speak volumes of the inconsistency of—sometimes—the approach of the Australian Greens here, may I say, because they have not applied these principles to legislation they supported in the Clean Energy Finance Corporation but now seek to do so with this legislation. To say somehow that clean energy projects are automatically consistent with the ESD is not a particularly accurate interpretation of the EPBC Act. The senator would know well that many of those projects themselves require approval under that act and of course would need to be consistent with those provisions.

The government has a position on what projects in this country require approval under the EPBC Act and require from a Commonwealth government perspective them to be consistent with that act, including the principles of ecologically sustainable development. The appropriate place to decide the scope and coverage of those provisions is in debates about the environmental approval process, and I will leave those finer details to the Minister for the Environment. But what we are debating here is trying to develop infrastructure in the north, not seek a backdoor way to impose red and green tape on projects in the north because we actually want to develop the north. We want to get projects going. We want to get jobs created. All of those projects and jobs and investments will have to be consistent with our laws in this nation but we are not about to impose higher hurdles and barriers, which would make that more difficult.