Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I have a few comments to make, but I should also let the chamber know I have a series of questions to the Attorney-General through you, Chair, that I will be seeking some clarification on. First off, I very quickly wanted to address some of the comments that Senator Brandis made last night and, in fact, Senator Dobson just touched on then, in terms of the consultation process and how the message Senator Brandis was intending to deliver yesterday was that everybody should be on board now because they have held another meeting and there is consensus now to these amendments! There is not consensus to these amendments. Yes, the bill is a relatively short bill, but it deals with complex issues. It does not mean just because a bill is short that it does not still involve complex issues.

There is not consensus, because last night we had people in the gallery who were clearly not on board with supporting these amendments. Just last night I had an email from a member of the Noongar community in Perth, Western Australia, who clearly was representing a number of people who do not support these changes. So there is not consensus. There was one more meeting that the Attorney-General convened and invited people from the representative bodies to. I acknowledge that that was extra, and that is a good thing, but you cannot claim that you have consensus because you convened that particular meeting.

We were getting, and we are still getting, a lot of messages from people saying, 'Don't support these amendments.' These are people that recognise that we need to be addressing this issue, and I and the Greens have acknowledged that in our contributions. We need to be addressing these issues. We are deeply concerned that these amendments are being rushed through because of Adani. These issues have been on the books for some time, and all of a sudden the government decide that they are going to deal with it now.

I will indicate that, although we cannot support the bill because we are still concerned about these amendments, we will be supporting this particular set of amendments because they deal with part of the concerns that were expressed during the Senate inquiry and that the Greens had identified. The amendments do pull back a little bit on the changes being made around the decision-making process. On schedule 11, I am also pleased to see that the ALP did in fact pick up on the issues that I raised through the Senate inquiry. So I can indicate that we will be supporting the amendments on this sheet, ZA429, even if that means we have to vote in the negative, because the question we will be asked to vote on is whether we should support the bill as printed.

However, what I would like to do now is to go to some of the questions that I have. I have some general questions, and I also have some specific questions around the second set of government amendments, which are on sheet ZA431. I ask this through you, Chair, to the Attorney-General: I do not know if you want to deal with them all at once or if you would rather do it when we deal with that amendment.