Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you for your question, Senator McKenzie. I find myself unable to agree with your characterisation of the regime that is being legislated. The Paris Agreement in fact requires signatories to update their contributions every five years; it is baked into the Paris Agreement. The regime that we are implementing requires government to seek independent advice on every occasion, in each of those five-year intervals, when we seek to update our agreement. So it meets the objective that you establish, which is that the benefits and impacts of the targets that are adopted by the Australian government be independently considered and advice be provided, both to the minister and publicly. That is the nature of the regime that is being proposed in the bill before you today.

What is most curious, though, about this is that when a specific proposition was put in the other place, your colleagues in the Liberal and National Party not only voted against it, but called for a division so they would be on the record voting against the amendments put in the other place to ensure that the interests of rural and regional communities were considered in that advice. I find that very strange, actually almost incomprehensible. So, yes, we do think that regional economic development is important, and our policies are expected to result in an additional 604,000 jobs to 2030, with five out of six of those jobs in the regions.

What is harder to understand is why the National Party and the Liberal Party teamed up in the other place to prevent an examination of those issues in the reports provided by the Climate Change Authority to the parliament.