Jonathon Duniam (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Environment, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

We're not ruling out the expansion of this mechanism to include scope 3. That's clear. We also talked about the Powering Australia policy, which of course, as far as I recall, had a promise to reduce power prices by a certain unmentionable number. If you're going to honour that policy as a whole, I look forward to that reduction in power bills.

Moving off that, not being able to secure any certainty for the people and industries of Australia, we'll talk about the hard cap, if we're able to. These new requirements around the proposed hard cap, I understand, provide that if it looks like the cap will be in any way breached, the minister needs to make an amendment or amendments, as needed, to the safeguard rules to achieve the cap. The legislation and the EM, as far as I can tell, fail to outline the types of amendments that could be made. But they could include, as I understand it, measures such as emissions decline rates that are far steeper than those the government consulted with industry on. Obviously these limits could target all facilities, specific sectors or even specific facilities. Any changes of that nature and with those characteristics could change the commercial proposition for existing and incoming potential investments, and what was once a profitable industry could be something very different when certainty is removed in the way that it would be.

It's been put to the community, in the public debate we've had on what has been proposed here as part of this cosy yet dodgy little deal, that there will be some tough choices needed to be made by government around which projects proceed and which ones do not. So I want to ask: how does the government expect businesses to have certainty in making any investment decisions when it's unclear what additional restrictions will be placed upon them and when these restrictions will come into force? I think it is important to understand exactly what's being proposed here and what the impacts might be.