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

The purpose of consultation is to establish a framework for good policy. It is not to take responsibility or seek to otherwise manage the business decisions of individual entities. Yes, of course the government has sought to consult as widely as possible. We've been through this before. We released a public consultation on the safeguard reforms in August and an exposure draft of the bill last October. The department has met with environment groups, with covered facilities, with industry bodies, with government agencies, with carbon market participants, with other industrial businesses and with other interested parties. I can seek information about whether or not V/Line elected to participate in that. I don't have that information with me at the moment. Over 240 stakeholders made submissions on the safeguard consultation paper and over 50 made submissions on the draft bill. Many of those stakeholders said that they support the government taking action to deliver on our climate targets and to support reforms to the safeguard mechanism to reduce emissions from the industrial sector.

The government released details of the full proposed reforms to the safeguard mechanism in January for consultation. We talked about this last night. That included draft rules, which contained quite a lot of detail because, as you observed, whilst this bill creates the architecture for the reforms, for reasons that I have explained this morning to Senator Roberts, many of the decisions are necessarily and appropriately contained in subordinate legislation, and it was appropriate that the draft rules be put out for consultation as well. Consultation closed on 24 February 2023 and, again, more than 250 submissions were received. The bill before us incorporates a number of the stakeholder suggestions from that period. A new objective has been added to the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Act 2007 to ensure that the net emissions of safeguard mechanism facilities must decline overall. It requires that the minister must be satisfied that any new safeguard rules are consistent with this objective, and it strengthens the compliance regime. Penalties for exceeding baselines will reflect the amount of exceedance and may require that businesses make good by surrendering credits to meet their baseline. There's also an anti-avoidance provision commencing from the date of introduction that will prevent businesses structuring themselves in a way to avoid obligations under the reforms.

Senator Duniam, I think we have had a healthy conversation in the chamber. I have sought to answer your questions, but I really am not in a position to talk or speculate about the individual business decisions that will be taken by individual entities that are covered by this mechanism.