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

For perhaps the fifth time now, I reiterate the motivation for the government in bringing this forward and I reiterate my earlier answer, too, which is that the government does believe that CCS has a role to play in allowing companies to meet the obligations that are placed on them under the safeguard legislation.

This chamber had an extensive debate about imposing obligations on projects that emitted large volumes of emissions. Your party voted for those requirements to be placed on large projects. This government accepts that, in some examples, it may be that a CCS project is the means by which those projects meet their obligations.

If they seek to do so through that technology, if that's cost-effective and commercial and stacks up for them in the context of their project, then, yes, we want it to be properly regulated.

I'll go back to the effect of the legislation before us. It puts in place the framework set out in the London protocol, and that framework requires a number of important environmental protections and other kinds of assessments to take place before any permit may be issued in relation to the transborder movement of carbon dioxide. It also requires an agreement to be put in place between the two countries that would be impacted by any such movement. These are important baseline regulatory arrangements that are necessary to respond to the possibility of projects of this kind. In the absence of these kinds of regulatory arrangements, we have an unregulated space, and I challenge you to explain why that would be a better outcome than having a clear regulatory environment that implements the environmental protections that the countries of the world have agreed to when they signed onto the London protocol.