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

Senator Hanson-Young, I am not going to speculate or provide comment on the approach taken by sovereign governments to environmental management. I have previously explained the steps that would be required to establish a permitting arrangement should this legislation pass, and the first of those is treaty ratification. We would need to submit an instrument of ratification and a declaration of provisional application. We would then need to establish a bilateral instrument or agreement with another party, even if that country is not a member of the London protocol, and the receiving country must be supportive of accepting any carbon dioxide for sub-seabed sequestration and have the necessary regulatory and legal frameworks in place to manage the monitoring, compliance and verification of CO2 being stored under the seabed. Only once those steps were in place could proponents apply to the regulator for permits to allow CO2 to be transferred between countries.