Page 4984 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 26 October 2010
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
some things found in the Liberal Party bill, I assume that there will be Liberal Party support for these amendments as we get to them.
It does raise the question of why the Canberra Liberals did not put the same series of amendments on the table themselves. If they had done the policy work on their own bill, they could so obviously see those glaring omissions. But that is okay because the Greens did make some of these changes that I think Mrs Dunne was alluding to, including reporting on the effectiveness of actions or initiatives taken by the government, inclusion of the requirement for the minister to make an energy efficiency target and setting the requirements for the minister, when setting the measurement methodology, to take into account Australian and international best practice.
I will speak more about each of those as we come to them but I just wanted to flag the general tenor of the amendments. There are quite a few of them but hopefully we can move through them quite quickly this morning.
With regard to my amendment No 1, this amendment provides the capacity for the minister to set additional targets under part 2 of the bill. We think that this would be a useful provision as it is likely that the government would want to set additional targets beyond 2020 and prior to the final target date of 2060 as a way of giving clearer policy direction at that time. I think that this is one of those things that are not a point of dispute. But by inserting this into the legislation we believe that it provides a more definitive opportunity for the government at a later date.
MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (10.19): I note the fairly combative tone that Mr Rattenbury has taken from the first moment today. I find that interesting. I would just address a couple of the points because he does seem to spend a lot of time focusing on us rather than on the government. The first point I make is that we will support sensible amendments and we will be supporting a number of the Greens’ amendments. We have made our position clear in terms of the overall targets and we had quite a lengthy debate on that. We do not believe that overall this is the way to go. That said, we will seek to improve this bill and we have our own amendments to do that.
Mr Rattenbury’s critique of us was that we had not put forward as many amendments as the Greens. I do not know whether Mr Rattenbury has noticed but this is a cognate debate. We actually have a whole piece of legislation that we put forward. So we have certainly put our position on the table very clearly. There are a number of the Greens’ amendments that we will support. There are some which we will seek to improve. Hopefully, the Greens and/or the government will see the merit of the improvements that we offer to the Greens’ amendments.
Our amendments largely will be about again ensuring that there is accountability and we will support reasonable accountability measures in relation to what the government does. We will also support reasonable improvements, some of which will be done through our own amendments, that are about particularly protecting people and ensuring that the government really does set out the costs of the action that it takes. That is the approach we will take and we will therefore be happy to support Mr Rattenbury’s amendment.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video