Page 4985 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 26 October 2010
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MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for the Environment, Climate Change and Water, Minister for Energy and Minister for Police and Emergency Services) (10.21): The government will support this amendment. The amendment provides for the minister to determine additional interim targets if the minister believes that is necessary or appropriate. I think this adds a level of flexibility to the bill that the government would welcome the opportunity to have available to it. So the government will support the amendment.
Amendment agreed to.
Clause 7, as amended, agreed to.
Clause 8 agreed to.
Clause 9.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (10.22): I move amendment No 2 circulated in my name [see schedule 2 at page 5086].
This amendment just seeks to change the way in which the renewable energy target is set. It basically sets out that the minister “must determine” instead of “a regulation may prescribe”. This ensures that the minister does determine a renewable energy target rather than leaving it up to the discretion of the minister.
We appreciate that the government’s intent is to do this but we are building an act that must last us until at least 2060 by the nature of it. So it seems prudent to assume that a future minister may possibly not have the same commitment to this and being explicit seems a prudent way to proceed.
MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (10.23): I move an amendment to Mr Rattenbury’s proposed amendment [see schedule 3 at page 5093].
There are a couple of things to say on this amendment. I think it is an improvement on the current wording, which says that a regulation may prescribe. I think it is important that we require the minister to do this. That said, we have taken a different approach in our bill, which is that we actually set the target out. I think that would be the better approach but that is clearly not going to get up. So I would think that this goes some of the way to improving it and we will therefore support it.
That said, my amendment to Mr Rattenbury’s amendment is simply to put a time frame on that. We believe that six months after the commencement of the act is sufficient time for the government to set that target because if they do not do it within six months, we are getting in to the middle of 2011. I think that that is pushing it too far.
We believe that there should be a six-month time frame to keep the government accountable, and to ensure that they do set a target soon, given that the target is not in the act, as it would have been in ours. I would therefore commend my amendment to
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