Madeleine King (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

Sorry; pardon me. What the member has said is not true. The bill before the House does not provide me powers to override any approvals whatsoever. It includes a technical amendment allowing the government to adopt future recommendations of an offshore environmental management review, which should come as no surprise to anyone in this House, including the Greens political party, or in other place. If a government undertakes a review, that government might seek to implement some recommendations of that review. No surprises there! This bill enables us to work and implement recommendations of the review—a review which is being undertaken as we speak. It might come as a surprise to the member to know that the Greens did put forward a bill to try and do something similar but not the same, but they're not any party of government, and they would have to make exactly the same changes to the existing offshore regulations to implement what they want to implement. In that respect, you'd be in the same boat as the government is, or any future government would be, to make any such changes to those regulations. So it might be worth having a bit of a look at that and getting some more knowledge in your own mind for your own sense of understanding of what the offshore regulations indeed are.

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