Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I appreciate that that was one of the recommendations. The Greens do not support the scaling down of some of the assessments of limited and controlled releases. I remind the Senate that there have been escapes from trials and from limited releases. There are examples of that which we are very concerned about, and we are concerned about the potential for that to increase if we streamline too much the process for limited and controlled releases.

Question negatived.

The Greens oppose items 34 and 35 in schedule 1 in the following terms:

(6)    Schedule 1, items 34 and 35, page 16 (line 17) to page 21 (line 14), TO BE OPPOSED.

This amendment relates to the consultative and ethics committees. The bill proposes to combine the two committees into one consultative and ethics committee. The Greens believe that it would be more appropriate to continue to have two separate committees. The issues in this area are very significant and we believe that the two committees are more appropriate. Combining the two committees will reduce the number of people involved in the consultative process. By limiting the number of people on the committee to 12, you are basically reducing the number of people involved in those consultative processes. The feedback we have had from stakeholders is that they would rather see the two committees remain. I acknowledge that the stakeholders we have heard from are not all the stakeholders, but they are a significant number of them. They said that they would prefer to see the two committees.