Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Climate Change and Water) Share this | Hansard source

In relation to the compliance burden, the advice I have received is that the authority is likely to require approximately 300 staff. That is a figure not inclusive of those persons already employed under the greenhouse reporting scheme and the Office of the Renewable Energy Regulator, so there would be some existing staff who would transfer to that. As I have previously and publicly said, we will release a regulatory impact statement with the legislation and full details of these matters will be before the Senate when it debates the government’s proposal.

This is a substantially less complex and large scheme in terms of compliance burden than the GST brought in by those opposite. As I have said publicly, we would anticipate—and this does depend on the information provided—approximately 1,000 Australian companies will be above the threshold in terms of being large emitters of carbon pollution, and obviously that is a substantially smaller number of companies than the many hundreds of thousands or millions of taxpayers and taxpaying entities which were required to change their approach after the introduction of the GST. Again, these issues will be canvassed prior to the provision of this legislation to the Senate.