Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Education) Share this | Hansard source

You can, but not without your laptop, I notice, Minister—you need prompting. For the benefit of the chamber, section 56 in the legislation, 'Excluded offsets projects', says:

(1) For the purposes of this Act, an offsets project is an excluded offsets project if it is a project of a kind specified in the regulations—

which I again point out we have not seen—

(2) In deciding whether to recommend to the Governor-General that regulations should be made for the purposes of subsection (1) specifying a particular kind of project, the Minister must have regard to whether there is a significant risk that that kind of project will have a significant adverse impact on one or more of the following:

(a) availability of water;

(b) conservation of biodiversity;

(c) employment;

(d) the local community;

in, or in the vicinity of, the project area, or any of the project areas, for that kind of project.

All this legislation says is that the 'Minister must have regard to whether there is a significant risk'. That is it. That is the sum total of the security blanket the government is giving us to determine whether or not there will be an adverse impact on any of our regional communities. Now that is not good enough. This detail may well be contained in the regulations, but who would know? Who would know how this particular section of the bill is going to work when all we have is the 'Minister must have regard to whether there is a significant risk'?

What does that mean? Will he think one day: I think this is going to be a problem? Does he have an advisory group? Are there going to be people within the community to advise him on this? Is he just going to make a ministerial direction about how all of this is going to work under his own interpretation of what 'significant risk' is going to be? It is simply not good enough and, if the way this government has dealt with the draft Murray-Darling Basin Plan and the 'community consultation' that was taken there and their understanding of 'community impact' is anything to go by, then I have absolutely no confidence that this government can deliver any kind of surety to our regional communities that there will not be an adverse impact as a result of this legislation. I simply do not have that confidence.