Joe Ludwig (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Manager of Government Business in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I do not want to lengthen the debate on this, but the challenge is that the amendment would mean—and I think this is probably the objective you are trying to achieve—that this would in truth be unworkable. The minister in this instance, when making a decision, would have to exclude individual projects. Our schema is trying to achieve this in a broader sense. The process that you have entertained would add significantly regulatory complexity to the CFI and really undermine the participation within it, by requiring the minister to examine and make decisions to exclude individual projects. It would also create investment uncertainty for individual landholders, who would then have to be stacked up waiting to find out whether or not they would be excluded or included in that process. We have already committed to parliament to make regulations that would put forestry managed investment schemes on the negative list of projects that are excluded from the scheme. So in that way we think we have achieved the same purpose, rather than trying to do it in—if you will forgive my turn of phrase—a piecemeal way.