Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I will continue to outline the Northern Territory approach. The Northern Territory Department of Health would then lead a process that would take account of interested parties' contributions to develop a management plan that could specify restrictions on the supply and use of regular unleaded petrol or other sniffable substances in that community. Senator Scullion has also written to the other states involved to propose that they consider adopting similar legislation. State and territory legislation based on the Northern Territory's can be more targeted and more flexible, will be more legally robust and will actually be a solution that provides confidence to those communities on the ground to take action when they experience a problem, instead of Commonwealth legislation being thrust upon them from Canberra.

The coalition has been proactive about developing a long-term, effective solution to this problem and has been attempting to work with both the government and the Greens—unfortunately, as of this morning, to no avail. Even the Greens themselves acknowledge that the bill would be ineffective. As they said in their minority report in the community affairs inquiry report:

The bill introduced by the Australian Greens does not in itself cause anything to take place. It is enabling legislation.

My concern, and the concern of the coalition, is that the Greens' decision to go it alone on the legislative approach to the scourge of petrol sniffing has meant the imperfect bill before us today. Petrol sniffing will not be stopped by this bill, not because of a lack of good intent in the bill but because it uses the wrong legislative mechanism to achieve the outcome. The Greens and Labor know this. I go back to my commentary on traders and how they will structure their businesses if there is a commercial advantage in doing so. We all know that they are capable of doing that.

Labor, as part of its opportunistic deals with the Greens, changed its mind. We do not know what the deals are; we just know that we are now debating this bill before us. Minister Snowdon changed his mind and now this bill is before us. It would be fantastic if the community and the Senate understood the price of getting this legislation onto the agenda this morning for debate with the government support. I guess we should not be surprised, because evidence based, effective policy for this government is shelved for political expediency, something we have seen time and again. We are here in the second-last week of our sitting year with another backflip as we have seen a political fix occur. I hope the details are going to be outlined somewhere. We have a couple more speakers. I hope that a little gold nugget will come forward. We saw it with the supertrawler, we saw it on live cattle exports, we saw it with the excising of the migration zone and we saw it with the carbon tax. With science and evidence based policy, a legislative approach that uses mechanisms that will work is shelved for short-term political gain.

My strong desire, in terms of addressing this problem, was that the Greens would choose to use being highly effective with this Labor government, rather than this strategy, to get the bill on the agenda and get the government's support. The Greens chose to mobilise their highly effective e-campaigners—the 76,000 that changed the minds of Minister Ludwig and Minister Burke. They could mobilise them to get consumers and industry to get behind them by running their businesses and purchasing the products that will lead to long-term and effective change in Indigenous communities as Opal becomes the only fuel sold. I am not sure what really happened in the past day or so to change the government's mind. Obviously, the bill is being done. I wish that the— (Time expired)