Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

No, I am sorry, I missed that, Senator Singh. It goes on to say that the President of the Business Council, Tony Shepherd, said:

We felt that we had made a lot of progress. Extensive work had been done at a public service level. The idea was to remove unnecessary Commonwealth-state duplication and have a single approval agency. We saw this as a tremendous breakthrough, saving time, energy and risk…

And then Tony Shepherd went on to say:

…at the last minute we were told, 'The PM does not believe this is a good idea and we will not proceed.' We were extremely upset. We felt we had been misled by the government and I saw this as a breach of trust. We were dealing with a government that was not trustworthy.

It is unfortunate that the Labor Party is turning its back on that tradition. We know how costly these duplications of process are. This is not something new. This is not something that was thought up during the election campaign last year or by this government since it came to power. This idea that we need to streamline environmental approval processes in this country is something that has been debated now for many years, long before the COAG Business Advisory Forum in 2012.

Indeed, it was actually the Labor Party that led the charge on these changes. I went back and had a look at what happened. I remembered from my previous career at the Productivity Commission, before I came to this place, that this was one of the key reforms of the Rudd government. They had a name for those reforms: Towards a Seamless National Economy—very grand, very Kevin Rudd. This was one of the reforms—