Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Hansard source

Sorry, Senator, I just had a moment of having been awake for quite a long time. Let me pause and gather my thoughts. The bill anticipates establishing a baseline for each of the covered facilities and then establishing a decline rate for them which, in the ordinary course of things, would be 4.9 per cent annually but under certain circumstances might be reduced. We canvassed these in discussions with other colleagues. The proposed decline rate includes explicit consideration of emissions from new developments consistent with the way that we treat those in our emissions projections that are already produced by government each year. New developments include new facilities, backfill projects and expansions.

As I tried to indicate to you in my earlier answer, the arrangements that are being put in place today don't alter that. What they do is establish a requirement that, on occasions when the environment minister makes an approval that will increase the emissions from a covered facility, that information is automatically transferred to the secretary of the department of climate change, to the minister and to the Climate Change Authority. That transfer of information, as you would probably understand, would occur in many instances anyway. This formalises it as a requirement on the minister for the environment. Under certain circumstances, if the Climate Change Authority or the secretary of the department considers that, on receipt of that information, we are at risk of not meeting the objects of the act, which are to reduce emissions, they must make that analysis available to the minister, who must then set in train some steps to try and remedy it. Those steps could be a change to the overall rule or they could be some other step that the minister considers necessary to achieve the objects of the act. Nothing about that alters the way that the minister for the environment would provide approvals. Nothing about that provides a capacity for the minister for climate change to stop or halt a project. I think it's important to be quite clear about that.