Karen Grogan (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm not sure if you developed it for maladministration, Senator Bragg, but I'm pretty sure it was about trying to ensure that the most meritorious projects got up. The applications were assessed against very clear guidelines and very clear criteria, but a successful court challenge has placed 12 of those feasibility licences and two preliminary decisions at significant risk.

Those potential delays in critical projects are forcing the developments into less suitable locations and injecting an awful lot of unnecessary uncertainty into the industry. In response, the Labor government took swift action to ensure that this great enabling legislation, passed by the coalition back in the days when they were a bit less desperate but still ineffective—in December, the minister signed the Offshore Electricity Infrastructure Amendment (Overlapping Applications) Regulations 2024, ensuring that, moving forward, feasibility licences would be granted only to the best projects in the case of overlap. But these regulations don't apply retroactively, meaning that the current applications are not all treated consistently.

I can see that everybody is enthralled by this deep explanation of a piece of legislation that's fixing up a challenge, but that's where we are at. This is what it's actually about, not some of the bunkum you've heard from the other side around this legislation. This is to ensure that our wind industry can grow and progress, because offshore wind is going to provide an enormous, valuable resource to this country to enable us—in a clean, green and sustainable fashion—to build our manufacturing, to ensure we have great jobs into the future and to ensure that we are supporting the regions.

The kinds of places that we are looking at, with these wind resources, are places that have traditionally provided us with our energy sources. There is the project in Gippsland, which is set to come online in 2030, and then we have zones in the Hunter, the Southern Ocean, Illawarra, Bass Strait and Bunbury. This is an economic driver. This industry will be a game changer if we just continue on the same pathway that, once upon a time, this whole chamber was in agreement over. In fact, in 2021 the support of the Greens, the support of Labor, the support of the Nationals, the support of the Liberals—