Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Environment and Water) Share this | Hansard source

Just in terms of the history of this, I will make the point that, in the last term, when my predecessor and my good friend Minister Plibersek put the building blocks in place for these reforms, the Senate was a little bit different, and we didn't just need the Greens party to pass these reforms; we needed the Greens party and a collection of Independents, and that made it somewhat more difficult to get things, rather than only requiring support of either the coalition or the Greens, but that's by the by.

In answer to your question, as I said, I'm not going to give a commitment today that the standards will be finalised prior to any accreditations or bilateral agreements, but I think it would be reasonable to expect that it will take a number of months at best to finalise some of those processes and bilateral agreements. As I say, we want to get cracking as quickly as we can, but I think there's a very good chance that at least some of those standards will have commenced by the time we enter into such an agreement or accreditation processes take place.