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

Thanks, Senator Pocock. I will deal with your second question first. We have made a change around the length of time someone can seek a reconsideration of a controlled action decision. As I was saying before, that really just brings that timeframe into line with the usual length of time that someone can apply for judicial review of a government decision for. I think the way you asked the question, Senator Pocock, implied that we were limiting the timeframe that people had to seek reconsideration of a not-controlled-action decision. We haven't done that. The change is to controlled-action decisions.

On the first question, which was about recovery plans, the way I think about it is that it's not so much that protection statements are replacing recovery plans. We see it more as protection statements forming a subset of recovery plans. Really, the purpose of the protection statements—again, this was based on a lot of feedback not just from industry groups but from environment groups as well—is that we have these recovery plans that don't necessarily influence decision-making in the way that they should, and protection statements are effectively a way of bringing up, to aid decision-making, the information that's contained in those recovery plans. We think that that will actually lead to better decisions that really take into account some of the risks to species, as set out in recovery plans.