BUSINESS

Senator DAVID POCOCK (Australian Capital Territory—Independent ACT Whip) (15:18): I welcome this motion. Clearly, these are big changes that need scrutiny, and we're currently having amendments legislated as we speak and hurtle towards the guillotine. I have questions on offsets, how that system is going to work and why we're replicating a system that has failed in New South Wales and has been called out by the auditor there.

I've got questions about the ruling powers and the proposed national interest pathway—'the NACC trap' as it's been described by a member in the other place. I have questions about net gain. I have questions about devolution of powers and questions about standards that we haven't seen yet, so I would welcome more scrutiny of these enormous changes.

I welcome some of the amendments that are currently being circulated, but, again, I would note for the Senate that, as crossbenchers, we haven't had the drafting resources to actually get our own amendments drafted. I had 22 amendments submitted on Friday. We've had six done.

Then we had the drafters say: 'I'm sorry. We just don't have time.' They may not be supported, but I feel, as an elected representative of the ACT, that it's my duty to actually listen to experts, listen to Canberrans, get those amendments drafted in good faith, put them to the Senate and be able to make my case in a second reading speech, which I and 20 other senators haven't had the opportunity to do.

I may disagree very strongly with some of the views in those second reading debate speeches, but isn't that how this chamber is meant to work? I welcome this additional time, and I would say to Senate colleagues: let's actually spend an extra couple of hours looking at this. Let's go through the detail and think about what we're doing.

Let's vote on amendments with a clear idea of what they do, what they don't do and what unintended consequences they may have. There are still a lot of unanswered questions, particularly when we haven't seen the Senate committee process actually report. I would note that, from looking through the more than 100 submissions on the bill and getting someone to actually analyse them, I don't think there was a single submission that said we should pass this legislation as is.

Every stakeholder had a view. Yes, there were extremely divergent views on what the legislation should look like, but they had a view. I'm really concerned about the process today and having no second reading debate speeches.

It's a deal that was done so hastily that they have had to extend the Committee of the Whole stage so they can move their own amendments. That kind of points out that we probably should have had a different approach from the start, and some more scrutiny. I really welcome this.

You can say it's easy for a senator for the ACT to say that, but I care deeply about this, and Canberrans care very deeply about environmental laws. They want environmental laws that actually protect nature, that aren't just a thing where we say, 'We've done a great job,' and then, when we're looking back in 10 years time, we're saying: 'What the hell did we do?

We missed a golden opportunity to reform our broken environmental laws, and we simply put a few little patches on it and said, "She'll be right, mate."' We can do better than that. We should do better than that, as the Senate. I hope that we do actually get a couple of extra hours from this amendment.