It’s quite remarkable that we’re sitting here debating this. I know the government has been mouthing sweet nothings to companies concerned about this issue, saying, ‘It’s all right, we’ve got a reserve, it’ll be fine, there’ll be growth.’ I was talking to some people at Aussie’s just before about this; they’re desperately trying to get information that they can’t get from your own minister or the government. They’re being told, ‘There’s a reserve, it’s okay.’ But you can’t even tell us how much is in that reserve. It could be 10, five, 100. Is it enough to even account for or accommodate the Olive Downs mine and/or any others? You won’t give me or the Australian people a figure of the reserve. I’ll put that aside for now; I might come back to it.
My question now is: what happens if the reserve is empty? What happens if we get other mines—some other senators have spoken of lithium mines, others that exceed the 100,000 tonne threshold—and they come into the system and are given this best practice formula, and they have a positive carbon emission impact, and that uses up some of this reserve? What happens when the reserve gets to zero? Say an Olive Downs project comes along; it’s been approved and wants to come along. If the reserve is already at zero at that point, if the reserve is empty, and there’s a proposal—it doesn’t have to be a coalmine—for another facility to come in, that wants to invest in Australia, and they need to get approval and get credited through the safeguard mechanism, will they have to offset all their emissions? Just to explain this question: if the reserve is at zero, and then a new entrant comes in—if there’s no reserve it doesn’t matter what the best practice is or what form you want to create to get under your cap, which you’re saying is a hard cap, in legislation now, of 1,233 million tonnes—to get under that 1,233 million tonnes they will have to offset all their emissions and be net zero from day one. I’m happy for you to point out where I’m going wrong here with this, but that seems to be the government’s proposal because there’s no flexibility in the cap.
