Q: Do you believe that the North West Shelf Gas project should be extended? And will approvals to that project be further delayed by Labor’s plans? Do we introduce nature positive legislation and the environment protection Agency?

Anthony Albanese:

On the latter, they won’t be delayed by that. They’ll be considered in accordance with the law but I make this point: Peter Dutton for people who haven’t followed, perhaps, the details the way the law works – in him declaring and pre-empting an announcement and a decision on North West Shelf, what he is doing is ensuring that it gets delayed.

That is what he is doing. And the former government the I the same thing with PEP-11 – the exploration licences off the coast of New South Wales, by pre-empting it, it meant that it got delayed and took a long period of time for eventually Minister Husic was given responsibility for it in accordance with the law and that issue is now settled.

If you go out there and you pre-empt the law which says that consideration must be given objectively by the Minister, then you, by definition, put yourself in a position of legal challenge.

There is no question that if the Coalition were to succeed and Peter Dutton were to move to Kirribilli with – on the Harbour, then what would happen would be there would be a legal challenge which is a bit of a lay down misere frankly, you can get any lawyer from – random, pick them out and they can win that case because it is shut, you know – a shut case. It is not sensible to do so for an alternative Prime Minister and there are so many ways in which the alternative government of this country shows that it is not ready to form government. They have been in opposition for under three years, what this shows is they need more time.

Some facts on Woodside’s North West Shelf plan:

https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/woodsides-north-west-shelf-gas-export-project-a-disaster-on-five-fronts/