Tuesday, 18 February 2025

 David DAVIS (Southern Metropolitan) (18:22): (1420) My matter is for the attention of the Premier, and it relates to documents that I have through freedom of information. They relate to exchanges between the Commonwealth environment department – the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water – and state officials under the control of the Minister for Environment and the Minister for Climate Action and Minister for Energy and Resources here. These relate to the Port of Hastings application for wind farm arrangements, in particular the decision of the Commonwealth minister Tanya Plibersek to reject Victoria’s application for a permit. The permit was rejected by Tanya Plibersek on the grounds that it was manifestly unsuitable – that it would impinge on Ramsar areas in and around Western Port. This was something that I think most people could see was an issue and could easily have been foreseen as a problem, but the state government put all of its eggs in one basket.

Late 2023, in December, the federal minister made the decision. The state government at that point went into a meltdown, and the officials within the state department contacted the federal department. They demanded that the federal department abbreviate or truncate some of its processes. It makes wild reading when you see the exchanges of emails and the decisions by the state department and officers – some are redacted, I might add, and are still redacted; we have not seen all of them, but we hope to see them. This actually compromised the Commonwealth process. Some of the comments made by Mr Fredericks, the secretary of the Commonwealth department, pulling the state officials into line make very significant reading.

On one hand this could actually land as something that IBAC could be closely involved with – and I certainly think that IBAC should look at this – but at a minimum the state Premier should refer this to the public sector commissioner. The public sector commissioner has a responsibility to look at behaviour across government, and the attempt by state officials, presumably with the connivance or otherwise of the minister, to actually subvert Commonwealth processes I think is deeply concerning. The action I am seeking is the referral of this at a minimum to the commissioner and to ensure that these officials are looked at very closely because they have clearly breached proper standards.