I have a short response with regard to the consultation. Consultation does happen continuously. In having listened to departmental officials, yes, there has been dialogue over the last two years on a lot of different issues. I don't think any of us really saw that it was coming to a legislative amendment so quickly, or we probably would have focused our energy differently. That's to say there's a lot going on. There's a lot that's happening for the departments, and I think we're all feeling the pressure of death by consultation, to be quite honest.
We do this full time. There are a lot of people who do it part time who would never have any idea that some of these changes are in the making.
In answer to your question about clause 692, the powers to protect the marine environment, it's difficult to speculate what it might impact. As far as regulatory powers are concerned, obviously anything that goes through a regulatory process has consultation built into it. I don't want to speculate that this could be very negative. In fact, there are probably a lot of situations where regulating for environmental reasons makes sense. In practicality, it's how it's done and what evidence and science feeds into it. That's a relatively new space for both the industry and the government departments as a whole.
Every chance that it can be a deliberate process, and with the right investment in resources for a positive outcome, will be a good improvement. I don't want to make it sound like this is a risk.
If you take those same powers in an interim perspective, there's a lot that could easily go wrong quickly. As you can imagine, we're not dealing with small powerboats. We're dealing with ships that are 300-plus metres long and weigh 180,000 tonnes. How they react and how they're regulated count, and there are no quick solutions.
We had a recent good example. Over the last year and a half, as I think everyone would know, everybody's been working really hard on the west coast to protect southern resident killer whales. From the science that came out of one department, one top recommendation was that we should be convoying these huge ships. Now you can imagine that when that landed on the desk of shipping professionals, we laughed. Our response was, “Why didn't you include us up front? We would have saved a year of time.” The Minister of Transport took the right action. We asked for a risk analysis, and he made it happen. We could have probably done that much more quickly if the right consultation process had been set up right from the beginning.
The details matter when it comes to the safety of shipping and its impacts on the environment.