Senator SCHACHT (1:26 PM) —I do not want to be seen to be provoked by my good colleagues from the Greens and the Democrats, but I have to say to Senator Margetts that when she responded to the point I made, she proved my point. Yes, this is a condition that you are putting there for any military purposes. If the minister provides a permit—and this is in there—someone could be vexatious or just difficult and say, `You have a screwdriver, you have a wrench inside it, or you have some other thing that could be considered a weapon,' or `We don't trust what you have done,' et cetera. The definition is so broad that anybody with a reasonable lawyer will start saying that they are going to try to stop it.

In the commercial world of space launches, the competition is red hot between the various consortiums. If the Kistler Corporation decid ed to use Australia—from which we would get some social and economic benefits, jobs, et cetera—and the French were launching from Guyana, it would not be beyond the French, on my knowledge of some of these matters, to have a lawyer turn up in Australia and use your amendments to delay and make it commercially more difficult for Kistler or anybody else to launch rockets with satellites that may be in competition with the French. That is just the way the commercial world is.

I do not think that is your intent, but until you get your definitions much more firmly written out and defined, that will be the way this will be applied. We will suffer commercially. Our opponents will use the opportunity to say, `We don't have any of these restrictions, but your definitions, as proposed by the Greens and the Democrats, will restrict our space activity and make us less commercially competitive.' I do not think that is the intent which, overwhelmingly, Australians want.