Senator ALLISON (8:59 PM) —With respect to Senator Lees, that is not what this amendment does. Our amendments did in fact ask for current Australian World Heritage sites to be immediately transferred onto the National Heritage List—this amendment goes forward six months. The argument for not supporting our amendments was that Indigenous groups would want to have that additional time to be part of a new assessment. We argued that you could still do that; you could put them onto the National Heritage List and then you could have a subsequent assessment process whereby other cultural and Indigenous values might be taken on board and added to those World Heritage values for the purposes of the National Heritage List.

As I read it, this amendment provides for the automatic transfer of World Heritage sites which, after the enactment of this legislation, would go automatically onto the National Heritage List without further process or procedure. That is my understanding of what this does. My question is: why the six-month limit? What happens after the end of that time? I wonder if the minister would attempt to at least answer this question, because it is otherwise left up in the air.