Ms Laurena Leacy:

As Mr. Burke has already stated, we had information sessions with stakeholders before and after the Government decision of 22 November 2022. There were requests from various stakeholders for bilateral meetings between the Department and themselves. Common concerns were raised by the stakeholders. I will be honest, and say that I need to be careful, because the contributions came from a small number of companies. I do not want to talk about individual cases. There were concerns about the impact of the contribution on their ongoing activities, potential capital investments in coming years and other future investments. They also made proposals to the Department on how it could implement the contribution. I have detailed some of this in the briefing. The Department considered these submissions, and the deductibility of capital expenditure was considered fair in the context of not wanting to impact any capital expenditure coming online from the companies. The issue of how much it may cost was also part of the Senator's question. I stress that these are estimates. The Department estimates that it would be about 10% to 15% of the total proceeds.