Ms Laura Brien:

I thank the Senator. To respond to her two questions, in terms of potential exemptions for the need to hold a licence for certain activities, we engaged with the Marine Institute in 2024 to do a report for us to identify what activities may not need to be licensed by MARA and, in particular, to facilitate the requirements of the ORE sector. We have shared that report with the Department.

We are aware the Minister has recently consulted with several State and industry stakeholders to identify the suitable activities that could be included in exemption regulations. We participate in these consultations. We are actively supporting the officials in the Department and we are awaiting them to bring forward the regulations that would support that exempted activity. In terms of timelines, then, this question would be better answered by the Department than by us. We do expect the timelines to be forthcoming.

Regarding best practice, we have certainly had the opportunity as a new agency to learn from other countries. One of the particular areas we have engaged on internationally is permitting across licences and seabed rights, what we call a "maritime area consent" and other people call a "seabed right". We have spent quite a bit of time talking to colleagues in the Netherlands and Denmark about their approaches to allocating seabed to particular developers and the basis on which they do it, such as whether they offer it based on the price offered or on non-price factors. We will shortly be coming out with our own industry engagement around a competitive MAC process that will apply to those sites within DMAPs that are not going to go through a renewable energy support scheme process. We expect some of the south coast DMAPs to come through that competitive MAC process, so we have been actively engaging in this regard. As I said, the Netherlands and Denmark, in particular, are two countries we see as leading in this area.