Tony Windsor (New England, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

He is an old meatworker—and he is not that old. The Garnaut report came out with a whole range of recommendations. There have been shifts and breezes blowing. Now we have a five per cent nonsensical target. It will mean nothing. The Leader of the Opposition is quite right: it means nothing. That is why he is creeping towards it. Their argument is to shift the five per cent target to the other side of Copenhagen and then make a decision. Given that the government is aiming at a five per cent target, I do not disagree with the opposition’s argument. I think we would be better off to defer making a very important economic decision on this until we can get the politics right because, at the moment, this five per cent arrangement is a sheer nonsense.

As I said earlier, there is soil science in terms of biochar. I am not a soil scientist, but I think we should be putting a lot of research into that. Soil sequestration is another issue. An issue we have not addressed and that is very significant in relation to agriculture in my view is the question of what will happen if agriculture does come in. We are still asking agriculture to supply food to other parts of the world because we oversupply this nation—we oversupply by 80 per cent. Because of our geography in the world, we are a long way away from the people who want our food in many cases. What will happen when a carbon footprint—and the member for Parkes would be well aware of this, as this is in his electorate—is placed on a farmer from Walgett, for instance? There will be the carbon footprint caused by getting the grain from Walgett to the port and from the port to the Middle East. Then we will exchange that money for energy and there will be another boatload of carbon coming back. You cannot get a train to Walgett anymore so the fuel will be carted back to Walgett by trucks so that the farmer can go around and around in circles again to produce food to send over there to exchange for energy. What will that mean in this system? How will that fit in? Who will pay for that?

The very article that they will have transported is starch. Part of the make-up of grain is starch. Starch is carbon. So we will have exported a boatload of carbon. We will have done that for two reasons. We are oversupplied in this nation; we need to export. And we need energy from somewhere else because we are undersupplied in energy. Surely a nation of this magnitude can look at those two things together and look at the options in renewable fuels. I know some people will think, ‘Oh, here he goes with ethanol again.’ I noticed that even in the budget there is money for research into cellulosic ethanol. The minister for energy is almost frightened of talking about grain based ethanol—’Oh, no, we’ve got to use our grain to grow food so we can send it over there to buy energy to bring it back again’—but he does not go into how this cap-and-trade system will impact in 2015 if agriculture comes in. There is no mention of that. He does not really embrace some of the renewable energy resources that are out there. There are opportunities in solar, wind, geothermal et cetera.

Mr Deputy Speaker Secker, you are a farmer. You would be well aware of this. You are an excellent farmer, I am told. There is going to be an argument in a carbon economy about food versus fuel, about profitability and sustainability. There are a number of collision points in these arguments. What if it is more profitable for that farmer at Walgett to grow switch grass, for instance? That is the original prairie grass in America. It is very deep rooted. It does not require a lot of nitrogen, so the nitrous oxide issue is not there. It can sequester carbon at depth in the soil. There is no disturbance of the soil, so there are other impacts and upper level soil carbon issues. There are a whole range of nutrient issues and water infiltration issues.

What if that crop, which is not a food crop, is harvested and converted into cellulosic ethanols? There is funding in the budget for research into that very thing. The land—the minister and others would argue against it at the moment—that should be used for food production, even though it will have a higher carbon footprint, will be then used for fuel production. Are we going to develop land-use policies in this building for this nation that then say to the farming community: ‘No, you can’t grow that, you’ve got to grow food because people are starving to death. And, yes, they can’t pay you anything for it, but that doesn’t matter. You’re an exporter, remember, and you’ve got to grow this product to send to them.’ We have got an extraordinary example in the Sudan. It could produce 600 per cent more food than we can if it used that same Walgett technology, which the member for Parkes would be very familiar with. The Sudan could produce enough food for Africa. So we have got this nonsense that we are going to have to carry on this long way away food producing, food security stuff, when we are doing nothing at all to help or encourage people in some of those areas where they have much more arable land of equal status.

I raise that issue because I think it is important on a number of levels. If we develop a market mechanism now and then bring agriculture in at a later date, no-one has talked about the issues of how that would work and how it would relate to the options that agriculture may have. In that fairly simple example, the option of using land to grow fuel is much better in terms of the carbon-accounting processes than using land to grow food, which is a negative in terms of carbon accounting. And we have this absolute nonsense where animals, for instance, that are used for food in this world are being considered for taxation. I just cannot believe or comprehend that anybody would even suggest that we take a key protein source off the map by way of taxation. But if we go down that road, that is exactly where some of these things are going to come from. Some would say, ‘No, if they go to cellulosic ethanol, for instance, we’ll use taxation policy to stop that.’ Are we seriously going to use taxation policy to stop carbon sequestration at depth, to stop soil erosion, to get organic matter going in our soils? (Time expired)

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