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

I do not apologise for delaying the House as I think this legislation is a very significant issue. I think the member for Lyne made a very important point a moment ago that there is a not-so-subtle contradiction in policy messages here. I have raised the renewable fuel issue on a number of occasions. Some members of the House, in fact I would say a majority of members of the House, believe that using agricultural land for fuel production is something that we should not be doing. I do not agree with that but, nonetheless, a lot of people do.

There is a collision point between fuel, food and carbon. They are three different policies but they collide at this point. Here we have a policy being introduced to encourage the use of land that could have been used for food production to go to tree production—a monoculture, as the member for Lyne suggested—which will mean that there could be benefits in terms of the emissions issue. Inherent in the message is that there will be land taken out of production that could have produced food. I do not argue with that. I think that it should go to the highest return as long as there is not environmental vandalism happening at the same time, and there are some questions about that in relation to a monoculture.

Why doesn’t the government have the same logic in terms of agricultural land being used for fuel production at source? I raised the point last night. We have an absurd situation in Australia, being poorly placed geographically in terms of some of our trading partners, where we grow 80 per cent too much of, for instance, grain and we export it overseas and we have all the carbon footprints getting it there. The starch within the grain is actually carbon and we export that. We get the dollars and we then go to another country and buy a boatload of oil and bring it back with all the carbon footprints that that denotes. Surely, if we are serious about emissions, we should look at these transport movements when quite a lot of them are to just enter the exchange of money to buy another product to bring it back. Surely there is an intersecting point where we can use some of that land to produce fuel.

The government has just introduced amendments, the very amendments we are voting on now, to use land for carbon offsets, not for food. We are endorsing that today. Surely we should be doing some accounting in terms of what shifting all of this carbon and starch around the world means in terms of the emissions-trading arrangements. I would suggest to the Parliamentary Secretary for Climate Change that this contradiction really needs to be looked at. I am not having a go at anybody here. I think it is a collision point that we need to identify. If we are going to start to drive land use through a policy that says, ‘You will make more money out of growing trees than out of growing food because there are these savings,’ what message do we send to other potential businesses such as the ethanol industry with cellulosic ethanol?

As the policy mix and the budget papers stand at the moment, after next year—or maybe it is the year after—renewable fuel will come back onto the tax regime in a similar fashion to carbon based fuels. Renewable fuel is one of the targets, and fine-particle emissions is another one of the targets that we are trying to get to in terms of health and emissions. I am pleased the Minister for Health and Ageing is here and I pleased to see that she is taking down notes furiously as I speak. I think we have to have a very serious looks at these points because we cannot use one argument to set aside one industry that can achieve environmentally and then use the same argument to drive another as we are with these reafforestation amendments within this particular legislation.

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