Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

Oh! We have moved from ‘wrong’ to ‘It is not right.’ At least now the member for Mackellar has discovered the sentence. I welcome her to the world of the sentence. We will move on to the paragraph maybe by the end of this year.

Then there is the important issue of soil carbon, an area that we must do something about. In the agreement at the end of last year, the government put forward the national carbon offset standard. We never pretended the national carbon offset standard would count towards our international obligations. We were quite explicit about the fact that this was for sources not counted towards Australia’s international commitments—for example, for agricultural soils, enhanced forest management, non-forest revegetation and vegetation management. That was agreed at the end of last year. Under the national carbon offset standard, additional to our international commitments, we were creating an opportunity for farmers to be able to participate in soil carbon work, to enhance their productivity directly and to be able to do good work, not yet counted for internationally, in sequestering carbon into the soil.

The opposition have taken that concept and are pretending it can be counted internationally. At the moment, it cannot. You cannot even get to two per cent under the opposition’s document before you get to a total reliance on agricultural soils. The document released today, from the beginning to the end, is a climate con job. It was meant to present reductions in emissions of five per cent. It does not even get you to two. It does not work. It does not require anything of polluters. There is no cap on pollution. It slugs taxpayers instead of big polluters. Unfunded, it can only lead to higher taxes. The climate con job does less, costs more and will mean higher taxes.

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