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

The member for Moreton might like to talk about this in his delivery, because he probably knows more about it than I do. It seems to me that the government should have a very close look at their circumstances, because they are dealing not only with a product that they have dug up out of the ground and sent overseas with no value adding taking place but with a product that goes into a lot of domestic businesses, including agriculture, soil conditioning and a whole range of other things.

If we are serious about sustainability, we have to make sure that some of these policies are sending the right signal. Here again, on the margin of the resource rent taxation issue, we see an area where that signal could become very blurred and it actually impacts on things that other aspects of policy are trying to encourage. So I suggest that the miners themselves take up the option of the Treasurer and the Prime Minister and get into those one-on-one discussions about how the tax is going to impact on their company structures and the long-term profitability of their companies.

As I said, I think the member for Braddon made a very important point yesterday. I would agree with him that, for the last decade, we have talked about renewable energy and done very little. We have these confused messages out there—and the member for Lyne will talk about some of those—with the various state and Commonwealth arrangements. This is a Commonwealth arrangement. Essentially it was to have been piggybacked on to the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme; nonetheless, it is here now. Again there are some blurred areas, including what it is going to mean for consumers, households and, particularly, the smaller end of the market where the real field for renewable energy is.

People want to be involved in doing things better. They want to be encouraged, but they want policy that does not penalise them when they get there. The Leader of the National Party made a very significant point the other day on the issue of natural gas, I think it was. The issue is similar to the ethanol issue that I just raised. Why did we encourage people to go into LPG cars et cetera and then penalise them when they did? Why do we do this? What was the point of doing it in the first place if not to trap them? I am not suggesting that liquid petroleum gas is a renewable fuel, but it is a better fuel in terms of emissions et cetera than some of the other fossil fuels that we have been using.

We constantly get these mixed messages. There are some good things happening in Australia. I do not think these things are being encouraged enough. The member for Moreton may well talk about some of the things that are happening. I know the member for Dawson raises the issue of cogeneration in sugar mills. The only reason we have a sugar industry now is renewable energy. The Brazilians removed themselves from the world market, in a sense, for sugar as a food product. They then moved back into producing energy from that food product, the sugar—producing bagasse and other things from the residues and then producing renewable energy at source. That is starting to happen along the Queensland coast and we should be encouraging that. We should be really encouraging those sorts of activities. Not only do they add value to an agricultural pursuit but they are renewable energy sources. You open up the areas where that particular primary industry exists. I do not have any sugar cane in my electorate, but I think it is an important area that we should be looking at—food production, renewable energy production and electricity production as well as molasses and other activities. It becomes a much more important and significant industry than that of just growing a plant and shipping the sugar as food to someone else overseas.

The member for Parkes would know the small town of Ashford in my electorate. Some years ago it relied very heavily on tobacco and, then, on a coalmine and a relatively small power plant which closed down. The town has been searching for activities that it can lend itself to. In recent years they have been trialling industrial hemp. The member for Lyne might remember from a previous lifetime that, in the New South Wales parliament, I was instrumental in introducing what was essentially a legalisation, a licensing, of industrial hemp, excluding high-THC—dope-smoking hemp—to be grown as a product. That industry has not gone far. There are a number of people that are actually looking at it in Ashford as we speak. Only the other day the Inverell Shire Council passed a motion to look at promoting what the small community group in Ashford is trying to achieve. That group had trials last year. They have established a small market. They need assistance to try and grow the business and find out where the pitfalls are. They have the ingredients: the water, the land and the expertise and capacity to farm that land.

They are asking for some degree of help. I will be very supportive of that, because we never know where that goes. Industrial hemp, for instance, is a sustainable product. Cars used to be built out of industrial hemp rather than out of the materials they are constructed from now. Industrial hemp has been used for a whole range of things, not just for ropes, tarpaulins and various clothing products. You can make furniture out of industrial hemp. It is a renewable product. We should be looking at and encouraging these sorts of people. I do not think the bills we are looking at today actually encourage the little people to motivate themselves too much. In fact, if you relate these bills to what is happening at the state level, they may in fact be counterproductive for the little people trying to make their contribution to a sustainable future. Mr Acting Speaker—

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