Mike Kelly (Eden-Monaro, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Defence Support) Share this | Hansard source

There is a beautiful visitors centre, with wonderful pictures on the wall that include a photo of my great, great-grandfather who founded the Bega Cheese Co-op and who was its first chairman. It is a wonderful part of our community and history. The Bega Cheese environmental management systems project is doing wonderful stuff with all of the members of the former co-op and now publicly listed company. They have identified environmental risks on 22 dairy farms. They have invested $2 million of public money and leveraged $6 million of private money. They have delivered approximately 75 on-ground projects, including 83 kilometres of riparian wetland fencing to protect approximately 300 hectares of riparian land; 124 hectares of revegetation and remnant vegetation management; 197 off-stream watering points; remediation of 13 priority erosion sites; 23 dairy laneway upgrades; 17 stream-crossing upgrades; 37 effluent systems upgrades; soil testing and nutrient mapping across 90 farms; and a very exciting dung beetle assessment across 22 properties. That is a really interesting outcome from those projects.

I salute what Bega Cheese and the farmers who are participating in that program have done. I was lucky enough to be at the presentation ceremonies of certificates to the farmers for what they have done under that scheme. There are things that farmers can do and are doing for themselves—and we should not think that they are not and that they are not alert to the challenges of climate change.

Finally, I come back to the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. We need to come back to this in the new parliament because it will help us to address this carbon in the soil issue. We need to unlock the investment that will flow from the CPRS and invest it programs that will help to get that carbon back into the soil. Various techniques and possibilities exist out there for helping us to achieve that. We need to get the CPRS in there to unleash all that potential investment, including in relation to reforestation. It will assist in this as well. It could also help with a range of other things like the wingless grasshopper problem that I had just recently, which gets a leg-up from the lack of vegetation in the area. We must take on board the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

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