Mark Coulton (Parkes, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Nature Repair Market Bill 2023. I want to state from the outset that I'm not opposed to farmers being compensated for protecting the environment for the benefit of the greater good. But I will say that I've been watching this debate with some interest, and speech after speech has been by people who actually have no concept of what this means in a practical sense. These are people who live in suburbia, who live in completely concreted and altered parts of the environment. I haven't heard one speech where they talk about the people they represent maybe changing what they're doing.

One of the great misconceptions is that the environment in Australia is somehow in a terrible state of decline. I find that deeply offensive to the people of regional Australia. My own family—my brothers and I—was one of the first to experiment with zero-till farming back in the 1970s. That has been a revolution which increased soil carbon, reduced erosion and made large areas of Australia highly productive. I'll say from the outset that the motivation for protecting the environment and biodiversity is always around the increase in production. The motivation to look after the land that you're in charge of is in production-earning income, because if you let your land decline and haven't looked after the health of your soil or planted trees along waterways, shade lines or whatever, then you're not productive. Many of those issues which are being spoken about here may have been relevant in 1920 but they're certainly not relevant today.

I've heard that in some of the speeches. The member for Warringah was a classic example. She called for the stopping of old-growth logging in forests. She lives in an electorate that's completely altered. Where do the houses in Warringah come from? Trees are being cut down and there are holes in the ground where the bricks were made. Carbon has been emitted while the cement was being made. What sort of a fairyland do these people live in? And then they say, 'We've got what we want, so you folks out there can just stop what you're doing.'

The world's population is at seven billion, and heading to 10 billion in a very short time, but not one of these speeches has talked about what they're going to eat. These credits and agreements that are being signed up to are for 25 to 100 years. How do we know what the circumstances will be in that time? Are we locking future generations into poverty because we reduced or stopped the ability to produce food because it suited people who live in urban areas to balance off their emissions—the large corporations to pay farmers to lock-up their land and plant trees? What possible benefit is that going to have for future generations of this country? It's breathtaking to see. It's like we're in a vacuum, in a debating chamber in a first-year university class where people are signalling their virtue and having all the theories under the sun but not having one practical idea of what it means to people on the ground.

Returning to my friend the member for Warringah and cutting old growth forests, 15 years ago the Labor government in New South Wales wiped out the cypress pine timber industry in the Pilliga Forest. It employed hundreds of people in a forest that was managed. The undergrowth was managed. Since that time, it has burnt in large amounts in incredibly hot fires. Koalas and sensitive vegetation have been destroyed by very hot fires because the forest has just been locked up and left. At the moment we have an issue with some very sensitive caves in the Pilliga that have great value to the local Gamilaraay people that are being destroyed by feral goats because there's no management in there looking after these things. In the wetlands of the Gwydir River west of Moree there are thousands of feral pigs because there's no-one in there to manage them.

So the idea that locking up land—I'll tell you what the idea is, Member for Macquarie. Locking up land, thinking that locking it up is good for the environment, is a falsehood. It's an absolute falsehood. Adjoining my property at Bingara is a stock route that hasn't been used for years. It is now overgrown with cypress pine and prickly pear; rabbits and feral pigs live in there. Over the fence on my property, where we rotationally graze—we manage the level of vegetation—the hardest working people on my farm are the dung beetles. They are the unsung heroes of regional Australia, building up soil carbon. We're going into a dry time. The livestock are still doing well. It's a healthy, active environment.

This idea of locking it up—and then the next step over is somehow this idea that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have an innate ability to be the overall best land managers. Handing over the final say in a deal that you might be doing on conserving a part of your land, taking the money—I understand all of that; I'm not opposed to that—but then having another body, the local land council or someone like that, come in to have a final say on whether this ticks off or not is not what Australia is all about. Freehold land is freehold land, and the decisions should be made on that by the people that own it. Bringing in a third party is not going to help this process. It will be just another clip of the ticket, another lot of rent-seeking going on in this process.

My concern, if we go forward into the years to come, in a hundred years—if you go back a hundred years, in Australia people were farming with horses, in horse teams. The government with closer settlement would take blocks of land from people if they actually hadn't cleared it and turned into it productive use. Soldier settlers—I was at Piallaway hall celebrating its hundredth birthday on Saturday. That community was built by closer settlement, by people coming in and changing the landscape. A hundred years on, that is still a productive area. It's still a vibrant living environment that's sequestering carbon, that's doing its bit because of the stewardship of the people that are there. We need to be very careful with what we do here. As I said at the start, I'm not opposed to farmers being compensated because they are using part of their property for conservation. This was actually a policy started under the previous government, and I was supportive of that. But, as per usual, because of the current government's lack of any practical understanding outside these four walls of what this stuff means, it's going that step further. It makes this unworkable. It impinges on the rights of individual Australians to produce and own land. But, big picture, it's about understanding that Australia feeds 50 million people outside of Australia. Countries around the world that can't produce the protein that we can rely on us. So why on earth are we trying to restrict that ability?

Members opposite know the balance of payment. The sectors that got us through the pandemic, agriculture and mining, are all being negatively impacted by this sort of legislation. Back to the idea that we will cut all old-growth forests—we'll just buy our timber from a Third World country's old-growth forest where they don't have any regulations. 'That's all right. We'll let them denude their country because they need a balance of payments.' No regulations and it comes in on a ship, but boy we feel good. We've stopped our timber workers, the ones down in Gippsland now being told by the Victorian government that they have no future, but we feel good about ourselves, don't we? Now the timber is going to come in from Indonesia, South America or somewhere like that.

We live in a global environment. It's not just about signalling our virtue with what we do here. We need to understand that, if we do things here and start importing things from somewhere else, the environment of the globe actually suffers. We saw that with the cement industry. Way back in 2008 or 2009, when the first discussion on a carbon tax came in—I'll digress a bit, Deputy Speaker, please—just on the strength of that, Cement Australia shut the plant at Kandos. It had been there for years and years. So where does the cement that comes in to build the suburbs that our good friends on the other side live in come from now, do you think? It comes in on a ship through the harbour, probably from Indonesia. No environmental laws there, but we feel good. We've closed down an industry in Kandos that was there for dozens of years, maybe 100 years or so. Those people don't have a job, but we've done our job here in Australia, haven't we? That's what happens with going a step further.

If it had stuck to its original concept, I would have supported this bill, because the other thing that's related to this is offsets. Taking your family to Disneyland for a holiday and ticking the green box so someone locks up a bit of forest somewhere or plants a few trees helps your conscience, but it still hasn't reduced your own emissions. What I want to see and hear is a debate where everyone in here looks at what their electorates can do to reduce emissions and look after the environment. It's all well and good for the member for Warringah to talk about the Tarkine—how far is that from Warringah? It's across the Bass Strait. Seriously, when will we start to see policy in here where all Australians can carry the weight evenly rather than just regional Australians, the people who have actually been carrying the economic responsibility of keeping this country solvent? We keep trimming away their ability to do that, whether we're restricting mining—we've had the Greens over here wanting to ban coal mining and gas—or, now, having this attack on productive agricultural farming.

A bit of this is fine. I've got some carbon sinks in my electorate. A bit of it's fine, but I don't want the whole of my electorate covered in trees. We're talking about the environment. You take out a productive farm, you plant it with trees and everyone feels good about themselves. What happens to the people that ran that farm? What happens to the business that supplied the drench, the fertiliser, the seed? What happens to the people that sheared the sheep on that farm? What happens to the company in town that owned the truck that carted the grain to the terminal? It's all gone. Then what happens to the person in town who's a schoolteacher with a reduced number of kids? What about the hairdresser, the coffee shop, the supermarket? This is an attack on country Australia. While we're all feeling good over there about protecting the environment but not doing one thing ourselves, bit by bit you're strangling regional Australia to a point where it's no longer viable.

I'm opposed to this bill. I'm sorry that I have to be, because in its original form, as put up by the last government, it would have been a positive one. Now I'm afraid to say it is potentially dangerous in the longer term for this country, and I no longer will support it.

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