David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak about a hypothesis circulating around the globe and in Australia. There are calls for us to be signing up to methane pledges due to supranational bodies like the UN and the IPCC recommending it. It is the genesis and the justification for the absolute madness proposed in Ireland, where they're going to cull a third of their dairy herd to meet the methane pledge. We've already seen the Netherlands virtually have a revolution by farmers who have started up their own party because they were going to shut down one-third of their farms. It's all based on very dodgy science. People don't understand that biological methane is quite different from unnatural methane that comes from gas and coal extraction and other processes.

The other madness is that methane has a very short atmospheric life. CO2 is there permanently. If you have the same herd reproducing itself, it is a closed system. To have dairy herds and beef herds, you need pastures. If you look at the effect of improved pastures, you see massive soil carbon growth. Otherwise, you can't produce enough pastures to feed all these animals. So they are more than carbon negative. The whole cycle is a natural cycle. The animals themselves, the bovines, are about 15 per cent solid carbon. Each one of them is a sink, let alone the soils on which their pastures grow. As I said, biological methane is a very short lived atmospheric. Even though it is technically, scientifically, maybe a more powerful warming gas, it's only there temporarily, and it goes back down into the soil and into animals.

In the Lyne electorate and in Australia, we have a huge dairy and beef industry. The red meat and livestock turnover was $67.7 billion. In Australia 428,000 people are employed by this industry, 191,000 directly. The production of red meat provides protein for us and for our importing countries who can't grow that. We have 1.5 per cent of the global cattle herd and five per cent of the global sheep stock, but we are the fourth largest beef exporter. So most of our red meat is for other countries. Not only do we supply energy for other countries but we supply protein and meat. And we should reject any calls for methane pledges.