Bill Heffernan (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

If it is all about 20/20 vision and forestry, then why are all the foresters getting into everything else? They are getting into everything else because it is a great lurk. This is lurk farming. Great Southern Plantations are still about 70 per cent forest and 30 per cent out in the other lurk world. They will go back to forestry, as you said. Timbercorp are about 70-30 the other way. But, if you want to compete, it is buyer beware. If you want to go into tax minimisation, driven by profit from a tax loss, and farm on that, then it is buyer beware.

The test—and there is no need to have a Senate inquiry about this—is whether these people are passive investors or not. That is something that the Commissioner of Taxation will have to sort out. We do not need a Senate inquiry; we need a test case. The idea that somehow the Labor Party can weasel its way through by not having a position on this, by having an inquiry, when the shadow minister is running around saying, ‘She’ll be right, brother; just vote for us and in the meantime publicly we’ll say we’ll have an inquiry,’ is garbage. It is gutless and garbage.

You cannot have a proposition that the rest of the world—the United States, Europe and England—has rejected; that is, the viability of a farming industry based on a tax subsidy. It is complete hogwash. There is absolutely no need for a Senate inquiry. There will be a tax office ruling and a test case. You ought to have the guts to say how you are going to pay for pensions and health care if you are going to have a drain on finance of these proportions. This will build to become bigger as a tax lurk than the bottom of the harbour scheme. This is a deadset tax lurk.

The government recognises that some transitional arrangements will need to be sorted out in the aftermath, but the proposition that you can build an agricultural industry that relies for its viability on a tax lurk is garbage. What about the subsidy rate that will eventually come out of this, if it is allowed to build? While we are arguing in the World Trade Organisation about the devil of the European Union and the US farm subsidy program, per head of population and per dollar of production this will make their schemes look like paltry schemes.

It is an absolute fraud to propose an inquiry into this matter. You blokes are going around saying, ‘Vote for us and we’ll put you back where you were.’ All of these lurk agents are being told: ‘We’ll put you back in business. In the meantime we’ll cover ourselves politically.’ You might ask your leader, Mr Rudd, what his position is. Maybe the media could ask, ‘Are you for or against?’ But you don’t have a position and instead you say, ‘We’ll have an inquiry.’ You are trying to have two bob each way, and your Mr Bowen has put his cards on the table. It is an absolute fraud of a proposition to want to hold an inquiry into the matter.