Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Or logged, as Senator Milne said. It is irresponsible legislation. We are talking about taxpayers’ money, because this is tax forgone. It does not go into the exchequer; it is not available for tackling climate change or for assisting public schools or hospitals. It is going to, and it will obviously go to, big corporations, coal corporations, aluminium corporations—polluters—because they are the people with the money to buy up vast amounts of land, including food-producing land, and get a huge windfall through this scheme to put in plantations for which they have no responsibility 15 years down the line. Incredible!

Senator Milne proposes a new schedule, which says, ‘You will have to keep those trees for a hundred years; you will have to see them through to maturity,’ and the government says, ‘We’re not going to support that.’ And the opposition says, ‘We won’t support that either.’ I will tell you what has happened here. The very, very powerful coal and logging industries at the front of the queue, at the open doors of the ministry of this new government, have handed across this legislation. It has not been thought through. It is now being dumped on the Senate and will perhaps be passed, and later on we will have newspaper articles about what an absolute rort it was. It has taken Senator Milne to pick up on it, and it will take the Greens to question the government carefully in committee about the various components of the program through the new schedule that Senator Milne has brought forward.

One thing that I will be asking the government about is the definition of a forest. They have invented a new definition. The government can get up and tell me if I am wrong, but the logging industry had a big hand in this legislation; it is written all over it. As I said, the definition of a forest for this planet-saving plantation forest through which taxpayers are going to be able to avoid millions of dollars in tax, this ill thought out scheme, is one where it can be reasonably expected that when these trees grow to maturity—and remember trees do not grow in 15 years; in the main, they take a century or more and most of the trees in our eucalypt forests go on to live for centuries—the canopy of the planted trees will cover 20 per cent of the land on which they stand. Hey bingo, you have a forest!

Mr Acting Deputy President Barnett, we are from Tasmania. I sought out the accepted definition of a forest according to the Forestry Industries Association of Tasmania. Here it is:

The term forest is used to define areas of land where trees exceeding five meters in height (current or potential) dominate an area, and where the tree canopy shades more than thirty percent of the ground surface.

The forest industry itself defines a forest as having a canopy that covers 30 per cent of the ground, but we look into this legislation and suddenly find that the definition of a forest for the purposes of this legislation is one that covers 20 per cent. Marvellous, is it not, that millions of dollars in tax deductions are going to be taken out of public moneys by already wealthy organisations planting trees to make forests that do not qualify under the definition of forests? Even when they grow to maturity, they will cover two-thirds of the land that the industry itself says they would need to cover to qualify as forests.

Moreover, you will note from that definition that the trees, if they are in a forest, are destined to be at least five metres in height. Have a look at the definition in this tax avoidance legislation—they have to grow to only two metres. Suddenly the whole world’s definition of forests, worked out by the experts, is dropped by the industry itself and by the corporate sector, which have written this legislation to allow tax-deductibility for a plantation that is never going to be in the region of what has always been defined as a forest.

Under the legislation, you need to make sure that the land you are planting did not have a forest on it on 1 January 1990—that is the Kyoto protocol basic measuring date—which could have grown to be a forest two metres high or covering 20 per cent of the land. In other words, the land needs to have been cleared. You can put your forest on that land and you will get the tax-deductibility. But, if somebody planted a plantation on that land in 1991 and by now it has grown or would have grown into a forest much bigger than this definition, you can flatten it, you can burn it down, you can do what you like. You can release tonnes of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere and replace it with a much inferior forest that is going to meet only the two metres and 20 per cent canopy definition—a much inferior forest in terms of holding back carbon—and get tax-deductibility for it. You are going to be rewarded for destroying an established plantation which has a greater planet-saving capability than the one defined in this legislation. You will get no reward for the plantation that stood there.

Money runs these things, so flatten that, destroy the wildlife and destroy the biology of that piece of country and this government—and that includes the Minister for Climate Change and Water, Senator Wong; the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts, Peter Garrett; and the Prime Minister, the Hon. Kevin Rudd—will reward you for doing the wrong thing, by any measure, to reduce the carbon load in the atmosphere. In fact, by increasing it you will be rewarded; you will get massive tax deductions under this scheme. How poorly thought out is this? What a rort it will be! Here is a reward system for doing the wrong thing by the environment.

I have circulated an amendment which will at least deal with that last matter, because it says that, if there was existing, in 1990 or at any time since, a forest which measured up to the 20 per cent canopy and two metres high rule, you cannot claim tax-deductibility for that land. That is plain common sense. I gave that amendment to Minister Wong this afternoon. I know that the experts in the government are looking at it. I would expect that the government, and indeed the opposition, will support that amendment.

This is very serious legislation, which requires very serious amendment. Senator Milne and I have put forward amendments. Senator Milne has a new schedule which, in one go, says that these forests are going to have to be dinkum and are going to have to be there for at least a hundred years. Why would you not say that if you expect to protect the welfare not just of the corporations now but of the planet into the future? In other words, these trees that are planted now to offset dangerous climate change will need to be there for our children and our grandchildren to see, and they will be the custodians.

I cannot believe that this legislation is as it is. I will be astonished if the government does not support these amendments and I will be astonished if the opposition does not support them either.