Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I hope that the government is prepared to go up to the Tully mill chairman, Dick Camilleri, and tell him why they think this is such a great idea, because he has put his finger on it when he says, ‘If you want a level playing field, get rid of the MISs. Don’t add other MISs on top of them’—which is effectively what has happened. Let us cut to the chase here. What has happened is that managed investment schemes should have been knocked out as tax deductions and were not. They have caused a disaster in rural Australia. They are undermining the social fabric of rural Australia and they are sucking the water out of catchments as we speak. Instead of knocking them out, the government has listened to people who say, ‘They’ve got a tax deduction for cutting down trees. We want a tax deduction for planting them.’ So now we are saying, ‘Okay, let’s have another managed investment scheme for them as well.’ So let us double the problem, not take it away! We have argued for the end to managed investment schemes for forestry, and they should have gone. They are bad policy. Now to put an MIS on steroids, as I have said, on top of that is an even worse position.

I want to unpack some of the deliberate obfuscation that has gone on this morning. For the opposition—which obviously now is going to weaken under pressure from the former minister, Mr Turnbull—Senator Ronaldson said the value of the timber will be minimal. Why? He says, ‘Because these trees will be planted on marginal land.’ There is no requirement in this bill for that. As I said at the beginning, trees, like crops, grow best on the best land with the most water. It stands to reason. So, if your investment depends on those trees growing either for pulp or for carbon credits, you are going to buy land that guarantees you the best return, and you are going to go in there and displace people at Tully, on the north-west coast of Tasmania, in south-west Western Australia and right around Australia.

We have no plan for food security in this country. Yesterday, the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists were talking about the water being taken out of the catchments. This is a very bad idea from a purely hydrological point of view. So let’s just get rid of that idea first: there is nothing in this legislation to say that this has to be on marginal land. Secondly, Senator Conroy says: ‘This is a tax bill. It’s up to the Greenhouse Office and the minister for climate change to set the regulations about how this might or might not play out.’ We do not know what those regulations are. I have no assurance whatsoever that even the current requirements for Greenhouse Friendly would apply; I do not know that.

The next thing that Senator Ronaldson said was, ‘Why would you cut down the trees when you’ve gotta make good the carbon?’ That is a deliberate mixing up of the two issues. One is the tax deduction for planting the trees. The other one is that, once you have your tax deduction and planted them, you might then enter into a separate arrangement for carbon credits, in which case if you cut them down you would have to make good the carbon credits. But you do not ever have to pay back the tax deduction. That is the point.

The next point that has been made is: ‘I am a timber company and I’ve got two arms. One is for pulp and one is for carbon sinks.’ So, if I were a timber company, I would busily say my intention is to plant the trees for carbon. However, the price of pulp goes up, so I sell that over to the other arm of my company, my subsidiary company, and I sell it for pulp. So I have the tax deduction to put the trees in; then I sell it, get the high pulp prices and pay no tax difference. Those are the kinds of lurks and rorts that are going to go on. As Senator Heffernan said, once you have planted it and sold it, a week later, once you have collected your tax deduction, you can lease it or sell it to somebody else.

Since when in legislation is it enough to say to get a tax deduction, ‘I intended when I planted that that it be a carbon sink; therefore it is one.’ Come on! Why can the forest industry and the big end of town, with the cement industry, the aluminium industry, the coal industry and the airlines, just say, ‘It is my intention at this time,’ but two weeks later or a year later, after they have their full tax deduction, they can say, ‘I changed my mind’? Then we are told the tax commissioner could take action. Well, we have seen how often that happens. It would be years before you got through the courts, so that argument is completely wrong.

As to the argument, ‘It’s very, very hard to legislate for 100 years,’ what nonsense! Our amendment is that the easement be registered on the title. That is what covenanting is about. There are plenty of schemes at the moment where you put a covenant on the land and then you resell it. The covenant is on the title; the person buying it knows the covenant is there. It is not complex, it is not difficult and it is happening now. I would have thought that Senator Ronaldson would have known that and I am surprised that Senator Murray thinks it is complex. It is not complex and it is not weak. Covenanting land is already done right now. That is what Bush Heritage and the Tasmanian Land Conservancy do: they get land, they covenant it and then in some cases it is onsold with the covenant so that that forest is always protected.

So let’s just dump all this nonsense. We are being told: ‘We want to give a tax deduction to people to plant trees and we’ll leave it up to somebody else to determine where, when, how and whatever else. We just want to make sure the money rolls for the people who plant the trees. We’re not interested in whether this carbon is actually sequestered in the long term. We’re not interested in that; somebody else can determine that. All we want to make sure is that up-front these guys get the money, because there is a whinge on at the moment saying, ‘They get it for cutting them down; we want it for putting them in.’ Those who are cutting them down are saying they do not mind because they know if we stop this our next step will be to get rid of managed investment schemes. That is what we should be doing. Bring in legislation here to get rid of them and I will be the first one on my feet supporting it.

Also, bring in legislation here to give a tax rebate for people protecting standing forests or protecting native vegetation. If you wanted to really help farmers who have marginal land you would be saying to them, ‘We will give you a tax break or a rebate for covenanting and protecting on your property the standing trees or the native veg that you’ve got.’ That would be a big help to existing landowners. But this is not about existing landowners. That is why it says in the legislation the people getting the tax deduction do not have to bear any relationship to the land. They do not have to be a farmer or be engaged in any farming activity at all. Why? Because it is not designed for farmers; it is designed for the coal companies, the airlines, the cement industry and the forest industry. That is who this is designed for, as well as the big end of town, Collins Street investors, who want to minimise their income by investing in this way.

So let’s stop the furphies. Just stop it all now and admit what you are doing. Former Treasurer Mr Costello brought this in the May 20007 budget. It was for this very reason: to extend the MISs through another name. He did not act on it until the last day the Senate sat before the federal election, when it was brought into this house. I stood up then and said, ‘You cannot stand up in rural Australia in this election campaign and tell people you are vaguely interested in rural Australia if you dump this on them.’ And within half an hour, it went from essential legislation that had to be gotten through before the election to nonessential and it was dropped, because they and the National Party knew they would not be able to go into rural Australia telling people the last thing they did before the election was to dump more MISs onto them under this legislation, which is so ill-considered.

I am shocked that, having knocked it off last time, the Labor Party in government has brought it back, because it is just as ill considered now as it was then—even more so considering that we are about to have a green paper on an emissions-trading scheme. We are meant to be having level playing fields, not setting up offset programs for companies that should be reducing their carbon at its source—at their cement factories and at their coal factories. Where is the equivalent? As I go on and on about, if you really were serious about greenhouse you would stop the loss of the carbon stores now, not subsidise them through logging and the RFA.

Senator Ronaldson tells me that I can be assured the Greenhouse Office and the climate minister will take care of it. What a joke! We have the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts, Mr Garrett, and the Minister for Climate Change and Water, Senator Wong, saying that logging in Tasmania is fabulous, that they love it, it is all under proper environmental controls and it is a beautiful thing. When you ask, ‘What about the greenhouse gas emissions from the pulp mill?’ they say, ‘We do not have to consider that under the legislation.’ When you ask, ‘Where is the greenhouse gas trigger for the forests?’ they say, ‘Oh, we don’t have one of those.’ Do not insult our intelligence by suggesting for one minute that Minister Garrett or Minister Wong care one iota about the emissions from the loss of our carbon stores right now. The point is that the carbon stores that are right now being subsidised to be logged and cleared have millions and millions of tonnes more carbon in them than these plantations, which would take a hundred years or more to absorb the carbon that is already there in the forests that are going to be logged. So let us not pretend that this is anything other than a managed investment scheme under another name, with no protection for anybody about anything in relation to carbon. The only people who are excited about this are the people out there offering the product to make their commission, profits and so on in relation to it.

My amendments are sound, but another amendment would be to dump the whole thing. Given what the National Party and Liberal Party coalition said last night, recognising that this is a rort, I suggest the option of getting rid of it completely. So you have several options from me: (1) mixed species; (2) a hundred years; (3) ecological assessment, including hydrological assessment and impacts on surrounding places and communities; or (4) dump the schedule altogether. That is my preferred option. I have a deal for you: put this option to get rid of it all on the table of the Senate. Let us see where the political will exists. I think the political will exists back in the offices of the former Treasurer, Mr Costello, the former Minister for the Environment and Water, Mr Turnbull, and the current Minister for Finance and Deregulation. It has nothing to do with carbon.

Again, I am very keen to hear from the minister representing the government, who is not even listening to what I am saying—that is how little interest the government has in this debate on climate and its impact on rural Australia—on where my guarantee is that these trees are going to be in the ground for any length of time. Where is my guarantee that, if I get a tax deduction for them and on-sell them after I have had my tax deduction, there will be any requirement to make good or any requirement for the area to be an ongoing sink? Is the minister’s conversation with Senator Coonan so interesting that the government is not even prepared to answer the questions? I hope people listening to this in rural Australia feel angry about the lack of interest in this parliament in what is happening to them—people like the dairy farmers pushed off the land at Preolenna and the cane growers pushed off the land at Tully. The dairy farmers were forced to sell out. The factory told the last one to put in greater storage because they were not prepared to come every day to collect the milk. He was driven out of the district. In Tully it is the same. At a certain level, the mill is unviable. Right around Australia it is not just the farmers but the mills and then the whole community that suffer. But apparently that does not matter as long as the big end of town get their tax deductions. The cement industry, the coal industry, the aviation industry and all the other industries that will get on the back of this are happy with the government’s lead to an uneven playing field for an emissions-trading system.

I am pretty angry about this and I never want to hear a backbencher or minister from Labor—or from the coalition, if they support this—turning up in rural Australia and saying, ‘Oh, what a shame. We didn’t know this would be the outcome.’ You knew it would be the outcome; you deliberated on it being the outcome; and I know now that you are going to vote for it to be the outcome. Let us hope we do not have this kind of hypocrisy and let us hope we get some sense out of this. Senator Conroy, would you please tell me now: what are the conditions that the climate change minister is going to put on these carbon sinks? Tell me now before the vote so that people here know what these conditions will be.