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

Thank you very much. The difficulty is that I know someone who has already contracted 3½ thousand acres to do this. Minister, as you have just pointed out, we do not really know what the contractual arrangements are because the law is silent. We have not got around to sorting out what it, in effect, means. This legislation is putting the cart before the horse. We clearly need to have the courage and political will to say, ‘Sorry, but we’ve all collectively made a mistake here because we do not know whether farmers are included or excluded from the full obligation in carbon.’ At $17 a tonne, every irrigated dairy farmer in Australia will be insolvent. We do not know the answer to that. We do not know the price of the carbon in the offset trading because that would determine what type of land will be used. I hear everyone saying that we should only use marginal land. Well, let me tell you, if I have the best farming land on the Liverpool Plains, and I can get $80 a tonne as a carbon credit every year and live on the Gold Coast, I will not grow wheat. This is an attack on prime agricultural land.

Progress reported.