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

Further to something that Senator Joyce said, the essential elements for the process of sequestration are the trees, land and water. The result of the process of sequestration is storage of carbon in a carbon sink. The accounting methodology for carbon sink forests will in most circumstances credit carbon dioxide sequestered in the entire system—that is, trees and other living vegetation, including branches, trunks, roots, deadwood, litter and soil. Unlike horticultural plants, where depreciation is recognised in the tax act, carbon sink forests actually continue to store more carbon as they grow, in their branches, in their roots, in the soil and so on, for decades or even centuries, depending on the type of vegetation.

This cannot be seen in the same context as depreciation. Apart from the fact that land is a capital asset, there is an even greater argument that the price of land should be included as a tax deduction because the land is essential to the carbon sink forest in terms of the carbon being sequestered, since, over time, there will be more carbon stored underneath the ground than there is above it. That is why old-growth forests have much more carbon in them than a plantation has—because they have got hundreds of years of the carbon in the soil. Unlike where you cut a tree down and you can take that away and sell that, with a carbon sink forest the land is an essential component of the storage of the carbon and an essential component of the calculation of how much carbon you have got there and therefore the value of that carbon sequestered over time. It is an entirely different thing. Whether or not you accept it, I think you are going to find that Senator Joyce and I are absolutely right here in terms of the interpretation that is going to be applied in the courts about the land actually being an integral part of establishing a carbon sink forest and maintaining the carbon sink forest because they are inseparable, unlike the MIS schemes, where you are cutting the forests down to take them away.

I come back to this issue that I still have not got an answer on—and I really think it is essential that we get one—as to what the difference between guidelines and mandatory regulations is and how these guidelines are going to be complied with and enforced. How are they going to be complied with and enforced? Please tell me that—not what is in them, not the amendments the minister has put up here, but how they are different from mandatory regulations, why this legislation does not have mandatory regulations and instead has guidelines, and, if they are only guidelines, how they are going to be enforced.