Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Water Resources and Conservation) Share this | Hansard source

I rise tonight as a National Party senator to make a contribution to this debate, and I say as a National Party senator that this is an issue that goes right to the heart of a sustainable rural and regional Australia. To my mind, there is absolutely no doubt about that, which is why I am standing here today. It is an interesting situation to be in with my National Party colleagues, knowing that to stick up for what we believe in we actually have to cross the floor. It is not something we have taken lightly. It is something that we have given a great deal of consideration. To us, it shows how important this issue is.

During the week somebody referred to it as a 100th-order issue. To me and to my colleague Senator Joyce, sitting in front of me, it is anything but a 100th-order issue. For anybody to think this is a 100th-order issue shows just how disconnected they are from things that are important to rural and regional Australia. This is not a 100th-order issue; this is a top issue. It goes right to the heart of how we make a sustainable rural and regional Australia. That is the question that this country needs to ask.

Just last week I was on the North Coast talking to a farmer, and they said: ‘Does this country actually want a sustainable rural Australia? Does this country actually want farmers to keep producing? Does this country want farmers to keep feeding the nation? If they don’t, come and tell me, because I’m quite happy to pack up now and go and do something else.’ The view was that they are getting sent from pillar to post, because there is no support and they are coming up against things exactly like this carbon sink legislation. They are out there working their guts out and have done across most of Australia for the last seven years. They are up against drought and all sorts of other difficulties, yet they keep soldiering on. And what do we do to them? We give them no support. Then they turn around and see something like this carbon sink legislation put forward, which is going to give potentially huge tax breaks to the big end of town. What does that say to them about how much we care and how important they are to this country? I think it says we do not care at all. But I can tell you that we care about it. The Nationals care about it. That is why we are prepared to cross the floor to stick up for the people who need us to stick up for them.

I recognise the others in this chamber, the Greens and the crossbenchers, who are also prepared to stand up on this issue and say how important it is. This is about the protection of prime agricultural land. Do you know what that prime agricultural land does? It feeds and clothes the nation. To stand here and support a piece of legislation that potentially is going to rip that security away—take that productive agricultural land out of the system and replace it with carbon sink forests through a tax break—is simply wrong. It is flawed legislation, bad legislation, and it should not be going forward. It is unfortunate that the only way we can address this is through a motion to disallow the regulations. We believe by knocking the regulations out we will disable the legislation itself. Coming up later this evening is a piece of legislation through which we will again address the issue. But isn’t it unfortunate that we have to come in here and address this issue through a disallowance motion on a set of regulations?

This legislation goes right to the heart of food security in this nation. It is a debate this country needs to have and needs to have pronto. We need to decide if we, as legislators here in Canberra, are going to provide the tools and mechanisms to ensure that we have food security—not only in the food we provide for this nation but in the food we provide to the least developed nations and the work that we do here to assist them. That is part of our role as a developed nation—to ensure that we help where we can. Yet this legislation directly places that food security at risk. What we are going to see, with the reduction of prime agricultural land, is a reduction in food production capacity. What we are potentially going to see, through that reduction, is an increase in the price of food, not only hurting our country but potentially ensuring that we will have to rely more on imports. Once we start to rely more on imports—apart from the fact that we are not doing what we should be doing and producing the food and fibre that we need—there is the issue of quality. We have tremendous quality standards in this country. The minute we start importing we will have serious quality-control issues about the food that we provide for the people in this nation to eat. The issue of food security is one that we need to address, and this piece of legislation does exactly the opposite—it takes away that security.

We do not have a problem with the planning of carbon sinks. We have an issue with the government giving a tax break for doing it. If there is going to be competition for prime agricultural land in this country, there should be a level playing field for farmers and corporate entities alike. Why should corporate entities get a tax break to do something when farmers do not get one? Farmers do not get a tax break to graze their properties. Farmers do not get a tax break to plant a crop—