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

Thank you, Mr Acting Deputy President. As I said, there is nothing in the legislation that precludes the land costs and this will end up being tested in the courts because the big end of town is coming after this, big time. As was indicated by Senator Nash when she was speaking about the tax break for the big end of town, this legislation is designed for the coal industry. It is designed for the big polluters, for the aviation industry, for the aluminium industry and so on. They will be able to establish fast-growing, rapid offsets using water and good land. They will offset their emissions and there will be a shift of taxpayers’ dollars to the mitigation effort of these companies.

They will get free permits under the emissions trading scheme and they will get taxpayers’ dollars to offset their emissions. They are getting a double take whilst driving up the price of land, driving up the price of water, displacing cropping land and displacing agricultural communities. That is the reality of where we are going. In terms of biodiversity, even more appallingly, the logging effort will be driven even more solidly into native forests as the MIS companies get a better price for holding their plantations as carbon rather than for harvesting them as wood product. In fact, what we will find is that the MIS companies will repackage. They will set up separate companies within the main company and they will shift the effort in relation to how much they put onto the wood market and how much they keep for the carbon market, and they will package that accordingly.

None of this was thought through in the legislation. It seems that there were some fairly naive people sitting around saying that it would be nice if we gave people a tax deduction to plant forests, on marginal land, that will never be cut down. If that was the intention that is not what the legislation delivers. I do not care what the explanatory memorandum says or what the tax office ruling has determined; this parliament has been misled. It has been misled by very poor drafting that does not give effect to what the government thinks it might be doing or indeed to what the Liberal Party might be doing.

We will be back to revisit this but not before there has been a megadisaster in rural Australia in terms of land use. We have already seen it in Tasmania and we have seen it in Victoria and in Queensland. Right around the country we have seen displacement as a result of managed investment schemes. People said at the time that it would not happen, but it did. I know that the Leader of the Opposition has been saying that this will just be marginal land and that the trees will be permanent. That will not be the case. This will be about monocultures and fast-growing ones. It will be bulking up the best land with displacement in rural communities and with a big tax deduction for doing so.

In summing up the debate, I thank all the speakers. I note that Senator Boswell talked about the land price distortions and undermining food security, and that is absolutely where we are going. It will mean double-dipping, as I said before, and, as Senator Boswell pointed out, it will mean that the managed investment schemes will convert to carbon sink forests and drive loggers into the native forests because of the distortion in the Kyoto accounting, which does not allow for emissions from native forest logging. I note that Senator Joyce talked about the destruction of rural communities, as did Senator Williams—and they are absolutely right.

Senator Brown also talked about the perverse outcome of driving the logging into native forests and the loss of the superior carbon stores in favour of inferior monoculture plantations. It is ludicrous that we subsidise the logging and clearing of the stores whilst giving a tax deduction for fast-growing plantations at the community’s expense. Senator Heffernan talked about the perpetuity laws. Senators Xenophon and McGauran also pointed out the impacts on rural Australia. Senator Nash spoke on rural and regional Australia and on the economic sustainability of country towns, and Senator Fielding mentioned his concern after having spoken to some farmers in Victoria.

In conclusion, it is very clear where this Senate is going to go on this motion. I have followed and thought about this issue very carefully for a long time. It disappointed me that, having moved for this disallowance motion, some six weeks later the government still had not got back to me when we had all discussed the possibility of negotiating an alternative set of guidelines which would be mandatory and which would give effect to these carbon sink forests in the way we wanted. The government did that while no doubt confident that the Liberals would be supporting them so they did not need to put the work into it, frankly.

This issue will come back to bite this parliament but, more particularly, the greatest concern is that it is too late once these people have bought up massive amounts of land, the deductions have taken place and the distortion is already in the market, because you cannot retrospectively come back in here and try to take it away after the event. We are indicating here that this is what will happen. Allowing the opt-in under the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme is a disaster because it provides the incentive, the driver, for this to go mad in the scheme. What should be happening is that subdivision 40-J, giving upfront deductions for carbon sink forests plus the coverage of reafforestation in emissions trading, should be suspended while policy incorporating the land use sector in Australia’s climate change mitigation strategy is developed. That is what we should be doing. We should be getting rid of this. We should not be allowing the voluntary opt-in of plantations into the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme; rather we should be looking at our whole land use sector, going back and getting full carbon accounting in terms of the carbon stores we have, separating the emissions from logging and looking at this in a holistic way.

I thank the senators for their contribution and I urge support for this disallowance motion so that we can come back and get it right. I urge the government to consider not putting in those plantations as an opt-in in the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, because that will be the price signal that really drives this in a way that you have not thought about but we all have.

Question put:

That the motion (Senator Milne’s) be agreed to.