Ron Boswell (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

This managed investment scheme issue is absolutely basic to the National Party. It is fundamental to the National Party. It is a question of life and death to the National Party. I will offer to take anyone on a tour of places where these managed investment schemes have eroded the viability of the sugarcane growers, the dairy farmers and the banana growers. We should have learnt our lesson. We developed an MIS and we thought it would help build industries. Everyone let it go through, but we saw what it did. We saw how it was impacting on rural Australia. I had the experience the other day of going to Tully. A big banana grower and sugar grower said that a block of land became available next door to him and he thought he would test the market. He was quite a wealthy man. The MIS tried to buy the block of land and it became a bidding war. He just got blown out of the market. He was a genuine farmer, farming sugar and bananas, and he could not compete. This is happening right across rural Australia.

It is bad enough with an MIS, where you give a tax break, if you actually include land in that tax break. I do not know if it is included, but Senator Joyce, who is an accountant, says it is, and Senator Milne has an opinion from a barrister who says land is included in the tax break. We will never know, I presume, until someone takes it to the High Court and has it tested. But if it is included, goodness help Australian farmers as there will not be any farming land left.

Australia is a huge empty land, and we do have lots of land. But we do not have lots of good land. In fact, we only farm about 20 million hectares. That is our total farming land. This measure has the potential for taking 20 million hectares out. Where are we going to farm? And where are we going to put the trees? We are told we will put them in land that is not highly productive. You put the trees where the trees grow fattest, and where they grow fattest is on productive land where it rains. Trees grow where it rains and they absorb more carbon. If you want to go and put trees out in the Simpson Desert I do not think we would have any objections to that. But putting them on prime agricultural land is just wrong. One of the other things that would happen—if people would ever care to go out—is that once you put those trees down next to a productive farm it becomes a haven for pigs, and—