Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The minister has just said that you will get incentives if you knock your forest down and grow something in its place, which is going to be a net loss of carbon forever in terms of the future horizon that we are looking at. What is the incentive if you do a far better thing for climate change and do not knock the forest down in the first place and, by the way, add another gift to the nation by protecting biodiversity, because nearly always these forests are the habitat of rare and endangered plants or animal species? So, I just ask the minister: can she see an absurdity in a projected gift to people who log forests and then replace them with some form of regrowth rather than there being a direct assistance from government or the market to protect forests that are already standing, have been accreting carbon for centuries and are doing the best possible job we could want in an age of greenhouse gas emissions and dangerous climate change?