Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

That does not preclude me from asking questions. I have every intention in the world to vote for amendments, and have done so already. If you think that you can somehow emasculate my capacity to ask questions on behalf of other people in this chamber, sorry, but that is not how it works at all.

You have said that human induced methods would not pertain to leaving country alone for it to naturally revegetate. I will draw a simile there. That is like saying that you are not starving a child if you choose not to feed it, but quite obviously you are. You are making a conscious decision that brings about an outcome. If a farmer makes a conscious decision not to maintain their vegetation management program there is then human induced reasoning behind its revegetation. What you are saying is that that is not the case. That means that, obviously, the only way to get a credit is for farmers not to let nature do it by itself. They have to actually go out and plant exactly the same trees that would grow there naturally in any case and incur the cost. For the life of me that is nonsensical; it is illogical.

You have your advisers there so do you have before you calibrations for which trees have the most effective tonne of carbon to tonne of timber? For instance, does English oak, Quercus robur, have a greater capacity for storage of carbon than brigalow, Acacia harpophylla? Do you have the tables before you so that we can see which tree is the most effective to plant? Since we cannot let nature do its job and we have to plant it, we had better have calibrations on which is the most effective tree. Also, if it is going to be scientifically relevant I suppose we had better start planting imported trees, and if we do that let’s not worry about the biological nexus between native animals and the environment—we will just plant the most carbon effective tree. It might be the sequoia—the California redwood. Do we have a range of these? Are there certain types of trees we can plant? Are they all the same? Is there a differentiation between trees? Do we have that scientific evidence before us?