Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Senator Macdonald—I am happy to yield to my colleagues on this issue. Minister, has there been any modelling or accounting work done, given that there has been an intimation to farmers that this new inclusion around these offsets will in some way go, as I said before, to counteracting the embedded costs that remain in the ETS? Has the government done any work at this stage on accounting modelling on, say, average size farms, measuring what the current input costs will be and potentially the amount of funding that may be forthcoming from these offsets? That may sound like a very simplistic question, given the complex nature of the detail of the bill, but I think the people out there listening, and certainly farmers, would be very keen to know whether, for a certain cost that will land on them and will be inescapable under this emissions trading scheme, the government has determined how much of that will be offset by some of the measures being proposed by the government and could be utilised by the farming community.