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

I could not agree more. The area of land use, land use change and forestry is absolutely critical. I really want to see rural Australia being given opportunities to reduce the carbon footprint and, in fact, assist all of us in protecting carbon stores and reducing emissions. I am emphatically in favour of that. I have had lots of talks with the National Farmers Federation and other farmers groups in relation to this. It is the Greens view that the whole of the land use, land use change and forestry sector should be taken out of the CPRS, not included in it, and that it should be run as a parallel scheme. You need to look at several factors together: water sustainability, biodiversity, food security and resilience in country communities. The concern I have is that picking and choosing offsets in the way that is happening will lead to perverse outcomes, just like the managed investment schemes did. Unless you look at food security, water and biodiversity all at once, you end up favouring one and destroying another.

That is the perspective that I come from here. It is not that I do not think we ought to be doing everything we can to maximise carbon stored in the landscape; it is about the manner in which this is done. It is not clear to me that it has really been well thought through. It is very ad hoc, and with adhockery you get those perverse outcomes. I assume the government said it would not make a decision until 2013 about whether it would include agriculture because it had to think through a lot of these methodologies. Now that it has been brought forward there will be a rush to get something done, and when you do that you inevitably end up, as with the managed investment schemes, with adverse outcomes for water, food security, land prices and all sorts of things.

The point that I was getting at with the registered greenhouse and energy auditors is that, whilst there are clearly people registered as auditors, I cannot see that they would have expertise in an area that we have not developed yet. In fact, they could not have expertise in this area. Minister, you were saying that units will only be provided for abatement that has already occurred and not for abatement that is expected to occur in the future, so there is going to be a whole lot of uncertainty in the next few years as to what you may or may not do on land in relation to this.

I would like to ask a specific question in relation to avoided deforestation. Can the minister explain to me what is intended here? Is it intended that you will provide credit to people who already have a permit to log or to clear and that, therefore, avoided deforestation is a decision not to proceed with a land clearance or logging permit? Can you just explain to me how this will work? What is your baseline? If that is what is intended, you will give credit to people who said they were going to clear and now are not going to. What sort of hectarage across Australia would people in theory have permission to log or clear?