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

I thank the minister for her answer, which was that the people who could register as auditors have expertise in agriculture or whatever. Just being an agricultural scientist—which I might say is an excellent profession, and we do not have enough of them and need more—does not mean that they would have expertise in carbon sequestration. This is an entirely new field and a very specialised one. So, whilst it would be more likely to have people in the forestry sector, as the minister is well aware it is a hugely contentious area in terms of developing methodologies for estimating the amount of carbon in a standing forest or in a regrowth forest et cetera, let alone a new field, which is that of estimating it in agriculture, soils and the whole range of things.

My concern here is that in order to get this show on the road you are going to have to have your methodologies in place first and then your people trained in those methodologies, in spite of their being experts in their field. And those people are actually going to have to help in developing the project, which they are then going to audit, essentially, because we will not have enough people who have expertise in the field. This is what has happened to us in a whole range of these new areas. As tragic as it is, this is what happened with our attempt at insulation, where we just did not have enough people trained in installing insulation and now we have two people electrocuted and one person dead from heat stress as a result of people not being adequately trained, I would suggest, to do this work. That was just in one field and this—assessing agricultural sequestration through these various methods—is a much more technically demanding field than that.

I want to come back to follow that up. You have said in the arrangement that you made with the coalition that there will be approval of projects and crediting of abatement from commencement of the CPRS on 1 July 2011. Approval of projects and crediting of abatements cannot both happen on 1 July 2011, according to what you are saying, because you are saying that units will be provided only for abatement that has already occurred and not for abatement that is expected to occur in the future. I assume that that means that you can apply for your project to be credited on 1 July 2011 and then there will be the process by which you will actually do the abatement. Then you will apply to have the abatement credited and, as it says here, you have to have an audit report by a registered auditor to actually then qualify for that. So I should imagine that if this starts on 1 July 2011 it is very unlikely there will be any abatement credits issued in a reasonable length of time—it is hard to say how much time.

I want to particularly go to the issue of permits being provided for abatement from the sources counted towards Australia’s international commitments, subject to the development of robust methodologies. So, presumably, if there are no methodologies there will be no permits for abatements from these various sources. I want to go through a couple of them—actually, all of them—for a start in a general question. What is the baseline year for all of these things? Taking fertiliser use as an example, obviously we are talking here about nitrous oxide and about changing farming methods to go organic and get off petrochemical fertilisers and all the additives that are generating the nitrous oxide emissions. If you as an individual farmer decided you wanted to get abatement for this over the next few years, are we saying that 2009, with the passage of this legislation, is the baseline year? So, you would say that I used X for my property in 2009 and I am therefore measuring it against that? The same goes for all of these things—for manure management, livestock and all the rest of it. You are going to have to have a baseline year. You especially need it for avoided deforestation; otherwise, in theory, people who have forests on their land that they have no intention of clearing could go out now and apply for a forest practices plan in order to demonstrate, 12 months down the track, that they had intended to clear it and can therefore now claim something that they never intended to do in the first place. That goes to the issue of additionality.

Then there is the issue of leakage. You might give abatement to someone for not clearing something they said they were going to clear, then over on the other property they start clearing and so you have got leakage. As you know, Minister, and as we all know, these are the issues that have vexed the international community for a long time. How do you measure it? How do you make sure that you have genuine additionality? How do you stop leakage driving the practice from one thing to another?

My first question relates to livestock, manure management, fertiliser use, the burning of savannahs and agricultural residues, rice cultivation, avoided deforestation, legacy waste and emissions from closed landfill activities. How are you going to calculate the baseline year from which you would measure the abatement activities? You cannot wait for the methodology if you are a farmer, for example, because you might want to start now to maximise your abatement in three year’s time.