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

I thank the minister for that but I am afraid I am a bit at a loss. I just want to take it back to where the farming community is now: hearing on the radio that the agreement between the government and the coalition is that offset permits will be available for abatement activities around fertiliser use, avoided deforestation et cetera. They are now sitting at home thinking: ‘What do I have to do on my farm and when do I have to start? Who do I register it with? How am I going to do this in order to take advantage of it?’ I think the minister and everybody in this parliament is quite right in assuming that people in rural Australia want to be able to do things. There is no question about that. They want to be able to do things to reduce their emissions. Anyway, it makes infinite sense to reduce their marginal input costs by getting rid of a lot of the inputs that cost them a great deal of money, and fertiliser is one of those. But how, on fertiliser use—