Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Climate Change and Water) Share this | Hansard source

There is one point I neglected to make in response to Senator Milne, who I think was suggesting there would be quite a lot of delay on this. If this bill is defeated, and the Greens have continued to oppose this bill, obviously there will continue to be delay on all action contemplated under the bill, including the development of the offsets regime under the bill.

In relation to the points made by Senator Boswell, these are arguments which were traversed in this chamber at great length when the relevant tax measure was previously introduced, from memory, by the previous government at the behest of Mr Turnbull—I could be wrong on that, but I think that was the process. A national Greens alliance opposed that measure. From memory, the opposition, other than the National Party, voted with the government on this. Those policy issues have been traversed. The government do not agree that the policy issues involved in trying to provide landholders with the opportunity to sequester carbon are outweighed by some of the risks that Senator Boswell puts forward. Many of the proponents of these types of activities do not envisage that you would utilise prime agricultural land for these types of activities. In fact, I would have thought there was an economic difficulty with some of what Senator Boswell is suggesting. He is suggesting that the carbon price, which starts off at only $10 a tonne in the first year of the scheme, could somehow displace agricultural production for what one would have thought would be much higher value products than that.

Firstly, there is the economic issue; what the real-life examples are and what people in this sector say. Secondly, as part of our agreement with the opposition in relation to forests earning forest credits, we said that we would require conditions for these to have adequate water entitlements. As I have previously indicated to one of your colleagues earlier today—or perhaps late Friday or Thursday night, or even late Wednesday night, I cannot recall—it would be our expectation that those conditions would be consistent with the National Water Initiative requirements. We have also indicated that we would include conditions for planning approvals.

The policy question is this: I accept that the National Party have a view that they do not believe that this opportunity should be made available because of the risks. We believe the risks have been overstated by those opposite. We think farmers should have this opportunity to make that economic decision, and we do believe that putting in place requirements around planning approval and water entitlements deal with some of the risks which are being put forward.