Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Regional Education) Share this | Hansard source

I will take that interjection, thank you very much, Senator Williams: you can't trust them; you simply cannot trust them. Under that Murray-Darling Basin Plan we saw this government say that removing one-third of the irrigation out of our basin communities would result in the loss of 800 jobs. If the government can get it so wrong through lack of consultation and lack of understanding of impact on regional communities, I have absolutely no confidence that they are going to get it right when it comes to the impact of the Carbon Farming Initiative bill.

One of my significant concerns about this is the potential change in land use and the potential skewing of land use as a result of this piece of legislation. What I mean by that is the skewing of prime agricultural land for tree planting instead of food production. I do not think that there is going to be a more serious issue for this nation over the coming decades than food security. It is one of those issues that is sort of under the radar at the moment; people are fairly used to walking into supermarkets and food being on the shelves and they really do not think about it very much.

But I have to say, Madam Acting Deputy President Crossin, they should. People across this country should indeed be thinking about food security. In the future it will mean our ability to feed ourselves, and not only our ability to feed ourselves but our obligation to do our bit to feed those on the rest of the planet. By 2050 there is a predicted global population of nine billion people and we are going to have to feed those people. At the moment the population is only around 6½ billion. We need to be absolutely sure in this country that we make the right decisions now to ensure our agricultural productive capacity into the future, and it is absolutely vital that we do that. If we theoretically look down the track and we do not have the control over the productive land that we need to ensure that we can feed, as I say, not only ourselves but those around the world, then we are going to become a nation of importers. That comes with two very significant issues. One is that there is no quality assurance to the level that we have here and two is that there is no security of supply. The only reason we have security of supply is because we have a domestic production capacity that underpins it. When we lose that—if we lose that—then heaven help us. I do not want to be in the situation where this nation has to be reliant on importing food over the decades to come. This is why we have to be so very certain that this piece of legislation is not going to skew land use in such a way that is going to have an adverse impact on that ability to have our prime agricultural land producing food.

I go back to section 56. The only thing between that scenario—and I admit that it is a hypothetical scenario, but it is still a scenario that needs to be considered—and this piece of legislation is this line:

...that the Minister must have regard to whether there is a significant risk.

That is not good enough. That is not nearly good enough for this chamber, for this parliament, for the people of Australia. We need to have certainty around how that will work. We need guarantees that prime agricultural land is not going to be bought up by companies looking to offset their emissions, who do not perhaps particularly care about the productive capacity of the land or even the financial benefit from that land. These are all scenarios that need to be considered. If this legislation does allow that outcome, then that is going to be a very significant risk for this country. We have to ensure that our farmers across this country have every opportunity not only to maintain their current productive capacity but also to grow it. There are going to be enormous responsibilities in ensuring that we can feed ourselves and those around the rest of the planet.

But there is also a huge opportunity over the coming decades for our farmers to be able to increase their productive capacity, to grow more and to do even better. Our farmers are some of the most technologically advanced, savvy and innovative in the world. There is no doubt about that. As a nation, we should be very proud of the contribution our farmers make to this country, very proud indeed. Indeed, they are not recognised nearly enough for the work that they do and the contribution they make.

So Madam Acting Deputy President, certainly on balance I think anybody that has been able to take the time to look closely at this piece of legislation will realise that the detail is simply not there to the level required for this chamber to be able to support this bill. It is simply not there. I would say that while it is a complex bill, it does not take much determination and much investigation to realise that a lot more needs to be put in front of this chamber by this parliament before we can possibly agree to consider supporting it. I would suggest that it is flawed enough that without many amend­ments we would not even get close to considering it—and I note that the coalition will be moving some amendments—but certainly from the coalition perspective, the lack of detail in this piece of legislation simply makes it impossible to support as it stands.