Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

There are a couple of questions that I would like to ask in relation to the draft regulations tabled yesterday. They relate to issues around water and water interception. I am genuinely interested in knowing what the baselines for those calculations might be. There is a table on page 6 that talks about the level of interception, long-term average rainfall and the volume of water offsets that have been claimed as part of that. But in relation to what the interceptions might be, in respect of the baselines for calculation of those given the general character of the landscape that they are in, in many circumstances revegetating—and I use that term quite deliberately—the local landscape is actually taking that landscape back to what it might have been before it was cleared. I use a very personal example of the farm that my parents farmed on, which was all forested land. I think there were four or five sawmills in the valley in the early 1900s when that land was cleared. Obviously, that has a material impact on the water flows and the water tables in those areas, so when you take forest cover away the natural impact of the native forest there is changed. It is obviously considerably changed in the development of the agricultural land. If you actually regenerate that country—and a lot of that is now about growing trees, although not in a native forest format unfortunately—you are actually taking that back much more closely to what it was like before. So I am interested in the justification of saying that you have to have that high-security water title, that water right, to that land, because this is a very new concept and it is not something that we have seen in any format that I have come across before. So the concept of saying that we now need to have a water licence to put trees back into the landscape is a new concept and I am interested to see how that might perhaps bleed off into some other areas. I am very interested to know what the government's baselines for these are, whether they are as to what was the natural state or whether they are as to what is now the altered state, and how those calculations have been determined.