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

I think the minister is genuinely trying to provide some advice in respect of that. I am genuinely interested in this and I am getting a good sense of the bases and the baselines for these. As I said, it is a new concept and it does have the capacity to be a precedent for other land uses. So in that context alone it is important that we make sure that this is put together properly. It actually does vindicate the opposition's concern at the time that this bill was first tabled when we said we wanted to see the final passing of this legislation deferred until after we had the capacity, as an opposition and as a parliament, to actively consider these regulations. There was some indicative work provided to us, I accept, but that was not until the day we reported on the legislation, which significantly inhibited our capacity to deal with it. Now here we are, with the government pushing to try to get the legislation finalised, receiving draft regulations and there are some very important concepts contained in these. This, as I have said, is something that I have not seen before in any legislation where someone wanting to have an agricultural land use is required, just to undertake that agricultural land use, to have a high-quality water entitlement. I think it is important to know what the baselines are for this. I understand that the water uptake by a forest plantation varies significantly over its life. It is very, very low in the early stages, obviously, when there is less density in the forest. It ramps up as the forest grows and then it evens off as the forest matures. I would like to know the basis for the calculation—whether it is an average across the life cycle of a forest. How are these figures calculated?