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

So that effectively confirms that there is no modelling specifically or broadly for agriculture for the carbon tax. There is a paper that talks about the efficiency of the dairy industry that does have some coverage of electricity prices, but there is nothing more broadly since the 2009 report by ABARES to model the impact on agriculture.

I want to move on to biomass. The government has decided to prohibit biomass as a potential alternative energy source under this package of legislation. Senator Xenophon has talked of compensation to the coal sector and the impact of this legislation on the coal sector, which is a valid point for him to raise. But in the context of actually doing something about mitigating carbon emissions, I really find it difficult to reconcile that the government has decided to prohibit the use of biomass, which has the potential to reduce CO2 emissions in comparison to coal by the order of 96 per cent. Carbon dioxide emissions per kilowatt hour of electricity produced from coal, at best practice, are about 955 grams per kilowatt hour. At current best practice from energy crops, biomass is 17 to 27 grams per kilowatt hour, so we are talking about a 97 per cent reduction in energy. The figures I have indicate that 3,000 gigawatt hours of energy could be generated from the use of biomass in Australia without harvesting an additional tree. So you are talking about almost three million tonnes of CO2 emissions that could be reduced by utilising biomass.

I would like the parliamentary secretary to give me some advice as to the rationale behind the government's decision to exclude biomass, given that the science of forest management is really quite clear that a managed forest will provide better carbon sequestration over the longer term than one that is just left to its own devices. In fact, some science was released just this week—Melsheimer et al in the Journal of Forestry in the United States—says:

Sustainably managed forests can provide greater carbon mitigation benefits than unmanaged forests, while delivering a wide range of environmental and social benefits including timber and biomass resources, jobs and economic opportunities, clean water, wildlife habitat, and recreation.

There is a lot of global science that matches that. Perhaps you could give me some advice as to why the government has decided to omit a resource which can provide significant mitigation of CO2 emissions, which is what the government's stated aim is, particularly in contravention of the science.