Jonathon Duniam (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Environment, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

I'll also make a contribution to the debate on these two proposed disallowances. At the outset I'll say that the opposition will be opposing both of the proposals put forward here. I appreciate the remarks made by the minister around the scheme and the purpose behind it. I'll start with the forestry plantation methodology. As someone who had a hand in going to the Clean Energy Regulator and seeking a review of what was in place in the early parts of 2021, I'll give some historical context about that. As has been well canvassed in Senate estimates, in this place and in the public domain, there is great difficulty in growing our forest estate to meet the demand that we actually talked about in question time today. This was one of those policy levers that the then government, and obviously the current government, thought was a good lever to have in place to be able to incentivise investment in plantation forestry to get us on a pathway to meet demand.

I appreciate, as Senator McAllister did, the points that have been made by Senator Pocock and the reason for him moving this disallowance motion, and I accept the arguments he's put forward. The thing we have to do here is balance up our responsibilities. We import so much timber into this country—a huge amount of it—much of it from places that don't do forestry well and, in fact, rip it out of the ground and don't care one iota for their environment. I know there will be some people in this chamber who don't agree with the point I'm about to make, which is that we do it to world's best standard, and, on the way through, we create jobs in many regional communities, where they're most needed. This methodology, as it was drafted in 2021, was about trying to grow that sector, create more jobs, create more resource, suck in more carbon, lock it up forever in beautiful timber products and incentivise that investment and use of this material—perhaps displacing concrete, steel and other, more carbon-intensive materials as well. That was the purpose behind it.

As I say, I understand the points that are being made, but, for the purposes of seeking to grow this industry and noting that many of the key stakeholders in that sector said this is one way we will be able to unlock that investment, it is one of the key hurdles. We have farmers we normally contract with who are saying, upon harvest, they now want to turn that land into pasture because there's more money and easier returns in growing certain types of crops or heading into dairy, for example, in certain parts of Tasmania. Obviously it takes a while to see the fruit borne from this scheme, but I remain confident that it will do what we intended it would. For that reason, we won't be supporting that disallowance.

On the disallowance motion moved by Senator Waters, I don't agree with the assessment that under this new safeguard mechanism proposal put forward by the government there'll be this flurry of seeking to grab ACCUs to cover over the emissions, because there won't be enough ACCUs. There just will not be enough. All the modelling is suggesting there'll be a massive shortfall, even with schemes like this in place. So, in the end, they'll just end up paying this massive tax that's going to be imposed instead. The disallowance is a bad one in this regard, and we won't be supporting it, but I appreciate the work that has been put in. That is the opposition's position.