Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm totally opposed to the Nature Repair Market Bill 2023 because I'm against these artificial, corrupt, government-imposed markets which do nothing to help the real world but end up making a whole lot of people money. In effect, what we have in front of us here is a modern form of indulgence. We had these old indulgences in the old days, where if you sinned and you did the wrong thing, you could go the Pope or the Catholic Church and pay some money and you'd be absolved and could go to heaven. Now, we have a new form of indulgence where you commit some sin against the Green gods and you pay a price—an offset, it's called—and I suppose you go to wherever the Greens go when they pass from this world. You still get to heaven. That's what this is all about and that's what these bills do. It says that you can destroy the environment a little bit—that's okay, as long as you do something over here.

What inevitably happens is these markets tend to be totally corrupt. They don't work, and I'll go through some examples of that. They don't even generate anything for the real world. At least, as much as the Catholic Church has sinned over the years, at least the old form of indulgence has got us St Peter's. We got Saint Peter's Basilica out of it, and that's pretty impressive. I was lucky enough to go this year, and it's pretty impressive. There was at least some corresponding benefit of the corruption that involved the medieval form of indulgences. We'll get nothing from these bills. This will do nothing for the environment. It just sets a whole new level of bureaucracy, which is what this town loves. That's why the Labor Party are for it and that's why all the trade unions are for it. They love it—more jobs, more bureaucrats assessing artificial things that will never generate any real-world improvements.

What happens with the situations is a bunch of big companies decide that they want to burnish their green credentials—you've probably seen it yourselves if you've ever flown recently. You will see those little boxes that say you can tick here, pay a little extra money and you can be green. You can offset the evil thing you are doing by flying from one place to another by paying a little bit extra on these green offsets. That's what these bills try to encourage and grow. What do these offsets do? There was a recent big international study of these offsets, used around the world by companies like Shell and even Gucci—all of these companies that like to tell us all how moral and ethical they really are. This study found that 94 per cent of these carbon offsets—run by this company called Verra, and all this company does is environment offsets—did nothing. They did nothing for the environment. They didn't change any deforestation at all but they were still sold for money. You still paid for them when you ticked the boxes or decided to get green power or whatever you decided to do it. Fair enough, if you want to do that and spend money on that, that's fine. But it's not fine when that money you are spending does not go towards an actual benefit. That happened in 94 per cent of these cases. In fact, one of these offset programs is in the Brazilian Amazon, and an auditor who worked in a lot of projects in the Amazon was quoted in the study, saying:

I have worked as an auditor on these projects in the Brazilian Amazon and when I started this analysis, I wanted to know if we could trust their predictions about deforestation. The evidence from the analysis—not just the synthetic controls—suggests we cannot. I want this system to work to protect rainforests. For that to happen, we need to acknowledge the scale of problems with the current system.

That is what is happening right now, and these bills do nothing to improve the auditing of practices that occur in this processes. In fact, I think these types of systems are fundamentally broken. You're never going to create an artificial environment that will work, because bureaucrats will never get this right. They will never do this right. There will always be this level of corruption. This is not the way things should go down.

The other aspect here that gets forgotten is that when these offsets do anything, if they do, it's not usually to protect the environment; it is to shut down economic production. That's what happens. We'll say we're going to protect this mulga country—this is a real example happening right now—in South-West Queensland. We'll say: 'Just take all the cattle off the property, and that will become a carbon offset, because cattle are terrible and woeful and do bad things. You take all the cattle off, and we'll designate that area now, without cattle, as being environmentally pure.' You can generate an offset and sell that through this carbon market, sometimes the biodiversity market, et cetera. That happens right now without these bills. It's happening.

I heard the previous speaker, Senator Ayres, saying it's great for farmers. Okay; the guy who sells it, the guy who owns the land, yes, gets some money. He gets paid some money for that. Good luck to him. Nothing much happens except that the cattle leave. Weeds grow, pests grow. No-one manages the property anymore. It's worse for the local environment. And the unspoken victims of that are economic—the small businesses, the people and the workers who live in that area. If there are no cattle anymore in that area in South-West Queensland, there are no fencing contractors, there are no mustering teams to muster the cattle and there's no longer any need for helicopter pilots to help muster. Truck drivers have less business. Fewer people are coming out to motels. A whole country town is then affected by this.

I spoke to the Cunnamulla mayor just a few months ago about this. There are now long roads in her council area where all cattle have been completely removed. In one part, eight of 13 cattle properties down one road have no cattle anymore because big rich investors from these big companies have come in and bought out all the cattle. They've bought out the economic base of these country towns and communities. As I say, it does nothing for the environment. You just get weeds and pests growing. It's great for all the wild dogs and pigs. They have a great old time because no-one is there managing the property anymore, but nothing is done for the real environment except real people are hurt.

There's another example, not a farming example. Some other people have come to me in recent years about a situation here, around the ACT. There's a large suburban community near the ACT called Jerrabomberra. It is growing rapidly, and there's a need for a new road out to this new suburb because the current roads are getting very congested. That road was set and designed to go through a certain area, a rural area. It wasn't going to impact anyone's homes or anything like that. But then, it turned out, the New South Wales government discovered that part of the road reserve that they had identified went through an area that had been offset against someone else's project. It was a mining or manufacturing project or something. Some other project had bought this area of land and said 'Nothing can ever happen on this land anymore,' for however many years—these bills say 25 to 100 years or something like that. So they couldn't build the road through this offset area. I've asked questions here at estimates, and apparently once something is offset like that it's done. It's set in stone. You can't offset the offset, and you're stuck. They've had to redesign where this road is going out to Jerrabomberra, and guess what? They've put the road through people's homes.

Now we have a situation with these stupid offsets where you're protecting some scrub outside of the ACT and saying it's wonderful for the environment. You can't cut down those trees. You could have cut down all the trees leading up to that offset area and the ones beyond that; that's fine. This little area, this little pocket, is inviolable now and can't be touched. So we'll just move the road and we'll knock out people's homes. We're going to displace human beings, who are living here, who have built their lives, some of whom would have built their forever homes here. Bang—don't worry about you; we're not going to worry about you anymore. This is ridiculous. These offset regimes cost people in real terms, and they do nothing to protect the environment.

I thought Senator Pocock made a very good point before, too, that if we want to protect the environment, why isn't the government paying for it, if it's a social good? I think we should have government funded environmental protection projects and biodiversity projects. We should do these things. The former coalition government established the Green Army, which did great, practical things at a local level to improve the environment—not these grand schemes but getting down into the environment, removing weeds, getting rid of pests and cleaning up rivers and bank channels to help your local environment. Those things are really important.

But the reason we've got this type of scheme coming before us is that the government is broke; they've got no money, and they want the rest of us to pay for it. That's what's happening here. This is a scheme that's being set up so companies can put more and more surcharges on your airfares and at your shops, to say that they're green without doing anything and cost you more money. That's what's going to happen here. It happens all the time.

You can see it at the shops right now; it's a little bit different from this, but it's scratching the same itch. Has anyone noticed how, when you go into Coles and Woolworths now, you pay 25c for these ridiculous paper bags? They say they're good for the environment. My mum was telling me the other day that when they introduced plastic bags a generation ago they made a big song and dance about how that was protecting the environment, because they were getting rid of paper bags, which meant chopping down the trees. Now they're making the same claims about these paper bags, which break and don't last. Do you know what it is? It's a money-making scheme, because they're 25c, they break every bloody time, and you've got to get another one when you go back. Coles and Woolworths are just making more money from this—saying that they're green and they're environmental. This is just a way of making you pay more, and they're hoping you'll feel good about it because it's green and environmental. That's what this is about.

We hear constantly from this government that their No. 1 priority is the cost of living. We hear that from the Prime Minister, and we've heard it from them this week in question time. Their No. 1 priority is the cost of living. Where are the bills this week that deal with the cost of living? Has anyone noticed any piece of legislation coming forward to this chamber this week that's actually going to lower the cost of living for Australians? I haven't. I haven't seen a single one. They say it's the No. 1 priority, but all we get are more and more bills that add costs onto people, that add red tape, that add regulation and that increase people's costs of basic life here, and that's what this bill will do. It's setting up a regime which will either force, make or pressure companies to buy these indulgences, these environmental offsets that will cost them money. And then they have to pass on those costs to all of you, in your shopping bills, in your power bills, in your mortgages—because the banks are big in this, too; the banks love all this stuff—in your interest rates. All these things will go up because of this legislation.

So why isn't a government that says they're in favour of doing something about the cost of living actually doing something to help? Why aren't they doing something to help our nation's farmers increase their productivity? They could still protect the environment but also increase food production. Why have they got a bill before us that shuts down agricultural production across our country, which reduces and makes it harder for farmers to produce goods and help to bring down the costs of food in your shops? We saw during the last week we were here the government forcing through legislation to rip water out of the Murray-Darling Basin, our nation's food bowl. There's now going to be much less water used in the Murray-Darling, because this government is obsessed. They did another deal with the Greens last week to take water off farmers. And if you have less water you grow less food, and that's going to increase the costs of food production—another bill that increased the cost of living for Australians. It's a constant theme here, from a government that seems committed to not doing anything without the support of the radical Greens political party, which has no interest in bringing down costs for consumers but simply wants to end intensive agriculture in this country, de-industrialise our nation and make us weaker and poorer because of that.

That's what this agenda is all about. We'll hear from other senators about how David Littleproud supported this. Well, I don't support it. Deal with the arguments. You're constantly wanting to resort to personal attacks and play politics with these sorts of things. Drop the politics. Tell us how this will actually help bring people's cost of living down, because that's what you say is your No. 1 priority. So, tell us, in very simple terms, how this bill is going to help Australians. That should be what we're here for. That should be why we decide to spend time away from our families and come to this place. How is this bill actually going to help the lives of real Australians? It's not. This is a bill that's all for big business. It's a bill for the big businesses of the world who want to assuage their moral guilt for other things and ways they might conduct themselves by buying these indulgences. That's what this bill is about. It's to help big business.

It's certainly not to help small businesses. Small businesses aren't there buying these environmental offsets. They don't care about these things. They're too busy running their own businesses, trying to keep their payroll in check, trying to deal with the red tape in the ATO and all the other things that oppress their lives. They don't care about this stuff. It's not for small businesses. It's certainly not for families who are struggling to pay their kids' school fees, to keep them in sports at ever-increasing costs, and right now to buy their kids' Christmas gifts. It's not for them. This bill is not about them. It's for a small group of people, elites in among our society, who talk a lot to the Labor Party. Labor are very close to big business now and the big banks. We've seen it in the last few months. Alan Joyce would have loved this bill. Qantas is one of the biggest buyers and consumers of these green offsets; they would love this. And the Labor Party these days seem constantly to be talking just to them. Everything that comes to this place seems to be driven by and the result of what big business needs and wants, not what small business needs and not what families need. It's certainly not to help Australians who are being crushed by the homegrown inflation and cost-of-living crisis created by this government's wanton spending and lack of ability to get anything under control.

I won't be supporting this bill, and I would hope that the Greens and others stay consistent to their principles against this. I actually share a lot of the Greens' criticisms of these systems. They are artificial, they are corrupt, they are for big business and they shouldn't be supported. Let's hope that common sense prevails and we don't end up with some dirty deals done cheaply here this evening that sell out the Australian people in favour of big business. Let's act to get the cost of living down for Australians, not make things harder for them.