Stephen Parry (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I present the 16th report for 2007 of the Selection of Bills Committee and I seek leave to have the report incorporated in Hansard.

Leave granted.

The report read as follows—

1.

The committee met in private session on Wednesday, 19 September 2007 at 4.18 pm.

2.

The committee resolved to recommend—That the provisions of the Crimes Legislation Amendment (Child Sex Tourism Offences and Related Measures) Bill 2007 be referred immediately to the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee for inquiry and report by 10 October 2007 (see appendix 1 for statement of reasons for referral).

3.

The committee resolved to recommend—That the following bills not be referred to committees:

• Communications Legislation Amendment (Miscellaneous Measures) Bill 2007
• Financial Sector Legislation Amendment (Review of Prudential Decisions) Bill 2007
• Health Legislation Amendment Bill 2007
• Lands Acquisition Legislation Amendment Bill 2007
• National Health Security Bill 2007
• Parliamentary (Judicial Misbehaviour or Incapacity) Commission Bill 2007
• Privacy (Data Security Breach Notification) Amendment Bill 2007
• Stolen Generation Compensation Bill 2007
• Workplace Relations (Guaranteeing Paid Maternity Leave) Amendment Bill 2007.

The committee recommends accordingly.

4.

The committee considered a proposal to refer the Tax Laws Amendment (2007 Measures No. 6) Bill 2007 to the Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport Committee, but was unable to reach agreement on whether the bill should be referred.

Stephen Parry

Chair

20 September 2007-09-20

Appendix 1

SELECTION OF BILLS COMMITTEE

Proposal to refer a bill to a committee

Name of bill(s):

Crimes Legislation Amendment (Child Sex Tourism and Related Measures) Bill 2007

Reasons for referral/principal issues for consideration

To examine the provisions of the bill relating to the creation of various offences, particularly preparatory offences contained in proposed section 272.17, including wether the proposed offences contain the necessary degree of certainty required for penal provisions, and whether the new offences are justified on the basis of a deficiency in existing laws.

Possible submissions or evidence from:

Law Council of Australia

Gilbert & Tobin Centre for Public Law

Australian Federal Police

HREOC

International Commission of Jurors

Australian privacy Foundation

Committee to which bill is to be referred:

Legal and Constitutional Committee

Possible hearing date(s):

Possible reporting date:

3 December 2007

Andrew Bartlett

Whip/Selection of Bills Committee member

Senator Andrew Bartlett, Australian Democrats Whip

Report—by leave—adopted.

I move:

That the report be adopted.

Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am appalled that the Selection of Bills Committee has decided not to refer the Tax Laws Amendment (2007 Measures No. 6) Bill 2007 to the Senate Standing Committee on Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport for appropriate consideration. I find it disgraceful that any government should be so keen to rush this through the parliament without appropriate scrutiny. I hope never to hear a Liberal-National Party senator stand up in this campaign and say they are concerned about water or food security in Australia. This tax amendment provides for the planting of so-called carbon sinks, but there is no definition of a carbon sink. It gives full tax deductibility for any trees that are planted in the next four years and then a different ratio after that. The important thing is that there is no requirement for the trees to stay in the ground for any length of time. This applies for 14 years—which, by coincidence, is the rotation rate for plantations. There is no requirement that the trees planted be biodiverse. There is no analysis of the hydrological ramifications of this legislation.

Already, rural Australia is up in arms because of the managed investment schemes and the distortion those are causing in rural Australia. Now, farmers facing drought are going to have the cement companies, the aluminium companies and the coal industry coming in and making huge investments (a) in water rights and (b) in land. They will be taking agricultural land out of food production and putting in what are effectively plantations to get tax benefits. It does not say these trees cannot be cut down at any particular time. That is the critical issue. It does not even say they have to meet the Kyoto rules. This is going against even the Liberal Party philosophy, I would have thought, because it is potentially distorting the carbon market. It is saying, ‘We’ll put a cap on but we will advantage the forest industry and these large emitters in the context of setting up a national emissions market.’ I do not know whether the government understands what it is doing with this legislation, but there will be a riot in rural Australia when they find out that the cashed-up large emitters—that is, the cement companies, the aluminium companies, the energy corporations—can effectively use their profits to take land out of agricultural production and take water out of agricultural production. Of course, trees need water just as much as crops do. The refusal of the government to allow this to be referred for proper analysis by those who are already concerned about what is going on because of the managed investment schemes is appalling. Everybody knows that, if you really were serious about sequestering carbon in forests, you would stop the logging of native forests and stop the clearing of land across Australia. That is how you would most effectively sequester carbon. Everybody knows that. Instead, we have a government driving deforestation in the Tiwi Islands. It is deforestation when you convert tropical savannah to monocultures.

Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Minister for Fisheries, Forestry and Conservation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

No, it’s not.

Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That is deforestation by anybody’s definition. It is even not allowed under the government’s own policies, but now I hear the minister defending it. You have logging going on in primary forests in Tasmania, Victoria and south-east New South Wales. You are knocking down primary forests and now giving tax deductions to the big emitters to drive farmers off their land and take more water out of the system.

This exposes the government’s failure to realise that you need a whole-of-government approach to climate change. You cannot intervene to distort the carbon market, to pork-barrel the forest industry and the big emitters at the expense of farmers. That is what the government has done. The hubris here of saying, ‘We’re going to drive this through this parliament,’ when in 12 months time they will say, ‘We had no idea that that would be the effect of this legislation.’ Let them not say that. Let them not get up in an election campaign and say that they are worried about the drought or the impact on farmers of lack of water in rural Australia, because this tax deduction will drive that process even more.

This is an appalling piece of legislation, which at the very least needs to go to a committee for appropriate scrutiny so the Bureau of Rural Sciences can at least point out to the government the error of its ways in terms of sequestration and emission trading. (Time expired)

Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I will say things now that I have said many times before at precisely this stage on a Thursday morning because they do need to be put on the record every single time. I flag that I will move an amendment to address the issue raised by Senator Milne. Just to make clear to the chamber, the report before us is from the Selection of Bills Committee. The committee considered a proposal—obviously, from the Greens—to refer the Tax Laws Amendment (2007 Measures No. 6) Bill 2007 to the Senate Standing Committee on Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport but was unable to reach agreement on whether the bill should be referred, which is a nice way of saying that all of us wanted to refer the bill to the committee and the government did not want to refer the bill to the committee so it did not refer the bill to the committee. So I will move an amendment seeking to bring about that end, purely to have it formally on the record by way of a vote.

I do not know whether all that Senator Milne has just said about what is in the bill is what is in the bill. I heard a few interjections from Senator Watson, who I do know understands tax issues pretty well. At least some of the things she was saying he was disputing, so I do not know. That is why you have Senate committee inquiries—to get all the views that different people have about what the bill will do, to hear from experts who actually know, to make sure there are no unintended consequences, at least as far as can be foreseen, and to see whether it is going to achieve what it said it is going to achieve. Then the committee would recommend that the bill be passed or amended to make sure it will do what it says it will do. Now, that is just good practice, good public policy and good public administration, regardless of your policy views about whether we should be having tax incentives for this type of thing or not.

It is a serious problem that we are rushing through a piece of legislation when obviously there are major concerns being raised by some about the potential impacts of it. Tax Laws Amendment (2007 Measures No. 6) Bill 2007 sounds benign—the name does not tell you very much—but anything dealing with tax deductibility relating to carbon sinks and the like will open up an area where we do need to get it as right as possible. The last thing I want to see is tax deductibility relating to carbon sinks that ends up being just a big taxpayer-funded rort for a bunch of people and does not provide any particularly positive greenhouse benefits. Then people will point to it and say: ‘We tried that and it didn’t work, so we won’t bother doing that anymore. We won’t bother trying incentives anymore.’ Let alone the fact that, if we are going to be giving tax incentives for this sort of thing, it will have a cost attached to it, and is that the best use of that money to produce a carbon gain? So there are all those sorts of questions.

It also raises once again the fundamental issue of fixed terms. All of us around here today are asking each other, ‘Are we going to be coming back in three weeks?’ There are a whole bunch of people, me included, who think there is no way in the world we will be coming back in three weeks and there are other people saying that we probably will. Again, it is just bad public policy and bad practice for a law-making body to be rushing something through just because this might be the last chance. We do not even know. We could be unnecessarily rushing this thing through and saying that we cannot refer it to a committee because we might not get the chance to pass it in three weeks time, so we have to put it through now even though it may be seriously flawed. A lot of people will make investment decisions on the basis of what is there so that, by the time you try to fix up the flaws, it is already built into the system and it is potentially too late.

If we had a fixed term we would know whether we are coming back in three weeks time and would be able to do our job properly. The ridiculous scenario is that we may rush this thing through now because we think it is the last possible chance and then find out we are back here in three weeks time and we could have had a good look at it, or at least some look at it, and made sure that it works properly. We do not know because of that simple thing. I repeat the Democrats’ longstanding plea for fixed terms for good public policy. I do not have a view on this bill because I have not had a chance to look at it. That is what Senate committees are for. Unless there is a good argument against it, we should be accepting what used to be the longstanding precedent: if somebody wants to look at a piece of legislation to check it out, we accept that and refer it. So I move:

At the end of the motion, add “and in respect of the Tax Laws Amendment (2007 Measures No. 6) Bill 2007, the bill be referred to the Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport Committee for inquiry and report by 10 October 2007”.

Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Minister for Fisheries, Forestry and Conservation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We have heard from Senator Bartlett, who was honest enough to tell us that basically his speech was similar to a speech that he has given on numerous other occasions. I thank him for that. So, without traversing the ground any further, I simply refer people to the Hansard where I have responded to him previously.

Senator Milne’s contribution was once again, if I might say, a bizarre and confused ramble. But it did show how antiforestry and how antitrees the Australian Greens are. It was quite a bizarre contribution. They go around the world telling us all that carbon and greenhouse gases are the most important issues confronting the world and that we have to deal with them and then they say in the next breath, ‘And the Howard government is doing nothing about it.’

Here we are introducing legislation and trying to provide carbon sinks, and what is the Greens’ first stunt? They complain about planting trees and they want to delay the passage of the legislation. Assisting the world’s atmosphere by providing carbon sinks is either important or it is not. But here we go, yet again, with a classic case of the Australian Greens trying to have it both ways. Their mantra against forestry, against trees and against tree plantations is such that all you have to do is mention them and they start salivating like Pavlov’s dog and know they have to oppose it irrespective of how good it might be for the environment.

We have been told a number of things which are just false. The emissions task force will be dealing with some of the further details, but what we want to do is provide certainty to people who want to plant trees for carbon sinks. If we believe that greenhouse gases are a real problem then we should be encouraging this type of activity—but not according to the Greens.

We have heard the bizarre commentary about deforestation on the Tiwi Islands. I have had the privilege of being to the Tiwi Islands, and the Aboriginal land council there actually support what is going on. The income that is being generated is now allowing them to develop their own private school. Do you know why they are using the income generated for their own private school? It is because the leaders of that community—people who are in their 60s and 70s—are concerned that the education they got as young people is not of the same high standard as what their sons and grandsons have achieved. They have said the education system is letting them down, and they see a real benefit for future generations in this.

Monocultures were mentioned as well. There is condemnation of changing a monoculture pasture to a monoculture tree plantation. But what is the environmental impact of that? It is virtually nil. But once again the bad thing is that there are trees! We cannot have trees being planted! It is a very bizarre position that the Greens continually put.

What the Greens also deliberately avoided in their discussion were other aspects of this bill which deal with grants for tobacco growers. We as a government have taken a stance in relation to tobacco growing. There is a particular exemption being provided to enable these people to get grants to get out of tobacco growing. I would have hoped that we would all support that move, especially the Australian Greens. These people are now putting in their tax returns for the previous financial year, and it is important that they be provided with certainty as well. That is a part of the bill that the Greens would also seek to delay, which would mean that these people could not put their tax returns in.

The other aspects of the bill are not canvassed at all by the Greens. The only thing they oppose is trees. Like the Pavlovian dog that salivates whenever the bell rings, all you have to do is mention trees, plantation and forestry and the Greens go berserk and think they have to oppose it—even if it is good for the environment, as it is on this occasion. (Time expired)

John Watson (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to respond briefly to certain remarks made by Senator Milne. Firstly, there is an assumption that carbon sink forests would have some benefit for MISs. I myself have sought an assurance that there would be no double benefit for an activity outside the carbon sinks legislation—namely, MISs—which specifically excludes such benefits. I think it is important that this myth that was alleged by Senator Milne does not get wider currency, and I rise today to put at rest that particular issue.

If Senator Milne has a particular problem in relation to prime agricultural lands, maybe the simplest approach would be for her to put up a simple amendment. Amendments are not uncommon to the Greens. I suggest that this would be a far more beneficial, direct and appropriate response to address Senator Milne’s concerns in relation to the issue of further trees being placed on prime agricultural lands.

Question put:

That the amendment (Senator Bartlett’s) be agreed to.