I rise to support the Carbon Credits and Other legislation Amendment (Integrity and Transparency) Bill 2026, and I accept from the outset that the title of this bill is not exactly going to pack out the pub on a Friday night. If you walked into your local and said, 'Who wants to chat about methodology determination, sequestration offset projects and the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Scheme?' I suspect you would suddenly find how quickly Australians can finish a drink. But underneath all the acronyms, all the technical language and all the legislative machinery, this bill is about something very simple: if we are going to put a value on cutting carbon pollution, we have to be confident that the reduction is real. That is what integrity means. We need to know what has been done, we need to know who has done it and we need to know how it has been measured. If someone receives a carbon credit for reducing emissions then that credit needs to actually represent a reduction in emissions. It sounds obvious. But, as anyone who's spent any time around regulation knows, sometimes parliament has to pass quite a lot of pages to achieve something that can genuinely be explained in one sentence.

So let us start at the beginning. The Australian carbon credit unit, or the ACCU, generally represents one tonne of carbon dioxide equivalent that has been avoided or removed from the atmosphere. Think of it as a little like a certificate. A farmer might undertake a project that stores more carbon in the landscape. Another project might reduce methane. A landholder might regenerate vegetation. Different projects work in different ways. But if they satisfy an approved method that can demonstrate genuine abatement, they can earn carbon credits. Those credits have value. They can provide income for farmers, First Nations communities, landholders, businesses and other organisations undertaking emissions reduction projects. They can also be used by large industrial facilities under the safeguard mechanism while those facilities reduce their own emissions over time.

The scheme does two jobs. It creates an incentive to undertake emissions reduction projects. It gives hard-to-abate industries some flexibility while new technology is being developed or installed. That is why the quality of the credit matters so much, because a carbon credit is ultimately a claim. It says that one tonne of emissions has been avoided or removed. If that claim is reliable, the credit has value. If that claim cannot be trusted then we have a problem. You do not need a degree in climate science to understand that.

I was an electrician before I came here. In the electrical industry, if someone signs a certificate saying that work complies with the rules, people rely on it. The customer relies on it, the network relies on it, other trades rely on it and, most importantly, the next electrician who opens a switchboard relies on it. You cannot have a system where everybody just says, 'Near enough; probably complies.' That is frowned upon in electrical work—usually for fairly obvious reasons. The same principle applies here.

If Australia is going to have a carbon crediting scheme, the units issued under that scheme have to be credible, and that is what this bill strengthens. The ACCU scheme has now been operating for more than a decade. It has been examined through the independent Chubb review and through several reviews by the Climate Change Authority. Those reviews found a scheme with sound foundations, but they also identified areas where governance, transparency and administration could be strengthened.

The government listened. This bill makes those improvements, and one of the most important of them involves First Nations consent. Under these reforms, registered native title claimants will be recognised as eligible interest holders. And for relevant projects on native title or claimed native title land, consent will be required at the beginning of the process, rather than leaving people to discover that a project involving their land has already progressed substantially.

There will be a two-stage process: consent to the project being registered, then consent relating to how the project will actually be carried out. This is a pretty straightforward proposition. If somebody intends to establish a carbon project on land over which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people hold or claim native title rights and interests, those people should have a meaningful say before the project gets under way—not afterwards, not after the contracts have been signed, not after commercial expectations have been created but beforehand.

The bill also improves the body responsible for testing the integrity of the carbon crediting method. The Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee will become the Carbon Abatement Integrity Committee. I admit that, once again, Canberra has demonstrated a unique ability to make a rebrand of a committee name sound like an episode of Utopia! But the change behind the name is important. The committee will have stronger governance arrangements, broader expertise, stronger transparency requirements and expanded functions. It will have an important independent role in assessing whether methods used to generate carbon credits meet Australia's integrity standards, because method matters.

If I claim to reduce 10 tonnes of emissions, the obvious questions are: How did you work that out? What assumptions did you use? What did you measure? What would have happened without this project? How long will carbon remain stored? These are not side questions. They are the entire basis for determining whether a credit is genuine. And sometimes knowledge changes. Evidence changes. A method that appeared sound at one point may later develop a serious integrity problem. At present, there can be circumstances where an old method continues to be used by existing projects even after significant concerns emerge.

This bill introduces what is called a method transmission declaration—again, a magnificent name. The idea is simple: if a method develops such a serious integrity problem that continuing to issue credits under it could threaten confidence in the entire scheme, there needs to be a circuit breaker. Returning to the electrical example, if we discovered tomorrow that a particular testing method could not reliably tell us whether an installation was safe, nobody would seriously suggest, 'Well, we've been using it for a few years, so we might as well just keep issuing the certificates.' You fix the method, and that is what this mechanism allows.

Importantly, this is not an arbitrary power. It is designed for exceptional circumstances. There are legislated thresholds. There must be independent advice. There must be public consultation. The minister must consider the impact on existing projects. If the relevant advice and reasons must be published, the explanatory material describes significant safeguards around this power, including advice from the independent committee and public consultation before it can be used, and that balance is important. We need to protect investors from arbitrary rule changes, but investor confidence also depends on the market itself being credible. There is not much comfort in saying your credits were issued under stable rules if nobody trusts the credits. Integrity is not the enemy of investment. Integrity is what makes long-term investment possible.

The bill separates two jobs that should sensibly be separated. At present, the Clean Energy Regulator has responsibilities connected with both regulating the scheme and government purchasing of ACCUs. This bill transfers government purchasing responsibility to the secretary of the department—in other words, we separate the buyer from the regulator. That is just sensible governance. You do not generally want the umpire running the TAB at half-time.

The bill also changes the purchasing principle from simply seeking least-cost abatement to seeking value for money, and that distinction matters. Cheapest is not always best value. Every household understands that, every small business understands that, and every government procurement officer certainly understands that—usually through a document approximately the size of what we formerly knew as a telephone directory. But value for money allows government to consider not only the price of carbon abatement but potentially other benefits associated with a project, and that might include benefits for biodiversity. It might include regional economic benefits. It might include benefits for First Nations communities. The carbon reduction still has to stack up, but government does not have to pretend that the price is the only thing that exists.

The bill also strengthens compliance. The fit-and-proper person test will extend more broadly, including to agents acting for project proponents. The regulator will have improved enforcement tools. There will be infringement notices for lower level breaches, and there will be stronger mechanisms for requiring ACCUs to be relinquished where too many credits have been issued. Again, strip away the jargon and this is easy to understand. If someone was credited 10 tonnes of abatement but updated information establishes that only eight tonnes were actually achieved, we cannot just shrug and leave 10 credits circulating. Two need to come back. Carbon credits are not frequent flyer points, where an administrative error becomes a permanent bonus. If the abatement did not happen, the credit should not remain in the system. At the same time, the bill allows proponents to voluntarily correct genuine mistakes. That is good regulation. There must be consequences for wrongdoing, but a well-designed scheme should also make it easy for people acting honestly to identify an error, correct it and move on.

The bill also encourages research and development. That is particularly important because climate technology is moving quickly. We want people experimenting with better ways to reduce emissions. We do not want the rules inadvertently punishing them for doing research necessary to develop a new method, so this bill adjusts the so-called newness requirements to better accommodate legitimate research and development. It also creates more flexibility for projects to combine different kinds of emissions reduction activities. For example, a future project could potentially combine storing carbon through regenerating native forests with reducing methane emissions from livestock. That would mean greater flexibility for landholders and more room for innovation.

Then we come to the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Scheme, the NGER. This is Australia's national framework for reporting information about greenhouse gas emissions, energy production and energy use. This bill provides for greater transparency by allowing regulations to require publication of more information submitted through that scheme. That matters because good climate policy depends on good information. You cannot manage what you cannot properly measure. If significant emissions data can appropriately be made public, there is a strong argument that greater transparency improves accountability and confidence. This bill also tidies up some compliance and administrative gaps.

Finally, we come to the new vehicle efficiency standard. Now, I know merely mentioning vehicle efficiency in this chamber can occasionally cause some people to behave as though Canberra has arrived at their driveway at midnight to confiscate their ute, so it is still worth being very clear about what this bill does. It does not change the headline emissions limits. It does not change which vehicles are covered. It adjusts some dates. That is it. There is a timing alignment in the legislation affecting when vehicle suppliers calculate and reconcile their obligations. Industry asked for certainty. Industry was consulted. The dates have been fixed so the scheme operates as originally intended. The proposed changes move several reconciliation and unit expiry milestones without altering the underlying standards.

Not every measure on climate legislation needs to become a culture war. Sometimes a date is simply a date. This whole package has been extensively consulted on. The exposure draft was released in April. The department received 73 individual submissions and consulted project proponents, carbon service providers, First Nations organisations, governments, industry bodies, NGOs, investors and academics. The changes were made as a result, and that is exactly how legislation should develop. Consult, listen, identify practical problems, amend the proposal, bring the improved version to parliament.

There will always be people who approach carbon credits from opposite ideological positions. There are some who hear the words 'carbon market' and reject the word 'carbon'. There will be others who hear the words 'carbon market' and object to the word 'market'. The rest of us have to deal with the system that actually exists, and we have to make sure it works. If carbon credits are going to be issued, they should represent genuine emissions reduction. If companies are going to rely on them, they should be able to trust them. If farmers and landholders are going to invest in projects, they deserve stable and credible rules. If projects affect native title rights and interests, First Nations people should be involved properly and early. If public data can be reasonably made more transparent, it should be. If a rule is discovered to be defective, government must have a careful, transparent and reviewable way of fixing it. That is not radical climate policy; it is competent administration.

Australia's carbon market will only ever be as strong as the confidence people place in it. A credit must mean something. The methodology behind it must stand up. The regulator must have the tools to enforce the rules. The public should be able to see enough of the system to have confidence that it is doing what we claim it is doing. That is what integrity and transparency look like in practice. It might not make carbon accounting the hottest conversation at the local pub, but it does make Australia's carbon market stronger, fairer and more credible. For this reason, I commend the bill to the House.

I move:

That the following words be added after paragraph (3):

"(4) the Government must also repeal transitional capital gains tax discounts for foreign investors disposing of large renewable energy infrastructure assets".

I want to run through a couple of places. Rushy Lagoon has been taken out of production, supported by the Clean Energy Finance Corporation against the wishes of an Australian buyer, to create a carbon sink. That's thousands of head of cattle production that has been removed from the market. They used to produce food for the food stack. In a world where the population is racing through the roof, we are getting a greater and greater obligation to do our part, our very small part, in feeding those people. I want to give a name of another place, Barry Station. Thousands of heads of cattle have been taken out of production now because they're going to create another carbon sink. That's another lot of food that's gone out of the food stack. Cooplacurripa is another one where thousands of head of cattle have been taken out of production to create carbon units.

You can't feed people carbon units. People will starve if you try to feed them carbon units. Yet somehow we have moralised trumping our obligation to the global food stack by a vanity project of thinking that we will change the weather from Canberra. That is an absurdity. What we do here makes no difference whatsoever to the climate because of many things, including the lack of participation by the world—the majority of the economy.

We are creating hurt. We are bereft of our higher moral responsibility to be feeding people. When you take food out of the food stack, it's not the people you see that are ultimately hurt. It's those at the very, very bottom in countries you can't see—in Sudan, in central Africa, in Central America, in the Pacific islands. These are the people who go without. We have an ever-increasing number of people in the world now who have been stated by the United Nations as starving. It's growing.

What we had that could be fed from the aspects of the green revolution has now been dealt with. Our population—the global population—has gone through that. We have a greater obligation than carbon units, and that obligation is to feed people. Our capacity in this nation—I'm sure the member for Farrer will address this in a way soon—is such that even Australia is heading towards being a net food importer—not immediately but within decades on the trajectory we're on. What a disgrace. What are we going to do then? Unless we evolve into a higher form of termite, there is not much we can do than say, 'What is our part in feeding people?' Yet that is the perverse nature of this parliament. We've somehow moralised that our greater obligation is not present.

The previous honourable member said he wanted to see what has been done. I'll tell you what's been done in our nation. We've lost our plastics industry, our urea industry and our glass industry. Our aluminium industry is on its knees. Our steel industry is basically closing. Our concrete industry is on its knees or going. There are record insolvencies in small business. Pensioners are being pushed into poverty at a greater rate than ever before. There's more homelessness. We're taking farming out of farmers' production and reducing our obligation in the global food sector. That is what we're actually achieving. That is the vanity project that we're actually on. That's the damage we're actually doing.

We have to decide. This epiphany will come to us, because the other thing that's happening in the background is our economy is really in strife. We are now rolling bills that we had from COVID. There were about half a per cent. Now they're going to roll around five per cent. The Treasurer was speaking about it yesterday. One Nation started speaking about it two or three weeks ago. With that, our debt at the Australian Office of Financial Management as I speak is $1,010 billion—over $1 trillion. As these bills roll and it goes up to five per cent, our interest bill is going to exponentially grow. It is exponentially growing now. It'll go through our defence budget. It'll become one of the highest issues in our budget. We will be taxing people merely to pay interest—no other outcome. That also is a moral deficiency. It's an ethical deficiency in what we are doing.

We have got to get on top of that if we want to help pensioners in the future. We've got to get on top of that if we want to provide health services in the future. We've got to get on top of that if we want to provide a defence force in the future. You have to have a fundamental—in fact, dynamic—change in behaviour to start getting on top of your debt, and we are not. It is getting worse and worse and worse at quicker and quicker and quicker rates. If we are challenged in the future with another issue such as COVID, we do not have the headroom to be able to deal with it. It's just not there. You'll start being run not by the Treasurer but by the Department of the Treasury, which will just say: 'The money is not there, so forget it. Stop saying it. You don't have the cash. If you continue on, you will go broke.'

I remember being, basically, sacked as the shadow finance minister because I had the temerity to say that our debt would go, on the trajectory we were on, through half a trillion dollars. They lined up the Secretary of the Treasury, the Governor of the Reserve Bank and the Treasurer to say what an outrageous proposition that was. Well, ladies and gentlemen, it's gone through a trillion. So I was wrong—I under underestimated where it was off to. I'm going to give you another one. It's on its way to $2 trillion. It's on its way. I can say that right now because if you add up our actual federal debt and our state debt, we're at about $1.5 trillion already. If you add on private debt—we have one of the highest private debt loads in the world apart from Switzerland, I think—we're on our way to $3 trillion. We're on our way, stuck into the interest market, and we're getting further and further into trouble.

So what are we going to do? Dynamic change! We have to get out of the Capacity Investment Scheme first of all. We've got to knock this stuff out of the park. It's got to go. The Capacity Investment Scheme has got to go. You must get out of net zero. You must get out of the Paris Agreement. You must remove the safeguard mechanism, which is actually shutting down your coalmines and the industries such as the steel industry, which you run around saying you're going to try and keep open. You can't keep it open when you've got legislation there to shut it down. That's what it does. Go and talk to them. They'll say: 'That's what you want. We're gone; we're finished.'

You can't say you're going to support the aluminium industry when you've got legislation in place to get rid of the aluminium industry. You can't say you support the steel industry when you've got legislation in place to get rid of the steel industry. You can't say you support mining and blue collar workers when you've got legislation in place to get rid of blue collar workers. That's what you're doing. You've got to get rid of carbon credits. One Nation says quite clearly that we are getting rid of the climate change department and climate legislation. There you go. There's a dynamic change—a dynamic change that starts to address the fundamentals of where our economy is at.

The other day, they voted for a capital gains tax advantage for foreign intermittent power swindle factories. That's what they are. They are not renewable. There is nothing renewable about them. If foreign intermittent power precincts, swindle factories, are sold to other foreign intermittent power precincts, swindle factories—it went through—they get a 50 per cent capital gains tax exemption at exactly the time we're removing the 50 per cent capital gains tax exemption for Australians. How perverse is that? They snuck it in, in schedule 3.

This amendment is about bringing it out and making you vote on it. Do you support the swindle factories getting a capital gains tax advantage? You'll get the chance to vote on it, and then we can explain to the Australian people why swindle factories are more moral than selling your own investment house or more moral than selling shares in Australian companies and that you want to help out these swindle factories from China, Singapore and Europe more than you want to help out Australian people. You'll get to vote on it. That's what the amendment is.

This is really important, because if you support the capital gains tax preferential treatment for swindle factories, then you support VNI West. If you support this, then you support the New England renewable energy zones. REZs, swindle factories, intermittent power precincts—you support them. If you support capital gains tax advantage for the intermittent power sector, you support the transmission lines. You support everything—Central-West Orana, the whole lot.

We have got to fundamentally change this not just for the people in regional Australia but for the economy of Australia. If you have another alternative to turn the show around, then tell us what it is, because we've heard nothing. All we've seen is the trajectory, and the only thing that's consistent about the trajectory into debt is that you keep on underestimating it. The economy is being driven further and further into debt. There are record insolvencies in small business. It's incredible. It is not just a 'sort of' record but a massive record.

Who else are we hurting? Ultimately, there's another thing in this moral. We're taking out of production food. We are reducing our obligation to the world to feed people who are ultimately at the bottom of the food stack, who you never see are starving, but they are starving. You haven't changed the weather, but there are people starving because you're not producing enough food. That actually is happening. But you somehow think a moral quest, a moral vanity project to help overseas billionaires, domestic billionaires, and foreign companies, is more important than feeding people. They are the most amazing lobbyists who've got you to that position. It's amazing that they've managed to connive the actual moral obligation of this nation into something that will actually have efficacy in being able to basically prostitute that into a form as you've created it: this sort of money-go-round, swindle industry carpetbagging for the benefit of those who are the least in need. That is the actual position you've got yourself into.

The other people that we're seeing a lot of are homeless people. We've never seen them before; people who can't afford their power bill any more. As I drive to the airport now, I see something I never thought I'd see in Tamworth. There are people living in boxes or tarpaulins over them, people living under bridges and people living in cars—pensioners in cars in Australia. That's what happens when you drive the economy into the ground. That's what you actually do to people. It's actually there. Do you know why you see them in Tamworth? It's a little bit warmer than some of the other areas. They are people we have never seen before. It's also in Bundaberg—in country towns, under bridges.

We're doing this to Australians. And it doesn't matter what you do; if you want to support them, you've got to have an economy that pays to support them. They wouldn't be there if they had a job. They wouldn't be there if you hadn't destroyed their cost of living. There would be some, but we have an exponential growth in that. Out of this virtue of wanting to help billionaires and the swindle industry, we are creating homelessness. Yet we moralise that it's the right thing to do because we're going to change the clouds, folks. We're bringing back the frosts. We're going to make the great glaciers grow from Canberra. No you're not. Whatever's happening to the climate, I'm not denying it. But you're not going to change it. That's the issue. You're not changing it; you're just ripping people off and hurting people.

This amendment is part of that. I know the Labor Party won't support it because they brought the legislation in. But, my former colleagues in the coalition, you've got to make a stand. You've got to draw a line in the sand. You've got to be ready to fight. You've got to bring about that dynamic change, if you're going to change what's happening to Australia, or you've got to accept responsibility. People will remind you of it in five to 10 years time when they say, 'Do you know why the nation is there in the dirt? It's because you put it there. That's where you took it. That's what you did. Do you know why that person's under that bridge? It's because you put them there. Do you know why that person doesn't have enough to eat—and you can't even see them because you're overseas? It's because you decided that you wanted to create carbon units. You prioritised that. You were quite happy that you hurt that person. You moralised it. You were part of a government that did it. You were part of an opposition that never stood up against it. You've got to wear it.'

So I move this amendment. I think you know I've been on this issue and I'll continue on this issue. I do this on behalf of Clarke Creek, Robbins Island, the Orana REZ, VNI West, the New England REZ, all the money wasted on green energy—I'll have to try and find out more about that—the people doing the transmission lines and the solar precincts, all of that, because of this ludicrous position that somehow it's all morally justified because you've got to help out foreign billionaires, foreign companies, domestic billionaires and the total calamity which is the swindle industry.

Is there a seconder of the motion?

I second the motion. I'd like to start with a question because I think it cuts through everything else we're about to debate: if you found out that up to 70 per cent—or more—of the Australian Carbon Credit Units under the three dominant methods backing Australia's climate strategy might not represent a single, genuine tonne of avoided carbon, would you fix the paperwork or would you fix the problem? That's exactly what's in front of us today. The amendment chooses the paperwork. They've called it the Carbon Credits and Other Legislation Amendment (Integrity and Transparency) Bill 2026—the integrity transparency bill. I want you to sit with that for a second. It is, frankly, one of the most audacious pieces of branding I believe this parliament has seen. It is a bill named for two things that its own record shows the scheme has never reliably had.

Let's be honest about how we got here. This isn't a routine tidy-up of a functioning market. It's damage control. It exists because the man who ran the government's own integrity committee for 6½ years, Professor Andrew Macintosh, turned around and told the country that what we'd been overseeing, in his words, was a fraud on the environment. Macintosh is not a critic on the sidelines; he's the inside man, the whistleblower of the Australian carbon policy, standing up and saying, 'I watched this happen and it isn't real.'

What did the evidence show? People were being paid for not clearing forests that were never going to be cleared, landfill operators were collecting credits for running generators they would have run anyway, and the human induced regeneration, the single largest category of credits this scheme has ever issued—42 million hectares, receiving 45 million ACCUs—was investigated by the ANU researchers in 2024. They found that most of the sampled projects didn't even comply with their own basic regulatory requirements and showed negligible real increases in tree cover for all that money and for all those credits. So the entity responsible for issuing the credits investigated itself, commissioned a review and found itself blameless. Meanwhile, new projects were banned in October 2023, but existing projects kept generating credits. This is not a hypothetical risk we're being asked to legislate against; this is what's already happened, and at scale. It has public money and other countries' trust in our national commitment riding on it.

So what does this bill do about that record? Let's go through it point by point. The details matter more than the 'integrity and transparency' title. It does not touch a single credit already issued. Every dubious ACCU sitting in the account right now—the ones tied to forests that grow nowhere and the ones tied to generators that run anywhere—remains exactly where it is: fully valid and fully tradable. The bill has no memory. It starts today and forgets everything that came before it. When it finally does catch up with a bad method, it lets it keep running. Under the bill's new integrity risk method declaration, a method the government itself has just found doesn't meet its own integrity stands, and it keeps issuing credits for up to two more years if it's an avoidance project and up to five more years if it's a sequestration project—five years! We will have identified the problem and then licensed it to continue.

Even getting to that point is deliberately difficult. The system is so designed that, before the minister can act, they need committee advice, a full public consultation process and proof that the alternative method already exists and is workable. Every one of those steps sounds reasonable in isolation, but, if you stack them together, they're a machine built to produce inaction. This is not a safeguard; it's a mechanism of last resort by the government's own description, which is a polite way of saying it's a lever that never gets pulled.

And who checks the checker? The new Carbon Abatement Integrity Committee is advisory only. The minister keeps the final say. There is no clear process for outside groups to take the flawed decision to court. They are the same groups who caught the problem in the first place, and we're being asked to trust the very apparatus whose failures created this crisis, with no independent avenue for anyone to knock on if it fails again. They've given the public three weeks to respond to it—three weeks to scrutinise the first rewrite of a law in over a decade, a law with sweeping consequences for native title holders, for safeguard mechanisms compliance and for every polluting facility in this country using these credits to claim they've hit their targets. This is not a consultation; it is a formality with a deadline attached.

Native title protections don't even apply to what's already in the pipeline. Every project already registered or in train continues under the old weak consent rules. The stronger protections only bite on applications lodged after this bill passes, which means the very projects most likely to have proceeded without proper consent are precisely the ones that this bill leaves untouched.

Quietly buried in the purchasing provisions, they've swapped least-cost abatement for value for money. That sounds harmless until you realise what it does. It removes the one plain, measurable yardstick the public had for judging whether government carbon spending was efficient and replaces it with a phrase flexible enough to justify almost any purchasing decision on almost any ground, and with far less scrutiny.

Colleagues, put all that together and here's what you get: better minutes, better committees and better paperwork. There's not one structural change that answers the actual scientific complaint that has been sitting on the table since 2022: that these credits, in large numbers, may simply not represent real additional emissions reductions. I'll say the quiet part plainly. This bill treats a credibility crisis as an administrative one. It polishes the brass on a ship that critics—including the man who used to captain its integrity committee—say is taking water below the line.

Here is why that should frighten every one of us, regardless of which side of this chamber we sit on. The markets don't collapse gradually and then suddenly. They collapse suddenly, full stop, when confidence breaks. Enron didn't lose 10 per cent of its value a year over a decade. It went from a market darling to worthless in a matter of weeks, because, the moment the people stopped believing the numbers were real, there was no floor underneath them.

Carbon credits, by their very nature, are priced on a story about what would have happened, and that is a soft number. Soft numbers don't fail quietly. When a court or a regulator, or another peer-reviewed study, puts hard figures on how much of this scheme was never real, we will not get a gentle correction. We'll get a stampede. The buyers will flee, the prices will crater and every company, every facility and every government contract that leaned on these credits to claim compliance will be exposed all at once.

This bill—the amendment—does not prevent that day. It just delays the reckoning and dresses it up as a reform. So I say to this chamber: don't vote for the title; vote on what is actually in the text. And what's actually in the text is a bill that protects every credit already issued, gives newly condemned methods years to keep operating and buries its own enforcement power under so many preconditions that it may never be used—and it hands the public three weeks to catch any of that. That's not integrity. That's not transparency. That is a scheme protecting itself from the people it's supposed to answer to. Vote it down, send it back and tell the drafters, 'Fix the science before you touch the paperwork.' I second the amendment as circulated.

I rise to support the Carbon Credits and Other Legislation Amendment (Integrity and Transparency) Bill 2026. In Melbourne, the people I represent care deeply about environmental outcomes. They want cleaner air, healthier waterways, more renewable energy, stronger protections for biodiversity and meaningful action on climate change. But they also expect accountability, they expect evidence and they expect transparency. Australians are being asked to support significant change as we transition to a cleaner economy. Communities are investing in renewable energy, businesses are changing the way they operate, households are embracing cleaner technologies and industry is adapting for the future. People have every right to expect that the systems supporting those changes are robust, transparent and worthy of public trust. That is what this bill is about. It's about strengthening the institutions and frameworks that underpin Australia's climate response. It is about ensuring that, when emission reductions are measured, reported or credited, Australians can have confidence in the integrity of the system behind them.

The Albanese Labor government has spent the last four years rebuilding Australia's climate architecture after a decade in which far too much time was wasted debating whether action should occur at all. Labor came to government with a clear mandate to get on with the job. One of the first things we did was set a target to cut Australia's emissions by 43 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030, while reaffirming our commitment to reaching net zero by 2050. Those targets provide certainty for investors, businesses and communities about Australia's direction.

Since Australia re-elected the Albanese government in 2025, we have continued this ambitious work. Whether it's strengthening the safeguard mechanism, delivering the new vehicle efficiency standard, establishing the nature repair market or supporting the next generation of renewable energy and storage projects through the Capacity Investment Scheme, the common thread is clear: we are moving Australia forward, we are reducing emissions and we are doing it in a way that creates opportunity, jobs and investment.

Across my community, people understand that climate action is also an economic opportunity. They see the innovation happening in clean technology. They see the investment flowing into renewable energy. They see new industries emerging, and they know Australia cannot afford to be left behind while the rest of the world moves forward. That is precisely why this legislation is so important, because climate action only succeeds when people trust the framework supporting it.

Australia's carbon credit scheme has become an important part of our emissions reduction effort. Carbon credits support projects that reduce emissions. They support projects that remove carbon from the atmosphere, creating opportunities for landholders, supporting regional communities, expanding environmental restoration and partnering with First Nations communities, particularly in projects on country. The Australian Carbon Credit Unit Scheme now underpins a substantial carbon market that plays an important role in Australia's pathway towards net zero. But, as the scheme grows, expectations grow with it. Australians should not simply be expected to accept environmental claims at face value. People want confidence that emissions reductions are real, that credit represents genuine outcomes and that rigorous oversight exists to ensure the integrity of the scheme.

That is why I believe the most significant reform in this legislation is the establishment of the independent Carbon Abatement Integrity Committee. This committee will strengthen the independent oversight of carbon credit methods. It replaces the current arrangements with a body that brings greater transparency, broader expertise and stronger integrity safeguards to the scheme. For the people I represent, this sits at the heart of what good environmental policy looks like: strong ambition, strong delivery and strong accountability. Australians deserve confidence that claims are backed by evidence, that assessments are informed by expertise and that governments are willing to put independent scrutiny at the centre of important policy frameworks. That is exactly what these reforms do. People in Melbourne want climate action, but they also want proof that it is working. Because we are asking Australians to support climate action, they deserve confidence that carbon credits are delivering genuine emission reductions and real environmental outcomes.

The creation of the committee also says something broader about the Albanese Labor government's approach: we are not afraid of scrutiny, we are not afraid of expert advice and we are not afraid to improve systems when improvements are identified. The independent review conducted by Professor Ian Chubb found the ACCU scheme was fundamentally sound while recommending reforms to strengthen integrity and public confidence. The government listened and acted. When experts identify opportunities for improvement, governments should respond. When institutes can be strengthened, they should be strengthened. That is exactly what is happening here.

Of course, the Carbon Abatement Integrity Committee is not the only reform contained in this legislation. This bill recognises public confidence is built through a range of improvements across the system. The legislation strengthens compliance and enforcement powers where incorrect information has been provided. It creates clearer pathways to deal with situations where carbon credits may have been overissued. It introduces mechanisms that can be used in exceptional circumstances where concerns emerge regarding a carbon credit mythology. These are sensible safeguards because good governance requires strong guardrails. The legislation also recognises that Australia's success in reducing emissions will depend on innovation. One thing I hear from clean technology companies, researchers and innovators is that government policy should support the development of new solutions.

Australia will not reach net zero using only the technologies we have today. We will also rely on the technologies being developed right now. This legislation removes barriers that may have discouraged participation in research and development, and creates greater flexibility for future carbon credit methods, helping support innovation while maintaining integrity standards. That means new ideas, new investments and new opportunities to reduce emissions.

The bill also strengthens the role of First Nations people within the carbon credit scheme. Projects on native title and claimed native title land will require stronger consent processes earlier in the project lifecycle, helping ensure traditional owners can participate in a meaningful way before projects proceed.

The legislation also recognises registered native title claimants as eligible interest holders. These are welcome reforms. Traditional owners have cared for country for tens of thousands of years. Environmental policy is stronger when First Nations knowledge informs decision-making. Partnerships are stronger when communities are engaged from the beginning, and good outcomes are more likely when respect is embedded in the system itself.

The legislation also improves transparency within Australia's greenhouse gas reporting framework. That may sound technical, but good climate policy depends on good information. If we want accountability, we need transparency. If we want effective policy, we need accurate reporting and, if Australians are going to judge whether governments are delivering, they deserve reliable information on which to make that judgement. The bill also makes targeted changes to the new vehicle efficiency standard to ensure that it operates as originally intended and provides certainty for industry as it works to reduce emissions from new vehicles.

Taken together, this legislative changes tell a much bigger story. They show a government that understands climate policy is never set and forget. Good policy evolves, strong institutions evolve, and government should always be prepared to improve systems as expectations grow and circumstances change. The truth is that climate action in Australia has changed significantly over the last decade. The debate is no longer simply whether Australia should act; the conversation is increasingly about how we act effectively, how we build public confidence and how we ensure environmental policies deliver measurable results.

This government is stepping up to answer these questions. We are strengthening emission reduction policies, we are backing renewable energy, we are restoring integrity to climate, and we are investing in the industries that will power Australia's future. Through legislation like this, we are ensuring the system supporting those efforts remains credible, transparent and trusted. Reaching net zero will not be achieved through a single announcement, a single project or a single piece of legislation. It requires sustained effort, it requires long-term thinking, and it requires institutions that Australians have confidence in.

Labor is rebuilding Australia's climate architecture piece by piece—stronger emission targets, stronger safeguards, cleaner transport, more renewable energy, and, now, stronger oversights of our carbon credit system. This is practical climate action that reduces emissions while building confidence in the systems that support it. The people of Melbourne expect climate action that is ambitious, but they also expect it to be delivered. They want governments that are prepared to make decisions, prepared to build institutions, prepared to strengthen safeguards, and prepared to improve policies when improvements are needed. That is what this legislation does, and it is exactly what the Albanese Labor government has been doing since Australians returned us to government in 2025.

Since then, we have continued strengthening Australia's climate framework. We have continued driving investment into renewable energy. We have continued backing cleaner industries. We have continued supporting the transition to a lower-emission economy. And we have continued doing the hard work of rebuilding public confidence in the institutions that underpin climate and environmental policy, because tackling climate change is not achieved through speeches, it is not achieved through slogans and it is not achieved by standing on the sidelines pointing out problems while refusing to engage in the work of fixing them. Real progress comes from building things. It comes from improving laws. It comes from bringing people together and it comes from having the courage to make practical reforms that move the country forward.

Australians are tired of the old climate debates, they are tired of delay and they are tired of hearing why something cannot be done. What they want is progress—progress that lowers emissions, progress that protects the environment, progress that creates jobs and investment and progress that leaves Australia stronger for the next generation. That's what Australians voted for. That is what the people of Melbourne expect. And that is what this government is delivering.

As the member for Melbourne I am proud to be part of a government that understands that protecting our environment is not separate from building Australia's future. A cleaner economy, more renewable energy, stronger environmental protections, lower emissions, better institutions—those outcomes do not happen by accident; they happen because governments chose to act and they happen because governments remain focused on outcomes rather than endless arguments. Climate change will not wait for another decade of delay. Australians expect progress. This legislation does exactly that. It strengthens Australia's carbon credit framework, it strengthens accountability and it strengthens Australia's ability to continue reducing emissions in the future. I am proud to represent the people of Melbourne in a government that is getting on with the work of delivering real action on climate change. I commend this bill to the House.

I rise to speak on the Carbon Credits and Other Legislation Amendment (Integrity and Transparency) Bill 2026. This bill amends three statutes at the centre of Australia's mitigation effort: the Carbon Credits (Carbon Farming Initiative) Act, the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Act and the New Vehicle Efficiency Standard Act. It actions recommendations from the Chubb review and from successive Climate Change Authority reviews. I commend the government for legislating statutory reviews, responding to them and then acting on them. That discipline is rarer than it should be. But, on process, I note that the bill is currently before a Senate committee, which will report on 24 November. It remains a frustration to those of us in this chamber that we debate legislation without the benefit of that proper review.

Why does this bill matter? The ACCU scheme underpins a multibillion-dollar market. It supports least-cost abatement. It funds environmental restoration and Indigenous land management. It is not a substitute for decarbonising industry and transport, and we must do that. But it does buy us the carbon budget to solve those problems.

A fortnight ago, the UN Environment Programme published Limiting overshoot. It's the first UN report to concede that breaching 1.5 degrees is inevitable. Best case: we peak at 1.8. The only route back down is net negative emissions—removing more than we emit. Global carbon dioxide removal today runs at around 2.2 billion tonnes a year, almost all of it land based. That figure has to grow by an order of magnitude. So I believe in carbon removal, because every pathway to a liveable planet now depends on it. I also believe we must accelerate genuine onsite abatement to shrink the removal task to something we can actually deliver. Those two beliefs are in tension only if you cannot trust the credits, and trust in this scheme is fraying.

That is why this bill and the safeguard mechanism review that follows it are so important to get right. The integrity of the ACCU scheme is not merely a feature; it is the entire product. A credit that does not represent a tonne is worse than no credit at all. It does not merely fail to remove emissions; it authorises someone else to keep making them.

I do support most of what is in the bill. It renames the Emission Reduction Assurance Committee to the Carbon Abatement Integrity Committee. It tightens who can be appointed, requires expertise the committee has not always had, mandates First Nations representation and bars members from paid work that conflicts with their duties. Those are sound reforms to expertise, independence and transparency. It also removes the option to conditionally register products on native title land before consent is obtained. As written, the current law was inconsistent with free, prior and informed consent, and it undermined the bargaining position of one party. Removing it, again, is right.

The bill also amends the newness requirement so that research and development can proceed without destroying additionality, consistent with both Chubb and the authority. I support that. We need far more R&D in this space. But newness is the test that stops us paying for things that were going to happen anyway. Loosen it, and someone has to draw the line between genuine R&D and a project reaching backwards for a justification. The regulator must be able to tell the difference. I would also say this: the most important methods we do not yet have are for engineered and novel removals. That work should be prioritised to unlock R&D.

Finally, I support the bill reducing regulatory burden and streamlining administration. We should be doing more of that in every part of the economy. But I do have two main concerns: the method transition declaration and the departure from least-cost procurement.

My first concern is with the method transition declaration. At present, if a method is revoked or expires during a project's crediting period, the proponent is grandfathered. They keep earning under the original method unless they choose to move. That gives certainty. It also leaves integrity problems unresolved, which is corrosive to the entire scheme. Under this bill, the minister may declare a transition to all projects under a method where three things hold: (1) that the method fails to offset integrity standards, (2) continued issuance would pose a material risk to the integrity of the scheme and (3) there is another method to move on to. Projects then have between six months and two years, or five years for sequestration, to transition.

Many stakeholders oppose this power for different reasons. Project developers say it introduces sovereign risk, strands capital already committed and invents a class of low-integrity credits that will be repriced the moment a method is even investigated. Environmental lawyers are concerned that the threshold is set so high it may never be used, and that material risk is undefined and left to ministerial discretion. Setting the availability of an alternative method as a prerequisite means the worst methods—the ones with nowhere to send the projects—are the ones that escape. Both concerns are pointing at the same hole: nobody outside this building knows what this power is actually for. The government has not said what circumstances it contemplates for a bar set at simultaneously failing the integrity standards and threatening the whole scheme and having somewhere else to go. So we can only speculate.

Avoided deforestation and human induced regeneration have well-documented problems, and together they account for the largest share of ACCUs ever issued—HIR alone for roughly a third. Under the HIR rules, projects face a late-stage reconciliation. Around year 15, the project has to demonstrate the forest cover it was modelled to achieve, measured against what is actually on the ground. Where the abatement has not materialised, credits already issued are handed back. That gateway is the one point in the design where the model has to meet with reality.

The integrated farm and land management method, the most likely destination for these projects, carries no equivalent requirement. Follow that through. The prospect of a very large relinquishment across a third of the market is, on any reading, a material risk to the integrity of the scheme. That is the trigger for a declaration. What is available under this bill is to move those projects onto a method where the model isn't tested against reality. The test would be extinguished at precisely the moment it became meaningful. I'm not alleging that is the intention. I'm saying that the drafting permits it, and that a power whose stated purpose is to raise integrity should not be capable of laundering a problem instead.

A functioning market and a high-integrity market are not alternatives. A market in credits that do not represent tonnes is not functioning; it is just liquid. The method transition declaration is an attempt to hold both at once, and it can, but only if moving a project between the methods can never lower the standard it is held to. As to why an exceptional power is needed at all, the government has not said, and we are unlikely to find out. The Clean Energy Regulator Act binds officials to secrecy on the threat of two years imprisonment, so we are asked to legislate a remedy without being told the disease.

My second concern is value for money. An ACCU represents one tonne of abatement. That is a commodity. The government's job is to maximise the carbon abated for a given sum of public money—and that is not my preference; it is the statute. Section 20G(3)(b) requires a purchasing process to 'maximise the amount of abatement the Commonwealth can purchase'. This bill replaces least-cost abatement with value for money and leaves that requirement untouched. Either the government intends to purchase less abatement for the same money or the two provisions do not sit together. It should tell us which. The assistant minister says the change will mean future purchasing can be done in a way that supports strategic priorities as they evolve over time, but which priorities and who sets them remains unspecified.

The priority of this bill is to reduce emissions—full stop. The problem with this government is it hangs so many objectives off a single program that the program costs more and delivers less of what it was built for. And where there is discretion, there is risk. Valuing co-benefits is inherently subjective, and subjectivity in procurement is where public money goes missing. The secretary of a department will decide which outcomes are most meritorious—another opportunity to select favoured proponents in favoured electorates for reasons opaque to the public whose money is being spent. Recent grant program controversies in this space make the point better than I can.

The government is no longer the main buyer. Real demand now comes from the Safeguard Mechanism and from voluntary action. Government should not be buying up the cost curve and leaving the cheap credits for compliance. I want to see covered facilities procuring credits with genuine co-benefits and paying for them. If the government is to depart from these costs, it should at least state the criteria explicitly and say why, and that departure should be confined to a first-of-a-kind removals project. It should not become an open-ended subsidy for avoidance projects.

If projects with high co-benefits are sub commercial, the durable fix is not the Commonwealth paying over the odds; it is a higher carbon price. That is what the evidence points to and it is what does the work. It drives onsite abatement, it rewards R&D and it brings high-cost projects into the money without anyone in Canberra deciding which ones deserve it. The government's role is not to pick up the largest tab. It needs to stop thinking that it is. Its job is the integrity of the whole scheme, not only of the credits it happens to buy. Credits that do not represent real abatement should not be issued in the first place.

Last week the Senate spent half an hour and a division deciding whether a methodology determination had integrity. That is what happens when machinery for settling integrity questions is not trusted to settle them. This bill is an opportunity to repair the machinery. It does not do that yet. I encourage the government to support the amendments from the crossbench.

I rise to speak in support of the Carbon Credits and Other Legislation Amendment (Integrity and Transparency) Bill 2026. This is a bill about growing Australia's nature economy and about who in this place actually wants to see it grow. The idea underneath this scheme is the simplest and fairest one in Australian public policy: big industry should pay for its pollution and those who repair it like farmers and traditional owners should get reimbursed for that repair. This policy dictates a simple and logical transfer of funds from those who damage our environment to those who repair it, and that's been working well since 2011. The scheme has delivered 190 million tonnes of abatement from more than 2,600 projects. This Nature Repair Market is now worth more than $4 billion, and every tonne of pollution is paid for by polluters, as it should be.

Like most schemes, from time to time, it needs review and reform, and that's what this bill is about. It strengthens the integrity of the scheme so that the trust behind it holds, the consent of native title holders is respected properly, and the whole system keeps growing Australia's nature economy instead of putting it at risk. This bill has practical effects for farmers all over Australia. It's sitting in paddocks from Bourke to Berowra to Goondiwindi.

Let me tell the House about some of the people growing Australia's nature economy right now, today, while those opposite, from the far left to the far right, argue about whether they deserve to keep doing it. There are the Rossers at Wanaaring, two hours west of Bourke. Their country was finished by the millennium drought—fences falling down, no reliable water, goats and dorpers eating the scrub down to dirt. They laid 80 kilometres of poly pipe, fenced every water point, trapped the goats out and rotated their paddocks properly for the first time in years after their first abatement contract was signed in 2015. For them, it unlocked millions of dollars and brought their property forward 15 years. When livestock income vanished, carbon paid the bills. It let them destock early. It let them keep their staff on and expand into mixed farming around Forbes.

There's Peter Yench at Cobar, who watched drought take his flock from 8,000 sheep down to only 600. He still drew close to a million dollars a year pre tax from carbon. Tom and Antoinette Archer at Rexton, near Goondiwindi, spent 20 years improving their grazing, fencing and water points, and in 2023 they were issued around 66,000 carbon credits for the carbon their soil had built up. There's a whole new income stream for farmers sitting alongside the cattle. Stuart Austin at Wilmot, near Ebor, sold around half a million dollars of soil carbon to Microsoft. His soil organic carbon lifted from 2½ per cent to 4½ per cent—more ground cover, more water held, more beef. Colin Seis at Winona, near Birriwa, holds his grain yields steady while saving more than $100,000 a year in fertiliser and chemicals. Graham and Cathy Finlayson at Bokhara Plains, near Brewarrina, took claypan country nobody wanted and lifted their stocking capacity by almost 80 per cent. Tim Wright at Lana, near Uralla, more than doubled the carrying capacity of his family's property. In Bourke, Sam Maroulis is selling poly pipes, solar pumps and fencing gear to farmers who would have never otherwise bought it.

Younger families are moving back to the bush because there is finally work to keep them there—more than 160 million carbon credits issued, $2.8 billion paid directly into the hands of land managers and an estimated $30 billion more over the next 20 years. This is what growing Australia's nature economy looks like. It's actual money in farmers' pockets, keeping families on farms and boosting our region's economy.

Let's look at those opposite, who want to strangle this system so that nobody notices until it's too late. Let's start with the Nationals. In 2022 the member for Maranoa, as agriculture minister, wrote concessional tax treatment for carbon credit income into law. He called it a diversified source of on-farm income. Four years later, his party is campaigning to abolish the market that that income comes from. They gave farmers this income. Now they want to steal it back. Their leader says he will scrap net zero and get rid of what he calls Labor's carbon tax. The tax he means is the one writing cheques to Bourke, to Cobar, to Goondiwindi and to Wanaaring.

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 11:53 to 12:04

Ninety-eight per cent of demand for these credits exists because big emitters are compelled to buy them. Destroy that demand and you take the income away from a grazier who borrowed against a contract in good faith.

The Nationals have become the party of big emitters, not the party of farmers. The Nationals also like to claim this scheme locks up farmland. The Climate Change Authority's own independent report released this month found no material conversion of high-value agricultural land to carbon projects at the national scale to date. The authority concluded that sequestration and farm production can exist side by side. They do not compete.

Brendan Foran, the Convenor of Growing Australia's Nature Economy, wrote in the Financial Review last month that the claim that carbon projects lock up farmland is a myth. He said:

… the scheme is on track to issue between 22 million and 26 million credits this year, worth about $900 million at today's prices. None of that money goes to Canberra—

Almost all of it—

… goes through farm gates.

That is growing Australia's nature economy, and those are the words of the people actually building it. I'd invite the Nationals member to name one thing his party has done for farm income this year. Then I would invite him to take a look at Peter Yench's bank statement to see what carbon credits are delivering to farmers.

Then, of course, we have the Greens. Earlier this year, they threatened for months to bring down the method that pays governments to leave koala forests standing rather than log them. Then, when the vote finally came, they split three ways. Seven of them backed it. Senators McKim, Bleyer and Steele-John voted to kill it, walking into the same lobby as Matt Canavan.

I want the House to sit with that method that actually delivers, because this is not abstract and because of what happened next. On 10 September, the Senate formally endorsed the improved native forest management method under this very ACCU Scheme. That single decision is the step that makes the Great Koala National Park possible. When established, it will be the second-largest park in New South Wales, protecting more than 475,000 hectares of native forests and existing reserve. It will protect more than 100 threatened species, including 12,000 koalas and 36,000 greater gliders. No fossil fuel company will ever be allowed to buy a single credit generated from it. For the first time in New South Wales, the park will employ Aboriginal rangers through Aboriginal community controlled organisations, putting cultural knowledge at the care and the centre of how it is run.

This deal was three years in the making, and it was backed by the Nature Conservation Council of NSW, the North East Forest Alliance, the National Parks Association, the World Wildlife Fund, the Australian Climate and Biodiversity Foundation, Greenpeace and the Great Koala National Park Aboriginal Advisory Panel. The New South Wales minister for the environment thanked the New South Wales Greens by name for their support in getting it done. On 10 September, the New South Wales Greens were thanked in a ministerial statement for helping deliver 12,000 koalas a home, but on that same day federal Greens senators announced they would vote against the bill in front of this House today. This bill protects the integrity of the exact scheme that has just delivered the Great Koala National Park. One arm of their party, thankfully, saw reason and stood with Labor to save the koala. The other arm walked into a party room on the same day and decided to vote against the system that made it possible. I don't know which Greens this House is supposed to believe—the ones thanked for building the Great Koala National Park or the ones voting against this bill that keeps the same scheme that built it standing up.

Now they want a cap on how many credits big emitters can use. If you cap the credits, you cut the demand. If you cut the demand, you cut the price. If you cut the price, then the funded burning stops in Arnhem Land. If you cut the price, funded goat control stops in the Flinders Ranges. Every outcome I'm about to describe goes backwards. The Greens have never once told this House who pays for nature repair if industry does not.

Nature repair in this country needs around $7.3 billion a year. That's more than the entire annual budget of the New South Wales police force. They will not take it from hospitals; nor should they. They will not take it from schools; nor should they. They would rather have a fantasy scheme than one that saves the quoll or protects the koala. Perfect is the enemy of the good, and in their hands it's become the enemy of the quoll, because this is what this scheme also funds.

I want the House to hear the animals this money is protecting, not just the balance sheet. The Gouldian finch is endangered. What is killing it is hot wildfires late in the dry season burning out its seed supply and nesting hollows. What saves it is cool early burning. In Arnhem Land, Indigenous rangers carry out that work across more than 80,000 square kilometres, funded by carbon credits alongside ranger jobs, cultural heritage work and on-country schools like the Nawarddeken Academy. The northern quoll is endangered. Feral cats are eating it out of an existence made deadlier by hot fire and heavy grazing stripping away the ground cover the quoll needs to hide in.

Fire management, feral herbivore control and restored ground cover are all funded by carbon farming. That's what these credits pay for. The yellow-footed rock-wallaby was headed for extinction in the Flinders and Olary ranges 30 years ago. More than 200,000 feral goats have been removed since. Today, the population and the country it occupies are more than 10 times what they were. A finch, a quoll and a rock wallaby—pulled back from the edge because a big polluter had to pay a land manager to do the work.

That is the choice in front of this House. One side wants to abolish this scheme outright; the other side wants to cap it and starve the demand that gives any value to it. Only Labor wants to strengthen it. Between the far left and the far right, they arrive at the same place from opposite ends: a grazier at Wanaaring with no income and a forest with nothing left in it. This government doesn't want to see that happen.

The Carbon Market Institute, the National Farmers' Federation and the Productivity Commission all back these reforms. That is farmers, economists and industry standing in the same place while those opposite stand somewhere else entirely. Labor is interested in growing Australia's nature economy properly with the integrity to make it last—real farmers, real money, real animals and real outcome, all of it paid for by carbon credits, not by the taxpayer. We'll defend this system, and we'll improve this system. I commend this bill to the House.

I rise today to speak against the Carbon Credits and Other Legislation Amendment (Integrity and Transparency) Bill 2026, because integrity and transparency have no part in this bill, as I read it. The more technical details have been dealt with by my colleagues speaking previously, but in summary it makes three changes. Firstly, the bill would allow a mere native title claim to be treated as native title actually existing. Now, while we all want to see native title dealt with fairly and justly, this creates a new level of uncertainty for proponents who are looking to implement a program in an area which may be under native title claim as opposed to a settled native title.

Secondly, the bill would allow the government to purchase carbon credits against a very opaque value-for-money test, replacing the current least-cost consideration. Now, taxpayers always want value for money. They deserve to get value for money. But this new clause would allow the government to buy carbon credits with a whole range of criteria other than value for money, and that can't end well for the taxpayers. Thirdly, and probably the most frighteningly for most Australians, this bill hands Minister Chris Bowen sweeping powers to disrupt carbon abatement projects through a special mechanism that would allow him to unilaterally declare methodologies void. Once again, this creates enormous uncertainty for proponents who are entering into agreements which, in many cases, are up to 100 years long. For those reasons, the coalition will be opposing this bill.

I want to take the opportunity today to talk about ACCUs and what they mean for my electorate of O'Connor and the people who live and work there. For many people in this place, Australian carbon credit units are a financial tool which is used for companies, large corporates, who are captured under for the most part the safeguard mechanism to reduce their carbon emissions while actually continuing to emit carbon or in fact increase carbon. What does this mean for the people who live in O'Connor? I'm sure many people watching this speech, people reading this speech at a later date or people in this House will remember when, a month or so ago, the Rushy Lagoon purchase in northern Tasmania made headlines. It made headlines because it was the largest farming property in Tasmania that had been bought by an international fund with borrowed money from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. Effectively, Australian taxpayer money was lent to a foreign manager to outbid Australian farmers and buy that property. That made the headlines for very good reasons, but across O'Connor that's happened 142 times.

We have seen large corporates come in and buy up entire farming properties. They started in the Central Midlands, which is not in my electorate, then they moved to Southern Cross in the Yilgarn shire, which most definitely is in my electorate, and they have been moving progressively into the high-rainfall, high-value agricultural land in the southern part of the electorate, with a property at Greenbushes being purchased several years ago. It has now been planted down to a shotgun mix of native species, which is all well and good. However, the neighbouring farmers had no opportunity to purchase that property. They are now left with a severe fire hazard on their boundary and have vermin coming out of that property onto their property. There's a whole range of issues.

It's by very happy coincidence that Luke Bayley is with me in the chamber here today. Luke, welcome. Luke is the CEO of the South Coast Natural Resource Management group. As the name suggests, natural resource management is about managing our natural resources and making the most of those resources while protecting nature and the environment, and they do a fantastic job. The NRMs are here in Canberra this week. It's great to see them here, and I absolutely support their work. Natural resource management is about, as I said, making the most of those natural resources. As a farmer, I'm aware that there are many farming properties which have areas that could be utilised for ACCUs or for producing, for example, biofuels. Sadly, that's not what's happening at the moment. We're not seeing these organisations, these large corporates, entering into agreements with farmers to utilise areas of properties that are of lower value for agriculture, which is the backbone of my communities and the economy across the bulk of my electorate. What we're seeing is these corporates coming in and buying entire properties.

To be fair to them—I've named some of them plenty of times, so I don't want to seem like I'm running a jihad against some of our best and biggest Western Australian companies—I recognise that under the safeguard mechanism they have to offset their emissions. If you're a company that pumps gas, then you don't have many options other than to go and buy farmland and plant it back to native bush. But there are other companies who are taking, I think, a much more sensible approach, and that is to enter into agreements with farmers to lease parts of properties on long-term leases to produce, in one case, oil mallees, which can then have the oil extracted, and that can go in a process to produce biofuels. I think that's a wonderful opportunity for the farmer. It's an opportunity for our natural resource management people to get involved in that process and link up those corporates and the farmers who have got that sort of opportunity. That's where I think we need to be heading in terms of ACCUs.

I think that the practice of purchasing entire farming properties and taking them out of long-term agricultural production lowers the amount of food that we produce and reduces the number of people that are living in those communities. Many of those communities are in decline because the farms are getting bigger. The technology is improving, and the mechanisation in producing a tonne of grain—the productivity is quite frankly extraordinary, but what it does mean is that there are fewer and fewer people in those communities. Corporates coming in, buying up entire farming properties and taking out the families that operated those farms is exacerbating the decline of those rural communities. Once this gathers pace—we've only just entered the first 18 months of the safeguard mechanism, and there's a review that's coming up later on this year, which no doubt will ramp up the requirements of those companies. They've got very deep pockets.

I don't blame the family who sells that property above the odds. They're coming in and knocking on the door. They're not going through the normal channels. They're knocking on people's doors and saying, 'We've got a premium to offer you for your farming property.' The first the neighbouring farmer finds out about it is when he sees the fences being ripped out and the tree planters going in. It is creating some division in those communities, but, as I say, I don't blame the people who are selling up for taking that option. It is their property and it is their right to do so. The government has set up a system whereby large corporate interests with very deep pockets are coming into these communities and offering a premium. Taking out those families, taking out that production, is causing some serious issues for the people that are left behind, by the way, in terms of managing that fire risk and managing the vermin. The weeds that come out of those properties are a big problem for those remaining families.

That's what I wanted to talk about today—to put on the record, as I have done previously, my implacable opposition to this notion of corporate Australia being forced to come in and buy up productive farming properties in my electorate, taking people out of my communities and hollowing them out. There are better options. As I mentioned, there's the option of leasing parts of properties or giving every party more security to purchase those properties. The problem there is that the state land departments will not allow existing titles to be subdivided to allow that to happen. There should be a change at state government level in state government land management to allow a farmer who may have a portion of his property that is low productivity, poor quality land—for whatever reason; it might not fit into the cropping system or the livestock system, or it might be an isolated block on his landholding. These properties should be allowed to be subdivided and partially utilised for ACCUs. But, as I say, the taking out of an entire property is detrimental to my community, it's detrimental to the Wheatbelt of Western Australia, and I think in the long term, in terms of our food security, it is detrimental to our country.

The Carbon Credits and Other Legislation Amendment (Integrity and Transparency) Bill 2026 strengthens a scheme that has already worked. It amends the laws behind the Australian Carbon Credit Unit Scheme. That scheme has delivered a—

Sorry. We've lost quorum, and we'll need to suspend the Federation Chamber until quorum is resumed.

Sitting suspended from 12:25 to 12:56

I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.