Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

As you know, Mr Acting Deputy President, and as the minister will know, farmers in many rural communities are protesting—170 of them protested in north-west Tasmania just two weeks ago—about the way in which these managed investment schemes pervert the market, lay waste to valuable land and disrupt rural communities.

Victorian dairy farmers who have refused huge offers to sell their land—one can imagine the pressure this puts on people on family farms—have dubbed the scheme ‘tax subsidised social annihilation’. Mr Bob Loone, a highly respected councillor at Meander Valley, near Launceston, said that research showed that plantations created only one job for every seven displaced in farming. This government’s tax breaks are displacing people on the land. Mr Loone went on to say that, for every million in tree sales, $10 million was lost by no longer using the land for higher income activities such as dairying and cropping.

There are studies available which bear that out, and we should take note. Dairy farmers who need to expand to stay competitive cannot match the price that plantation companies can offer because of the tax breaks. The Australian Financial Review has reported that, in the town of Delegate, councillors and local farmers who at first welcomed the timber company Wilmott Forests now have signs up that say, ‘People not pines’, because they are being swamped by these forest pines. This is just removing locals off the land. Mr Chris Smith, a dairy farmer and Colac Otway Shire councillor said:

What annoys us is investors think they are doing something clean and green for the environment and feel warm and fuzzy and all they are contributing to is the decline of the rural sector and ultimately a pulp industry that’s going overseas.

Another dairy farmer, Rob Leishman, said that more than 60 farms in south-western Victoria had been bought up by the timber companies over the past two years, taking out more than $75 million to $100 million in income from the area. This is having a very serious impact on the ability of local communities right across southern Australia to survive, and they are up against it unfairly. The government is promoting those big companies—and I say again: there are six, in principle—by giving them hundreds of millions of dollars in undeserved tax breaks which the rest of the family farmers, some of whom have been on their farms for four or five generations, simply do not get.