Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share 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.