Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share 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)