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

I also rise to note this report from Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport Committee which, as the Chair, Senator Sterle, has just indicated, is an interim report. Senator Siewert and I first sought to refer to the committee the issue of climate change and its impact on rural and regional Australia, and on the agricultural sector in particular, quite some time ago. We actually tried to refer it twice and it was voted down until finally—and this was under the previous government—it got to the committee. That just shows you how far we have come in the last 12 months in getting people in the Senate to recognise just how serious climate change is in its impacts in rural and regional Australia. That is not to say, of course, that its impacts are not serious everywhere, but the intensification of the drought as a result of climate change is everywhere to be seen. The frustration I have is that the response to that has been far too slow and that not enough coordinated research is being done around Australia on adaptation and the mitigation strategies that are out there and possible to respond to climate change.

The committee’s interim report looks at the science of climate change and what the likely impacts are to be in Australia. It reinforces what we already know, and that is that we are going to have more extreme conditions: we are going to have more extreme drought, more extreme weather events such as floods and so on, and many more bushfire days in various parts of Australia. The problem, though, is that farmers want very regional-specific information for it to be useful to them, and the climate models to date have generally been too broad. They can give you a trend analysis for a reasonably large area, but people need it to be brought down to quite specific regional scales in order for it to be very useful. One of the very strong things in this committee report is that we need to get cracking in Australia, particularly, on refining our climate models so that they become very much more useful and relevant to people in rural areas who need to use that information. There was overwhelming support on the committee for recognising that that has to be a research priority in Australia and to use the science we have and bring it down to a scale that is meaningful to rural communities, both to the towns and to the farmers around those towns.

The second thing is that we addressed issues about drought relief. Again, this is something that has been overtaken, to some extent, by the review of drought relief that is going on on a broader scale. But the point I want to make very strongly is that it is time to stop thinking in terms of drought relief and one-in-100-year droughts and the need to just pay the drought relief because it is thought that things are going to change, that it is going to rain and that everything will be all right again. We now have an understanding in rural and regional Australia that things are not going to be all right again and that the climate is significantly changing. Therefore we have to have a discussion about how we are going to help people adapt. What we all want is for people to be able to stay on their land and change the way they do things so that it remains viable for them to stay on the land and therefore the rural communities they serve will remain viable as well. That is why I emphasise the research.

One of the things the Greens are very keen to do—and there is increasing interest in this—is to intensify soil carbon, to get much better accounting methods for soil carbon and to look at what the opportunities are in rural and regional Australia for, if you like, the development of green carbon and soil sequestration. Unfortunately, I was not able to go out to the wheat belt with my colleagues from the committee, but I will be going to Warren this week. I think there is a lot of merit in accelerating the research we are doing, particularly with things like planting perennial grasses so that you have constant ground cover and better moisture retention, and then you can plant into those perennial grasses for some of the crops. That is what we will be going to see. That is the work of Dr Christine Jones, who has made a particularly interesting submission. I think there is genuine interest across all sides of the House in the work that is going on there.

The other issue, from my point of view, is that I am a bit disappointed that the renewable energy community has not taken the opportunity with this inquiry to come and talk about the huge opportunities there are in rural and regional Australia for partnership arrangements to farm renewable energy as an additional crop. Quite clearly a lot of the very large properties that are really suffering because of the drought have tremendous solar radiation or, in some cases, wind resources. What we need to do is to work out ways in which we can pre-permit large areas. It is the role of the Commonwealth, in my view, and the state governments to go and talk to communities and get agreement about having a large renewable energy park, if you like, across private land. That would have to be agreed in the community, of course. We have to do that; otherwise there will be fighting in rural communities, as some farmers will want to go with renewable energy and the people next door may not like it. There will be conflict and so on. That is why going out and talking to people and getting some agreement about the area enables the renewable energy companies to come in and sign up partnership agreements or reach joint venture or leasehold arrangements—whatever you want to do—and be able to put in large-scale, utility scale, solar, thermal, and wind facilities in rural and regional Australia so, effectively, the farmers can stay on their land and get an income from generating renewable energy. That would also require the government to give additional support through the permit money coming through the ETS system to extend the transmission lines out to those areas to make it viable. Then you would get, in conjunction with a feed-in tariff, a huge investment and a real adaptation strategy in terms of building economic resilience.

Ecosystem resilience is the other thing. There is huge recognition now that, as an adaptation strategy to climate change, we have to build resilience in ecosystems. The best way of doing that is to protect existing native vegetation in those areas because of the water flow-on impacts, and that will require paying people to restore native vegetation and assist in the fight against weeds and feral animals. We should never forget that rural and regional Australia is losing millions of dollars in productivity every year because of alien invasive species, feral animals and weeds. So, instead of drought relief, we need to think about ways to pay farmers an income for ecosystem restoration and management of alien invasive species and so on. There are all sorts of ideas that we hope will come forward in the rest of this inquiry, which will now report in December. The final part of this inquiry is looking into where the best ideas are in addressing mitigation and adaptation strategies.

I conclude by saying that we have a global issue with food security. I do not think that people have really started to engage the fact that, because of climate change, peak oil and perverse incentives for biofuels in some parts of the world, we have lost large areas of productive farmland, and we are going to have increasing pressure on production of food. We have to make sure that we maintain the potential that is in Australia for agricultural productivity and not lose that with, again, perverse incentives for carbon sink forests.

My final point is that we want to see plantations used for wood production, and native forests and native vegetation ecosystems used as carbon stores. The worst thing that could happen is that land in rural Australia is driven up in price because of plantation forests for so-called carbon sinks and that you drive the logging industry further into the native forests. That would be an appalling outcome for Australia. We need to make sure, in any discussion of what might constitute a carbon sink forest, that it does not go on the best agricultural land, that it does not lead to companies being able to buy up all the water rights and take the land out of food production and that it does lead to plantings of mixed species and plantings in areas that are marginal, where it will improve issues such as salinity and lead to an increase and intensification of carbon.

There are a lot of issues still to come before this committee. I hope that we are going to get an ongoing response from the community as to their ideas about how we can support rural and regional Australia in a sustainable way. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.