Fiona Nash (NSW, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Water Resources and Conservation) Share this | Hansard source

The biggest threat is the government, says Senator Joyce, and I completely agree with him. That is what will happen. Can I reiterate, as I said earlier: we do not have an issue with carbon sinks being planted. What we do have an issue with is the fact that companies are going to get a tax break to do it.

The future of rural communities is at stake here. It is interesting to note that we are seeing the same approach from the government as we saw in the water debate last week. They have no idea about the impact their decisions are going to have on rural communities. I recently travelled from one end of the Murray-Darling Basin to the other, and every community along the way said how dislocated and disconnected they felt because the government were not taking them into consideration, because the government did not know, did not understand, the impact that their decisions on water were going to have. So we are seeing the broad approach from the Labor government and the complete disconnection from the impact their decisions are having on rural and regional communities. This shows up nowhere better than the fact that we are looking at this piece of legislation on carbon sinks. There have been no socioeconomic impact studies at all done on the effects on the communities. Look at water. Look at the buyback program potentially taking a huge amount of water out of communities. And guess what? There has not been a single bit of socioeconomic work done on the potential removal of that water. There has been an ABARE commissioned study. That is not going to report until the middle of next year. Guess how much entitlement is going to be bought back between now and then. It is indicative of the lack of respect that the government show rural communities and their lack of ability to understand the potential impact that their decisions will have on rural Australia. It comes back to the question: do we or do we not want a sustainable future for rural and regional Australia?

I come back to the farmer I referred to in the beginning. They will pack up and do something else if we are not prepared to support them. They will pack up and somehow find some other way to live their lives. Our role has to be to support those people who are providing food and fibre for this nation—and, if it is not, then it should be. If it is not, we need to address that. We need to make sure that that is one of our prime concerns, because all they are seeing at the moment is a whole lot of disconnection and a whole lot of dislocation from what they are doing and from what is being provided by way of support through government policy and programs to try and assist. They deserve to be assisted. They do not deserve to see a piece of legislation that is going to give a tax break to the big end of town that can afford it. I do not care how many speakers there are against this; there is no way you can get away from that statement. It is fact. This is going to give a tax break to the big end of town.

I do not see why mum-and-dad taxpayers, working families who work hard in this country to pay their tax, should subsidise the big end of town to put in carbon sink forests so they can deal with their carbon emissions. It is wrong. It is not their responsibility and they should not be asked to do it. The big end of town have enough capacity to do this without a tax break—it is as simple as that. They do not need it, they should not get it and they should not be having it. Why should the mums and dads of this country subsidise the big end of town under a Labor government? There is no reason for it.

The government knows that it can reverse this. It knows it is bad legislation. The only people who are prepared to actually say that it is bad legislation are those who are going to be sitting across on the other side, on the side supporting this, when we get to the vote. All I can say is that those sitting on this side and not joining us are doing the wrong thing by rural Australia, who so desperately—now more than ever, after seven years of drought—need our support, not a kick in the teeth. They need our support now. We are going to continue to stand up for them. My colleagues Senator Joyce, Senator Boswell and Senator Williams and I will continue to do that, not only through this piece of legislation but every time we turn around. We will do everything we can to support rural and regional Australia because we know how important those communities are to this country. They deserve our support, and we will be supporting this disallowance motion.