Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to fully and utterly endorse the comments of my colleague. She has had that position from day one, and I congratulate her for it. I will reinforce the comments that she made, and I reinforce them by saying the rural sector, the farming sector—the farm gate—was never in this scheme to begin with. We do not want the other side to be selling this as a great concession. The truth is, if farmers were ever going to be in, the decision would not have been made for several years and they would not have entered the scheme until 2015. As my colleague said, it really was a no-brainer because it had reached a point where no other country in the world—what we will call the draft scheme in the United States is locked up in the Senate at the moment—included the rural sector. So how could it ever have been that the rural sector, the farm gate, was ever going to come into this scheme when a major competitor such as the United States would have had an incredible competitive advantage over our farm sector and our exports right across the board?

The ability to measure the emissions has become farcical, quite frankly—not just impossible, but farcical. I remember going to a Wimmera field day where the state government’s agriculture department had a display stand which the state government had given research dollars, believing that in the future there would be some way of measuring the main emitter, which is cattle. We all know what that is. They had this farcical box that you strapped on the cow. Even the person at the stand, who was representing the state government and had been part of this research, could not keep a straight face when I spoke to him. And this was at a Wimmera field day!