Sean Bell (NSW, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) | Hansard source

Under the Albanese Labor government, productive Australian agriculture is being destroyed in pursuit of its net zero obsession. Rushy Lagoon should be a warning to every Australian. Tasmania's largest farm is being turned into another monument to Labor's obsession with economic vandalism. This is productive agricultural land. It grows food. It supports farmers and regional business. Now taxpayers are helping finance its purchase by a foreign-backed investment structure, and taxpayers are even paying for the trees that will take thousands of hectares out of agricultural production. The Clean Energy Finance Corporation has put $69 million behind the purchase, and the Commonwealth handed over another $8.8 million towards establishing the plantation. Think about the madness of that. Australians are being made to help buy Tasmania's largest farm and they're being made to pay for the pine trees that will destroy the agricultural value of thousands of hectares of it, all so carbon can be counted, traded and turned into credits. We are literally subsidising the conversion of productive farmland into a carbon credit plantation, and the government expected Tasmanian farmers to have to compete with that.

If Canberra was prepared to put $69 million behind Rushy Lagoon, why could they not be prepared to use that money to help Tasmanian farmers buy the property and keep it productive? Now, both federal Labor and the Tasmanian Liberals tell us they want to grow agriculture and train young people in agribusiness. Well, here they had an opportunity. Tasmania's largest farm came onto the market. They could have helped local farmers buy it, improve it and keep it productive. They could have backed irrigation, livestock technology and training. Instead, taxpayers are backing pine trees, carbon credits and a foreign-backed investment fund. Tasmanians have every right to feel sold out.

The hastily rushed sale of Rushy Lagoon exposes something much bigger: carbon credits are changing what productive land is worth and how investors behave. If you create perverse investment incentives, you're going to get perverse outcomes. A farm can now be valued not only for the food it produces but for the carbon someone else can claim by planting poisonous trees on. The Albanese Labor government are creating this lunacy and financing it—again, with your money. They're taking your money and they're using it to destroy productive agricultural land.

The consequences are obvious. With millions of dollars in taxpayer backing, productive farmland is now worth more to carbon investors than it is to a farmer who wants to keep producing food. That means agricultural land gets taken out of production with fewer opportunities for local farmers to expand and a direct threat to the future of farming communities so important to our nation's history, our nation's future. Our farmland is being destroyed.

Rushy Lagoon shows exactly how that distortion works, but Labor is boasting about a $140 million economic return. We're not looking at the fine print on the jobs they create. These jobs are claimed over the lifetime of the project. They're not saying they'll create 190 permanent jobs from day one. Once again, they're being a little bit fudgy with the maths here. Meanwhile, productive agriculture supports an economy year after year—farmers, contractors, transport operators, vets, machinery businesses and local suppliers. Labor gives Tasmanians the big headline number, but the fine print tells a much different story, a much smaller story. And this is where Rushy Lagoon becomes part of a much bigger national argument.

The Albanese Labor government have locked Australians into net zero and they're spending an extraordinary amount of public money trying to force the country to go along with it, trying to force the country into meeting arbitrary targets. They call it a transition, but a lot of people refer to it as a managed decline. Many Australians call it a massive government direct transfer of money into projects that fit Labor's net zero agenda. Just look at the Capacity Investment Scheme. The Capacity Investment Scheme is what is underwriting these renewable projects. Rewiring the Nation commits billions to transmission, so-called green hydrogen gets its subsidies, and batteries are getting their subsidies. The Clean Energy Finance Corporation pours public capital into projects that fit the government's net zero agenda. Labor calls this investment, but Australians should remember whose money is being invested and who is carrying the risk, because ultimately this is your money that's being invested, and you're carrying the risk. If these projects fail, we're bearing the consequences.

The Albanese government are spending like a drunken sailor to achieve net zero at any cost, except drunken sailors eventually run out of their own money. Labor have got a supply of yours that will last them quite some time until it runs out.

But there is not an infinite supply of taxpayer money, despite how Labor are spending it. Now, if anyone wants to see how absurd this has become, just look at Tomago Aluminium. Tomago is Australia's largest aluminium smelter and one of the biggest electricity users in the country. It was built in New South Wales because this state once had abundant, reliable and affordable coal fired electricity. Now that smelter's future has been put at risk by the cost of power.

So what's Labor's answer? They're forced into another taxpayer rescue. The Albanese and Minns Labor governments have announced a $2½ billion package to keep Tomago operating beyond 2028.