Slade Brockman (WA, Deputy-President) | Link to this | Hansard source

First of all, I also thank Senator Collins for her contribution earlier. It was a wonderful thing you shared with us all, so I thank you.

Rushy Lagoon is a big agricultural property in Tasmania; in fact, it's one of the biggest, at 22,000 hectares. In the recent past, it's run 55,000 sheep and 8½ thousand cattle. This is a big agricultural enterprise that helps feed Australia and helps feed the world. I along with a number of my colleagues led by Rick Wilson, the member for O'Connor, wrote to Treasurer Jim Chalmers and to Minister Bowen and Minister Collins asking them to make sure that the purchase of this property is being examined with the highest level of scrutiny possible. You have an international fund management company seeking to purchase this remarkable Australian property and use it not for food production but for trees.

Hovering in the background is the question over where the funding is coming from, because there are at this stage unconfirmed question marks about whether the Clean Energy Finance Corporation is actually providing cheap government funding to a foreign buyer of a 22,000 hectare Australian food producing enterprise to turn it into a carbon farm. Losing that land, out of production and into trees, in itself would be questionable, though I'm a believer in markets; the market should prevail. However, doing it through an international company with Australian government dollars, with cheap finance behind it, is an absolute disgrace if it's true.

Australia helps feed the world. We produce around three times the amount of food we consume in this country. It is through significant agricultural enterprises like this one, and like so many in my home state of WA, that we produce the food that feeds Australia and the world. In my home state we're hearing stories from high-rainfall areas, not marginal country, of land being purchased and locked up, taken out of food production. Just this week, the minister who sold out the sheep industry for a few preferences from the Animal Justice Party set up a new scheme to buy land for conservation—again using government dollars to artificially inflate the price of farmland, taking it out of the reach of Australian farmers, locking it up and taking it out of food production. This is not the path forward for Australia.

Senate adjourned at 20:51