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

I rise to speak on this committee referral of the approval of the sale of Rushy Lagoon, and I do so for a very good reason. Even though where I happen to live in Australia is about as far from Rushy Lagoon as you can get it doesn't mean that the events that occur in that part of Tasmania do not have direct implications both for the good governance of Australia and for an enlightening look at how this particular government operates when it comes to these sorts of decisions. But it also reflects much more broadly on the trend that is happening across agricultural land, when land is taken out of production and moved to basically a non-productive state, particularly when it comes to food production.

I will preface this contribution by saying I am not opposed to foreign investment in Australian agriculture. The Esperance sand belt, which is one of the most productive parts of the Australian Wheatbelt, would not have been opened up the way it was but for foreign investment—in that case, from America. It's very interesting to note that, whilst that foreign investment was very important to the opening up of that Esperance zone, it is now almost universally within the hands of Australian farmers producing grain not just for Australia but for the world. It is, as I say, one of the most consistent and productive parts of Australia.

So I am not rising to speak about Rushy Lagoon because it is a foreign investment alone, but I am rising with great concern about this entanglement of foreign investment, government funding, government backed schemes to value carbon units—Australian carbon credit units, as they're called—and the outbidding of Australian farmers by 30 per cent for land that should be in the business of producing food and fibre, not just for Australia but for the world. You can take any one individual property and say, 'Taking that out of production doesn't really matter.' But if you do it over and over again—and there are 225 examples of property being tied up with carbon unit production in the state of Western Australia alone—you will materially decrease our access to food and fibre both in this country and for export to the world.

What has happened here with Rushy Lagoon is a very murky conflagration of a foreign investor buying a very, very large piece of Australian farmland—at one point in the near past, it ran something like 8½ thousand head of cattle and 22,000 head of sheep—taking it out of food production and putting it into trees. Again, we need trees. We need agroforestry. We need the production of timber in this country. But what makes this very, very murky is that a large chunk of the investment dollars in this project has come from a government instrument, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, and seemingly, though I cannot say this for sure, a large part of the revenue model for this particular sale and the price paid—again, significantly above what local farmers were able to offer—comes through the supposed value in Australian carbon credit units.

So we have a deal with a foreign business backed with Australian government cheap money—it's not cheap money; it's taxpayers' money, but, from the corporate world's point of view, it's cheap money because they don't have to contribute it—on the basis of Australian government regulated carbon credit units and done in a way which is extraordinarily non-transparent, particularly to the farming community in that area, who face the impacts of that land being taken out of production.

Those opposite say, 'Oh, well, there'll be some trees planted, so there will be some forestry jobs created.' I'm a huge supporter of forestry jobs, and what the WA Labor Party did to the Western Australian forestry industry is an absolute disgrace. But the fact is—having been involved in agriculture myself, including in livestock production and timber production—that the jobs that disappear through the loss of livestock production are not replaced if that farmland is taken into timber production. They simply are not replaced.

It's not just the direct jobs. The sheep industry is very labour intensive. The cattle industry is to a lesser degree, but the sheep industry is particularly labour intensive. You need the shearers. You need the veterinarians. You need the support services. You need the agricultural product supply in your local community. You need all these things which give life to communities, which give economic substance to communities. Replacing them with trees not only diminishes our ability to provide high-quality protein and high-quality natural fibre to the world but also weakens the economic base of those communities. There is no doubt about that.

If you do a straight swap between livestock production and a timber producing enterprise, and if it were an Australian farmer who made that decision, fine. That's their right. That is absolutely their right. But this isn't an Australian farmer; this is a foreign company backed by government money on the basis of government regulated carbon credits. It's mind boggling. The fact that that company could come along and pay something like 30 per cent above market value—it's great for the seller, absolutely. But is it good for agriculture? Is it good for Australia? Is it good for that local community?

The fact that the government instrumentality, the CEFC, is putting its money into it is what should make it a problem for this government, but they don't have a problem with it. They don't have a problem with it because they want to see these carbon units, these carbon credits, having some sort of a market. So they've got to shoehorn activity like this into the economy through a huge investment, through the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and other similar investments right around Australia—there are 225 in my home state of Western Australia—which means that companies like this foreign entity could outbid local farmers who are producing the food and fibre that Australia and the world needs.

Recently in the media there have been question marks over how long Australia will actually be self-sufficient in terms of food production. That's shocking that that's even entering the debate. A very, very short period of time ago, we exported food and fibre to the world. We produced enough food and fibre for three times the population of Australia. We were massive net contributors to the world. We stopped people from falling into malnutrition. We stopped people from being at the point of starvation. We helped feed the world. Now, it's actually entered the public discourse that we are going to have to consider a situation where Australia is a net food importer. It's absolutely shocking and shameful, and it does reflect on government policy, which has effectively, in multiple ways, green-lit this particular project at Rushy Lagoon.

It was the government, first of all, that had to approve the foreign purchase. It was the government, through its Clean Energy Finance Corporation, that funded the project. We haven't seen the business model, but the reporting that's out there says that it's the government that controls the carbon units and the system of carbon credits that is the business model of this project. So the government has its finger in this pie in every way it possibly can. It's got investment. It's the regulator. It's the decider on the foreign investment.

That is just an extraordinarily murky and dangerous combination, especially, as I have said, when this is not a one-off event. This has brought it into the public spotlight, but these kinds of projects are cropping up right around Australia in high-quality agricultural land. It is simply not true that this is now happening in marginal country. This is happening in high-value rainfall land. It's happening in places like Boyup Brook in my home state of Western Australia. It's happening in Rushy Lagoon in Tasmania. This should be an issue that concerns every Australian.

Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank Senator Colbeck for his motion, which One Nation strongly supports. Rushy Lagoon is Tasmania's largest agricultural property, covering 21,745 hectares in the north-east of Tassie. The property sold recently for $142 million, with settlement due last week. The new owner is a special-purpose vehicle called Tasmania Natural Asset Trust, TNAT, with three shareholders. The federal government, through the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, contributed $69 million—almost half. This is taxpayer money, not government money. The remaining $73 million came from UK investment companies Gresham House and Aviva Investors. The latter has BlackRock as its largest shareholder.

The previous owners were New Zealand's Pye family, who held the property for 30 years. In that time, the Pye family built the Ringarooma River irrigation pipeline, which, with dams and 11 centre pivots, provided irrigated cropping across 1,100 hectares. What an amazing achievement. This supported a massive dairy operation, with two automated milking parlours and substantial storage vats. The shearing sheds and stockyards supported 30,000 head of livestock. Improvements included grain and potato storage sheds to feed the world. The property has a main homestead and workers cottages. In short, until the Albanese Labor government got its dirty hands on Rushy station, the property was actively involved in growing food to feed Australia and the world with foresight and ingenuity.

This sale is a perfect example of the Albanese government hollowing out the bush, including by covering prime farmland with industrial solar and wind installations, transmission lines and, in this case, pine plantations. For those who don't know—I learned this recently—nothing native grows under pine. Over the next five years, the new owners plan to plant roughly 12 million radiata pine seedlings across 9,000 hectares of the farm to generate an estimated 3.2 million carbon dioxide credit units—try eating them!—each production cycle.

There it is. This ideology driven, delusional, dishonest Labor government is turning Tasmania's largest agricultural producer into a subsidised farm for carbon dioxide credits. In case the government wants to pretend this was nothing to do with them, the Albanese government provided an $8.8 million grant under the Support Plantation Establishment program before the land sale had been approved by the Foreign Investment Review Board. It was a taxpayer funded grant. Turning productive farmland into a timber plantation was planned and financed through deliberate Albanese government policy. Taxpayer money is being used to destroy productive farmland. It is a measure in part justified through the timber production, which will eventually be used for housing, so they say, which could happen in 25 to 30 years time when the trees are ready for harvest. That's not going to help the people sleeping in cars, sleeping under bridges, sleeping in tents and sleeping in caravans right around Australia because of this government's policies. Given the miserable performance of this Albanese government in providing for the housing industry, we might still need the timber in 30 years time.

By the way, those jobs Labor is claiming will be created are largely short-term jobs ripping out 100 years of farm improvements and then planting seedlings. That's it. The real, breadwinner jobs will occur during harvesting, and those jobs will be 25 to 30 years away. The local community will not survive until then, but Labor and the Greens don't care about that. This agenda is about sacrificing the bush to win votes in the city. It's about sacrificing the regions, which feed Australia, which are crucial for the income of this country, to satisfy the city. Until the trees are mature, all the Tasmania Natural Asset Trust will produce is woodchips, most likely to be burnt for electricity to earn Albanese government issued large-scale generation certificates.

Let's review it so far. The Labor government spent $69.9 million to force the price of Tasmania's largest agricultural producer so high that local farmers could not afford to buy it. It knocked them out of the market. Then they spent another $8.8 million to encourage the new owners to grow timber, not food. Then they will spend more taxpayer money giving certificates for woodchipping those trees and in turn burning them for power. This is insane. Under this arrangement, the government is giving money to itself and destroying our best farmland and productivity in the process.

The truth is that Australia does not need this timber. According to ABARES, there are already 271,000 hectares of timber plantation in Tassie alone, part of 1.6 million hectares of timber plantation right around Australia. Nine thousand hectares of timber going into the national estate of 1.6 million hectares is not going to make any difference to timber supply. This is a lie. If the government were serious about increasing our plantation area, it would look to the 800,000 hectares of native plantation forests that have recently been locked up to prevent logging, despite there being seven million hectares of suitable forests. It just gets worse and worse.

Logging has never taken a large percentage of the national timber estate—just 10 per cent—and logging does not destroy those forests. They remain habitat for native fauna and flora because they're selective. Of course, this does not include old-growth forests, which One Nation would protect. I note the Greens and the Labor Party are actively clear-felling old-growth forests for industrial wind and solar installations and the related access roads and transmission lines, yet non-destructive logging is the problem, so they say. The real reason Australia's timber supply is falling is that timber mills can't pay their power and energy bills. Net zero power costs and intrusive bureaucracy are killing our precious timber industry. One Nation will lower power prices—we've given you the policies—remove the red tape, remove the green tape and remove the blue UN tape and encourage the Australian timber industry and the jobs it creates. We want jobs now, not in 30 years.

Rushy Lagoon is about hollowing out the bush and hollowing out the regions. It's about this Albanese government's ideological war on red meat and dairy in the name of saving the planet from nature's harmless trace atmospheric gas, carbon dioxide. Importantly, the war on cows is based on supposed science that is fundamentally wrong. The methane cycle has no impact on the environment. It's a closed loop. A more important question is this: what are people going to eat if this Labor government continually destroys Australia's agricultural capability? Only last week, SunRice laid off 78 workers in the Deniliquin and Leeton food processing plants because this government is knowingly, deliberately, deceitfully taking irrigation water off farmers and sending it out to sea. Listen to this: last year, over 4,000 gigalitres of water were sent out to sea against a basin plan target of 2,000 gigalitres—double the target wasted into the ocean. Why? It was so irrigators could not use the water to grow food and fibre to feed and clothe the world. Go for it, Labor! You're destroying farming in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia.

Labor is just one part of the uniparty. The other part of the uniparty, the Liberal-Nationals coalition, introduced the Murray-Darling Basin Plan in their 2007 Water Act, which has a list of aims for the act, one of which is to enforce international agreements. What the hell is that doing in our water act? Farming industry body TasFarmers strongly condemned the buyout of Rushy Lagoon, calling it a 'disgraceful outcome' that locks up prime dairy and beef country into a 'monoculture pine plantation'. They nailed it on both. It is just so they can 'tick a carbon abatement box'. A TasFarmers survey revealed that 99 per cent of local community respondents oppose the sale—99 per cent. For this reason, the new owners are now talking about undertaking ecotourism and community projects to moderate the fallout, and the state Liberal government is now holding an inquiry into its own stupid decision to allow the purchase. I mean, this is farcical. One Nation will do everything in its power to unwind this deal and ensure Australia's best farmland is devoted to food production—to food.

Australia's farmers have had enough of the Liberal-Labor-Greens war on the bush in the name of saving the environment, killing the environment in the name of saving the planet. One Nation will bring this agenda to a halt on day one of our government.

Sean Bell (NSW, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) | Link to this | 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.

Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Industry and Innovation) | Link to this | Hansard source

That's so dishonest; you're so dishonest. Why do you hate jobs?

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

Have you got a point of order there?

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

Senator Ayres? Senator Bell, you have the call.

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

I'm glad Senator Ayres is paying attention to this speech. He's paying a little bit more attention than the minister was paying to our press release on keeping Australians safe. It's good to see you paying attention. You are switching off now!

We've got a Labor government breaking the energy system. Then who do they call when they've done this, when they've driven up electricity prices so high that once-profitable manufacturing businesses can no longer compete? Who do they call in? They're forced to go back to the taxpayer because the net zero obsession that they have has meant, for these once-profitable industries that provided jobs and security to the people of our country, to the people of the Hunter and to the people of New South Wales, they've destroyed them.

We know that Tomago needs huge amounts of reliable electricity 24 hours a day. You cannot tell an aluminium smelter to wait until the wind picks up. You cannot shut the pots down when solar generation disappears. You need dependable power. After years of closing the reliable generation and forcing the system towards intermittent renewables, Labor is now spending billions to compensate a major industrial user for the cost of that policy. For that sort of money, Australia should be asking how much permanent, reliable energy generation we could have built instead. One Nation has been pointing this out. We've been calling on the government to invest in coal-fired power stations. But they've let the ones that we have fall apart. They've abandoned them. In doing so, they've abandoned the reliable, affordable, effective energy generation that powered things like Tomago.

Now they're asking the taxpayer to power Tomago. There's no way to infinitely bail our way out. The promises they make about intermittent power are simply not true. Windmills and industrial-scale solar blanketing agricultural land is not the solution. Then they won't even consider things like nuclear. That's all because anything down that path destroys their argument, destroys their vehicle towards the targets that they have legislated and set for their net zero obsession.

How many more industries could we have if we had even more coal fired power, if we had even more reliable generation? They're bailing out Tomago, but think about how much more we could have if we had even more coal fired power. The opportunity cost that we have witnessed and the amount of loss and decline we have seen from Labor's failure to secure reliable dispatchable power in favour of intermittency boggles the mind. That is Labor's net zero economics. Labor's obsession with making energy expensive is what's putting Australia's industry in danger.

Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Industry and Innovation) | Link to this | Hansard source

You're a mind-boggling unit—that's what you are!

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

Order, Senator Ayres!

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

It appears that the Labor government does not want the people of Australia to hear what I have to say, but I'm going to say it anyway.

Tomago and Rushy Lagoon look like different stories. They are not. They are both examples of governments using enormous amounts of public money to force economic activity to fit their chosen political target. At Rushy Lagoon, taxpayers helped a carbon investor beat agriculture. Tomago taxpayers are asked to rescue industry from the price of energy. They're asked to rescue industry from Labor—the same government that tells Australians the transition is delivering cheap power and stronger industry. They're the ones who have driven Tomago to the brink of bankruptcy. They're the ones that Australian jobs now have to be rescued from. They've lit the house on fire. They're spraying a bit of water on it and asking for a thankyou. You can't make this up.

Much of this spending is also dressed up so it does not look like ordinary spending. Loans are called 'investments'. Risk is shifted onto public balance sheets. Guarantees are treated as if they're free. But there is no magic government money. There is taxpayer money, borrowed money and taxpayer risk. If these projects are as cheap and commercially irresistible as Labor claims, then why do they need so much taxpayer help? Why does this government have to underwrite them? Why are consequential loans required? Why does Canberra keep inventing new schemes to make their failed economics work?

Australians are paying more for electricity while being told that the technology driving the transition is cheaper. Families do not care what a government model says electricity should cost. They care what appears on their ever-growing bills. Manufacturers care about whether they can keep operating. Businesses care about whether they can stay competitive. Tomago cares about whether it can get reliable electricity at a price that keeps the smelter open. Under Labor, they couldn't. That is the future that Labor created. That is the path that we are facing—a future where our manufacturing, our industries, our farms cannot stand on their own two feet. They don't have the power to run. The market has been perverted, and we see these outcomes which are so detrimental to our future productivity and the jobs in our regions.

Then we get to the issue of the environment. The environmental hypocrisy is just extraordinary. Labor and the Greens lecture Australians—I'll give you a shout-out there, Senator McKim—about protecting nature whilst supporting the industrialisation of huge areas of regional Australia. Transmission corridors cut across farmland. Wind and solar disturb land and habitat. Roads, substations and other infrastructures have to be built. Apparently, environmental damage stops being environmental damage when it helps Chris Bowen meet a target. Regional Australians are the ones who are expected to wear it.

The towers are not being built through inner-city streets. Large renewable intermittent developments are not being concentrated beside people writing the policies. It's regional communities who are forced to bear the brunt of the infrastructure that is forced upon them by this Albanese Labor government's net zero obsession—and Rushy Lagoon fits perfectly into that pattern. A productive farm becomes an opportunity to store up carbon. Taxpayer money is making it happen, and the people who are told this is all for their benefit are expected to applaud when it's their jobs being wiped out and their communities being destroyed. Other countries are already discovering that political climate promises eventually collide with economic reality. Canada scrapped its consumer carbon price. The European governments are reworking their climate policies because of competitiveness, industrial pressure and household costs.

Eventually, the bill arrives. For many Australians, the bill is already here—and they are finding it very difficult to pay. Australia needs to learn that lesson. Instead, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Chris Bowen keep treating net zero as the organising principle of energy policy. In One Nation, we believe this is a fundamental mistake. That is why One Nation would scrap the net zero obsession. We would stop treating taxpayers as an unlimited source of risk capital for the politically favoured projects that Labor choose. We would not allow carbon credit schemes to distort the value of productive agricultural land. We would put reliability and affordability back at the centre of energy policy. We would stop pretending, like Labor does, that destroying productive capacity can somehow be called progress simply because someone's attached the word 'green' to it.

That brings us back to Rushy Lagoon, Tasmania's largest farm—productive agricultural land destroyed by Labor. Tasmanians are the ones paying for it. (Time expired)

Sue Lines (President) | Link to this | Hansard source

The question is that the motion as moved by Senator Colbeck be agreed to.