Carbon Credits (Carbon Farming Initiative) Bill 2011
June 15, 2011
Mr Speaker, I rise before the House to speak on the Carbon Credits (Carbon Farming Initiative) Bill 2011. The Bill before the House is an attempt to provide incentives for farmers to establish carbon abatement processes.
The Coalition supports this aspiration in principle. However, typical of this Government there is a startling lack of detail in the Bill before the House. Again, the Coalition is attempting to have this oversight rectified through the Amendment put forward by the Member for Flinders. This Government has proven it cannot be trusted with public finances – so no blank cheques!
However, the Carbon Farming Initiative Bill is a piecemeal component of the Government’s overall carbon dioxide emissions reduction policy.
The introduction of the Carbon Tax in July 2012 will be the centrepiece of this Labor-Greens Government’s carbon reduction policy, which will destroy jobs at the same time it compounds the already-huge cost of living pressures imposed on Australian families.
Mr Speaker, carbon abatement measures such as the Carbon Farming Initiative mirror the Coalition’s Direct Action climate policy we took to the 2010 election.
A central component of the Coalition’s policy to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 5% on year 2000 emissions by the year 2020 is to provide voluntary financial incentives for farmers to abate carbon dioxide emissions.
Measures such as Bio-sequestration – the capturing of carbon emission in soils, trees and other biological matter – is part of this Coalition policy objective. According to the CSIRO’s Sustainable Agricultural Flagships, Dr Michael Battaglia, in the report titled “Greenhouse gas mitigation: sources and sinks in agriculture and forestry” outlined the great potential for bio-sequestration to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
In this report Dr Battaglia also found that, and I quote “we can potentially increase these stores in our rural lands and perhaps store or mitigate enough greenhouse gasses to offset up to 20% or more of Australia’s emissions during the next 40 years,” unquote.
Mr Speaker, not only does this report by the CSIRO support the climate abatement feasibility of the Coalition’s Direct Action climate policy, but contrasts greatly with outcomes this Government is foolishly accepting from the Renewable Energy Target.
Mr Speaker, I have previously raised in the House the proliferation of wind turbine construction in the electorate of Hume. The two major issues of contention with respect to wind turbine construction that are worth incorporating into this debate.
Firstly, the misguided funding this Government is providing for their construction through the Renewable Energy fund; and secondly, the choice farmers and rural landholders are being forced to make with respect to the imposition of wind turbines on their properties.
Mr Speaker, as the most recent Australian Government Productivity Commission report – titled Carbon Emission Policies in Key Economies – released on June 9 of this year made this statement (as noted in the documents “Key Points”, page 14): I quote “… Emissions trading schemes were found to be relatively cost effective, while policies encouraging small-scale renewable generation and biofuels have generated little abatement for substantially higher cost…” unquote.
Mr Speaker, this statement by the Productivity Commission comprehensively slams the farcical claims by wind turbine industry bodies such as the Clean Energy Council that Wind turbines are a viable and reliable alternative energy source to replace fossil fuels.
Mr Speaker, Wind turbine technology has proven to be neither cheap nor efficient when compared with our base-load coal technology and now as illustrated in the CSIRO report, nor when compared with the potential for bio-sequestration to abate up to 20% of Australia’s total emissions over the next 40 years.
According to the Auditor-General in Victoria this year, the cost per megawatt hour for Wind turbine technology was between 80c to $1.20, compared with brown coal which cost 35c – nearly 3 times more expensive.
Wind turbine developers are saying they are going to supply electricity including “enough clean energy to power up to 180,000 homes a year – preventing up to one million tonnes of greenhouse gas pollution entering the environment” (Rugby Wind Farm Press Release 17.05.11).
What the developers and operators can’t and won’t tell you is how they going to produce that kind of energy when it has been proven that Wind turbines operate at 30% efficiency, and that is when the wind is blowing!
Mr Speaker, bio-sequestration offers a serious carbon abatement alternative for the Australian government to pursue, which is why the Coalition took this measure to the last election under our Direct Action policy and also why we support this Bill in principle.
But measures such as the Carbon Farming initiative provide more than just another alterative for the Australian Government; it provides landholders in the electorate of Hume a real alternative to the construction of industrial wind turbines.
Mr Speaker, I have been advocating on behalf of landholders and families in my electorate to have an immediate moratorium on wind turbine construction throughout New South Wales.
One of the aims of the moratorium is to give landholders in the wind turbine developer’s sights a reprieve from the disgraceful predatory practices, such as orders of property acquisition and intimidation into signing confidentiality agreements, which some of these wind developers are subjecting landholders to.
Mr Speaker, after being subjected to 10 desperate-years of drought, it is understandable that farmers in electorates such as mine are looking for reliable sources of income with the added benefit of contributing to the abatement of greenhouse gas emissions.
This Bill seeks to create incentives for farmers and landholders to undertake voluntary land sector abatement projects. The Government will provide saleable Australian carbon credit units in return for eligible carbon offsets projects.
In particular, carbon farming would have additional environment benefits such as reducing salinity and erosion, protecting biodiversity, regenerating landscapes, improving water quality and improving agricultural soil productivity.
It may come as a surprise to many latte-sipping, inner-city bureaucrats on left of the political spectrum, but farmers in Australia have been managing and implementing sustainable soil measures for decades.
A bio-sequestration carbon farming initiative is in principle a sensible way in which farmers and landholders can derive income from carbon abatement measures; whether it is by capturing and destroying methane emissions from landfill or livestock manure, or removing carbon from the atmosphere and storing it in soil or trees, for example, by growing a forest.
Sensible and sustainable abatement measures such as these have the potential to abate 20% of Australia’s total greenhouse gas emissions over the next 40 years and means farmers don’t have to go down the destructive path of allowing the construction of industrial wind turbines on prime agricultural land.
Mr Speaker, as a consequence of the misguided implementation of the Renewable Energy Fund there has been an explosion of wind turbine applications in electorates such as mine.
This would not be a problem, except Government planning regulation in states such as New South Wales have failed to keep pace with the blitz of development applications.
Mr Speaker, this failure to adequately regulate the implementation of green schemes effectively is the Coalition’s primary concern about supporting this Government on this Bill.
Furthermore Mr Speaker, this is why the Member for Flinders has sought to amend this Bill by requesting that the actual detail of the Carbon Farming Initiative Bill be included in the legislation, rather than by regulation after the Bill in enacted.
Mr Speaker, throughout my 23 years in both State and Federal Parliaments I have adhered to a very simple principle: don’t listen to what Labor says, look at what they do.
Before the last election we had the Prime Minister declare that “there will be no Carbon Tax under the Government I lead’, only to trash this commitment for political expediency and survival.
The Treasurer claimed that the members of the Coalition were making wildly hysterical claims warning the Australian people that the Labor party could not be trusted and that a Carbon tax would be high on the Government’s agenda if re-elected.
Yet, Mr Speaker aside from the lies and the deceit contained within the opaque words of this illegitimate Government, it is their actions that cause the greatest consternation.
This abject lack of policy detail is why Labor’s Carbon Tax is being totally rejected by mainstream Australians. Without policy detail, why would the Opposition even consider supporting this huge impost on Australian families already struggling with increasing cost of living pressures?
The Government’s carbon tax will hit every Australian household. A carbon tax will unnecessarily lift electricity, grocery and petrol prices and attack jobs in our key industries. According to recently released Treasury calculations, if the Government decided to impose a $30 per tonne carbon price, the cost impact on households without petrol tax concessions would be $863 a year.
The Wollondilly region in the north of my electorate relies heavily on the jobs created by the coal mining sector. The Chief Executive of Australia’s second largest metallurgical coal exporter – Anglo American Metallurgical Coal - has warned that a $25 per tonne carbon tax could put at risk 3000 regional jobs in Queensland and New South Wales as well as up to $2 billion in planned investment.
A $26 a tonne carbon tax means 16 coal mines – some of which are in my electorate - closed, 23,000 mining jobs lost, and 45,000 jobs lost in industries like steel, aluminium, cement, glass, chemicals and motor cars.
Mr Speaker, to add further insult to Australian families, Labor’s 2011-12 Budget fails to give any details on the impact the carbon tax will have on cost of living pressures on families. The Budget does, however, contain $13.7 million taxpayer funded pro-carbon advertising blitz.
So the only details we have of the financial impact of the Government’s Carbon tax is not the price per tonne, nor the impacts on the costs of living; instead we only know how much the Government believes it needs to spend to ensure the Carbon Tax doesn’t destroy it’s re-election chances.
The Gillard Government’s unilateral step to tax carbon dioxide emissions will send jobs offshore and hurt Australia’s economy without improving the world’s environment. By contrast, the Coalition’s Direct Action climate change policy will reduce emissions in a way that is economically responsible and that won’t cost Australian jobs.
The Coalition’s Direct Action Plan will reduce emissions by 5 per cent by 2020 through creating a fund to buy back greenhouse emissions, more tree planting, better soils and smarter technology – principles that we support in this Bill.
However, Mr Speaker, the disastrous record of policy construction and implementation by the Rudd-Gillard Governments is astounding, which is why in good conscience and for the sake of good governance the Coalition could not allow this Bill to go forward without the proposed Amendment.
Mr Speaker, the Carbon Farming Initiative Bill contains very little substantive policy detail, instead relying upon regulation that will be outlined after the Bill has been enacted. Well Mr Speaker this is simply not good enough.
Mr Speaker, the Coalition will not be handing the most incompetent Government in Australia’s history a blank cheque to pay for another disastrous Home Insulation Scheme, or to fund rorts such as those allowed under the Prime Minister’s own School Halls debacle.
For those reasons, the Coalition’s amendment declines to give the Bill a second reading until the regulations giving effect to the provisions of the Bill are laid before the House.