Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Just before the lunch break I was asking some questions about those activities which are counted towards Australia’s international commitments and for which CPRS permits will be provided subject to the development of methodologies. In particular, I was asking about issues around measurability, additionality and leakage and asking how, if you were a person engaged in any of these activities, you would know when this would apply, what the baseline years would be and so on. I was particularly asking, in relation to fertiliser use, how that would apply, because if you are on a farm and you decide that you are going to go organic, reduce your fertiliser use or something then you are going to need to know how that is going to be calculated in order that you can start making very clear what hectarage you have covered, what volume of fertiliser you have used over a period of time and that sort of stuff. It seems to me that there is no detail about how that will happen.

The issue I will come back to is avoided deforestation. This is an issue which still is not sorted out. I know the minister referred to REDD and the ongoing negotiations, but we still do not have a clear view of how avoided deforestation is going to be accounted for. I want to know: in the CPRS permits that might be provided, is that going to include properties or activities whereby a farmer in Queensland, for example, had let native vegetation grow back and then might have been going to bulldoze that for ongoing utilisation and then decides not to? Would that be counted as avoided deforestation?

I also note, while I am on my feet, that the minister said she could not give an idea of what sort of hectarage across Australia might be counted as avoided deforestation, because that is something that the states have carriage of. The problem we have here, which makes this grossly unfair, is that every state seems to have different policies with regard to the clearance of native vegetation. In Tasmania, for example, because Tasmania has virtually no laws against land clearance, clearing native veg and so on, there would be an argument that anyone with any vegetation or forest on their land could be credited with avoided deforestation by virtue of being able to log it if it is not covered by existing legislation. So I am rather keen to get a much better sense of some reality in the debate about what sorts of time frames we are talking about before you would get robust methodologies, especially since they will need to be consistent with international best practice and what is agreed in international negotiations.