| Sourced From |
INDEPENDENT MP Tony Windsor has warned the climate change solution he supports may not include a carbon tax or a price on carbon.
While the government has flagged a price on carbon as a priority for this term, Mr Windsor has said that paying farmers to put carbon back into the soil and get paid may be a better solution.
And fellow independent Rob Oakeshott — who also sits on the climate change committee — has called for the Department of Agriculture to be made central and “elevated, re-elevated to where it should be — one of the top three or four departments in this country and providing the solutions to not only climate change, but population, land use, planning, food security, food miles — this is the moment”.
The comments were made at an Outcomes Australia carbon management forum, which was hosted by the organisation’s chairman and former governor-general Michael Jeffery, and which brought together farmers, business groups and sustainability experts.
The pair said farmers had to be central to any plan to tackle climate change.
“The focus on soil carbon has been, in the minds of many, focused very much on the market and money. The real productivity increases from the techniques that a lot of people in this room are doing is in the pocket, what the individual gets from increased productivity — humus, organic matter, moisture retention, higher yields,” Mr Windsor said.
Malcolm Turnbull called for investment in biochar techniques when opposition leader in March last year to “suck carbon out of the atmosphere”, a proposal that later formed a key part of the opposition’s direct action approach to climate change.
“So the carbon committee, the carbon price committee, people are misconstruing that as being about a tax or an emissions trading scheme — it doesn’t necessarily have to be. It could be a price on incentives, it could be a whole range of things,” Mr Windsor said.
“It could be that a whole range of strategies are put in that take up bits of the pie and negate the need for a price — I don’t know the answer to that.”
Mr Oakeshott said people in the bush were frustrated over the government’s lukewarm response to direct action proposals.
“The moral challenge of our time is not so much climate change as a general concept, it’s to get this working on the ground on farms in the space of a price on carbon offsets and biodiversity offsets [to give] better returns to the community,” he said.
“Now is the moment . . . this is a great opportunity to break the frustration of those involved in land, water and biodiversity, to break the frustrations of not getting the answers and solutions from government and start to be the answer rather than offer the answer.”
Mr Jeffery said putting a price on carbon would give farmers a big shot in the arm because it would offer them another income stream.
“What I would see is the big emitters doing a direct deal with the farmers, no trading scheme, no middle man, a big emitter doing a deal based on the price, with a farmer who, if the price is $25, can say to the emitter ‘well, I can do a deal for $20′ while he is carrying out efficiencies to improve his land,” he said.
“The beauty of it is that it’s not inflationary, it’s not a tax, it gives options to the emitters, they don’t have to do anything — and it’s good for Ken Henry as well.”
Related posts: