Did farmers do the ‘heavy lifting’ under Kyoto?

Did anyone?

By Peter Burnett

My ears pricked up last week when I heard Michael McCormack, Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the National Party, say that farmers should be exempt from any commitment Australia might make to a Net Zero by 2050 emissions target because farmers had done the heavy lifting under Kyoto.

My ears were not to deceiving me because the Agriculture Minister, David Littleproud, would soon repeat the comment (Regional Australia ‘should not pay bill for climate target‘).

Australia’s Kyoto policies

This struck me as passing strange, since I had been researching the Howard Government’s Kyoto policies, which were based on a principle of ‘no regrets’ – ie, that policies to abate emissions of greenhouse gases should not place a significant burden on the economy, the budget or key stakeholders.

And farmers are certainly key stakeholders.

Over time, this ‘no regrets’ principle started to fray at the edges. First, the government enacted a Mandatory Renewable Energy Target (MRET) in 2000. And in 2004, it committed a non-trivial $700 million for emissions reduction programs, although the lion’s share of this was aimed at fossil fuel industries, who were key government supporters.

Finally, in 2006, the government announced a domestic Australian cap-and-trade emissions trading scheme to be established by 2012, although it lost office before the scheme was fully developed.

Anyhow, the point is that even though the Howard Government did start to move away from ‘no regrets’ as public opinion shifted, at no time did any of their Kyoto- or climate-badged policies place any significant obligations on farmers (or on anyone for that matter).

They were some programs aimed at supporting farmers to take voluntary action, such as the Farm Forestry Program, which sought to encourage the incorporation of commercial tree growing and management into farming systems, but of course these don’t count as burdens.

So, if there were no Kyoto regrets, might ministers McCormack and Littleproud been thinking of something else?

Maybe the heavy lifting was for the EPBC Act?

Perhaps they were thinking of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act)? Many farmers were outraged in 2001 when Environment Minister Robert Hill listed the Brigalow Ecological Community in Queensland as endangered. This meant that a farmer could not clear a significant area in brigalow country without an approval under the EPBC Act.

In practice, however, very few farmers seek land clearing approvals under the EPBC Act. Between the commencement of the Act in July 2000 and July 2008 (ie, early in the first Kyoto commitment period) the EPBC Act was only applied to 10 agricultural-related land clearing projects involving the removal of 6,200 ha of vegetation, constituting less than 0.2% of total national land clearing over the period (Macintosh 2009).

In any event, the EPBC protects biodiversity, not the climate.

Perhaps they were thinking of state land clearing laws? Certainly, several states did pass land-clearing laws in the 1990s. The most significant states here are Queensland and New South Wales, because that is where most of Australia’s land clearing was occurring at the time.

New South Wales began to limit the land clearing in a significant way in 1995, initially by policy and then by law, passing the Native Vegetation Conservation Act in 1997 and replacing this with the Native Vegetation Act 2003.

Land Clearing in Queensland in the First Kyoto Commitment Period

Queensland also began to restrict land clearing in 1995, enacting the Vegetation Management Act in 1999 and introducing a new regime in 2003-2004 with the aim of ending broad-scale land clearing by 2006. This new regime was apparently extremely effective, so, as a case study, it is the more interesting of the two states.

Andrew Macintosh from ANU has explained that when the Queensland reforms of 1999 and 2003-2004 were introduced, the Australian Government was engaged in negotiations with Queensland over the design of the laws and financial assistance for affected landholders.*

These negotiations were acrimonious and failed. As a result, the 1999 laws were watered-down and their commencement delayed, and there was no financial assistance, federal or state.

In fact, the Australian Government wasn’t just negotiating with Queensland, but with all states and territories. And its objective, at least on the surface, was not to support Kyoto but to strengthen the National Strategy for the Conservation of Australia’s Biodiversity, which had just received a poor review.

But back to Queensland, which rolled out a $150 million package to support the 2003-2004 laws. Macintosh found that while this helped farmers, it by no means eliminated their opposition and there were ongoing complaints about the scheme in operation.

Interestingly, Macintosh interviewed Peter Beattie about the Queensland scheme some years later. Mr Beattie, who was Queensland Premier at the time, said that there was little doubt the laws would have been introduced irrespective of concerns about climate change.**

Apparently it’s the same story with New South Wales; the laws made no mention of climate change and it was not raised as a significant issue when the laws were being designed.**

Who’s been doing the heavy lifting?

So, did farmers do the heavy lifting under Kyoto? The answer is ‘no’, because nobody did any heavy lifting under Kyoto. It is certainly true however that environmental laws have had an impact on farmers and that this has been the cause of considerable grief over the years, although sometimes affected farmers have been compensated.

The underlying and more difficult question is whether it is fair to curtail or even prevent land clearing, in the interests of protecting and conserving the environment?

For my own part, although I would not acknowledge an absolute right to clear land, as some farmers claim, I do argue that environmental laws are for the benefit of all. As a result, where they have a disproportionate impact, for example by removing from farmers a right to clear land, I believe we should spread the burden of those impacts across the entire community.

This might mean that we should be making structural adjustment payments to some farmers.

Or perhaps we should pay them for ecosystem services from their properties.

In that regard, the government is currently developing (again)*** trials for an Environmental Stewardship Program. If the trials are successful, we may see farmers being paid to protect or restore biodiversity on an ongoing basis.

In my view this would be a welcome development.

*Andrew Macintosh, ‘the Australia clause and REDD: a cautionary tale’, Climatic Change, 2012, Volume 112, Issue 2.

** Andrew Macintosh, ‘Mitigation Targets, Burden Sharing and the Role of Economic Modelling in Climate Policy’, (2014) Australian Journal of Public Administration, Volume 73 No 2.

*** An earlier Environment Stewardship Program was closed down.

Image by Alistair McLellan from Pixabay