Carbon Credits and Other Legislation Amendment (Integrity and Transparency) Bill 2026

Mr BIRRELL (Nicholls) (12:01): I rise to speak on the Carbon Credits and Other Legislation Amendment (Integrity and Transparency) Bill 2026. I think this is not an administrative tidy up. I think this bill is a wolf in sheep's clothing.

It's fundamentally flawed, and I think it's a regressive net zero bill. It begins with extending expanding the native title regime and removing the least cost test. It gives the minister sweeping new powers over carbon credits.

I think these are really consequential changes that will make Australia poorer and make it more difficult to do business in Australia and make it more difficult to develop our country and our resources. I think that's a retrograde step, because we need our economy to be strong and we need to be successful if we are to navigate all of the challenges that we face into the future.

The bill's most serious flaw is its expansion of the native title arrangements. Under the current act, an offsets project may be conditionally registered on native title land before consent is secured, but evidence of consent must be provided by the end of the first reporting period within five years, and sections 27 and 28 of this would make a mere native title claim an eligible interest, whether or not the title has been established at law, and impose a much more cumbersome two-stage consent process.

Section 32 would let the Clean Energy Regulator revoke a project declaration before the first reporting period where there is no reasonable prospect of consent. What problem is this solving? Native title holders already have strong protections.

Proponents must obtain consent, and holders retain a right to negotiate. The change also goes beyond the Chubb review. Recommendation 11 opposed conditional registration before consent.

It did not recommend extending eligible interests to mere claims. The review said, 'Proponents should only consider the need for and benefit of claimant consent.' The legal consequences for this are very unclear. The Indigenous Carbon Industry Network says 11 per cent of Australia's land mass is under native title claim awaiting Federal Court determination.

The National Farmers' Federation recommends a right-to-negotiate model, similar to that which exists with the future acts regime, and it says, 'Current negotiations are already difficult, protracted and sometimes not conducted in good faith, including demands for upfront payment merely to hold an initial meeting.' These incidents, according to the National Farmers' Federation, reflect a pattern of behaviour experienced by the sector nationwide.

It's not just the National Farmers' Federation. Industry concern is more broad than that. AgForce Queensland—it represents some 6,000 farmers, managing 55 million hectares—warns that there is 'substantial uncertainty', higher establishment costs, greater complexity and delays.

Woodside has raised concerns. AGL wants clarity on overlapping claims and how consent requirements can co-exist with timely project delivery. And the Business Council of Australia warns of unintended consequences and calls for 'specific guidelines for clear evidence requirements, standard forms and service level timeframes' to reduce delay and uncertainty.

Our concern, also, is that this would unleash a new wave of lawfare in Australia. The expansion risks unleashing this lawfare, delaying good-faith projects, driving up costs and pitting Australians against each other—without improving environmental outcomes. At a minimum, it requires deeper consultation and Senate committee scrutiny, involving farmers, legal experts and a broad sector across industry.

This bill also removes the least cost test, which currently requires carbon abatement purchases to avoid undue financial impact. Labor would replace that with an undefined and opaque 'value for money' test, allowing expensive credits to be purchased in pursuit of government policy. Now, the taxpayer should come first in this, but Labor's record doesn't inspire confidence.

The cost of the Capacity Investment Scheme remains undisclosed. Rewiring the Nation has blown out by at least $1 billion—probably a lot more than that. The Cheaper Home Batteries Program has risen from $2.2 billion to $8.5 billion.

And the three regional hydrogen hubs have collapsed at taxpayers' expense. That's not to mention the $155 million set aside for COP, including $6 million for hotels in Fiji. The government owes it to the Australian people to be a lot more transparent about what the cost of this is.

It can't just say, 'We're pursuing climate action, and it's the right thing to do, in our opinion.' You've got to disclose the costs of these things, and then we can have a debate in Australia about the costs and the benefits. In addition, this bill gives the minister significant powers. Part 9 would give the minister the power to shut down carbon abatement projects by legislative instrument.

Disallowance is not enough; the government has not shown that persistent noncompliance threatens this scheme or justifies such a broad power. And projects should not be torn up when the political fashions change. Again, the National Farmers' Federation has said that the power should 'be limited to genuinely exceptional circumstances', with proponents given time to transition to a new methodology, and we agree with that assessment.

This bill also supports the operation of the safeguard mechanism. From 2014 to 2023, the government was the largest buyer of carbon credits, and demand is now driven by the safeguard facilities because Labor's baselines are constantly falling and they operate as a tax on industry. Covered facilities have closed or are closing, while Australia's annual emissions reduction has flatlined under Labor.

The coalition will scrap Labor's safeguard mechanism. Now, there's an important debate to be had about climate change, its effect and what action looks like. It is an important debate, and I mentioned it in the first speech I gave in this place—that it's a serious and real problem for the globe, for everyone on the planet.

But I said this at the time and I stand by it: if we rush towards an energy transition that makes us poorer—and I made this speech in 2022, just as I came into this place, just after the government had gone to an election promising that, for their energy transition, the modelling had shown that their climate action was going to make people's bills $275 cheaper.

Well, that certainly hasn't happened. I felt that there was a real risk that if we rushed into it and lived in this delusion—and I do think it is a delusion that renewables can provide 82 per cent of our electricity whilst we remain a serious manufacturing economy—then what was going to happen, and we're seeing this already, unfortunately, was that industry was going to shift offshore to other parts of the world that don't have measures that are as punitive as ours when it comes to emissions.

Now, that's a tragedy for Australia, because we lose the economic activity of those industries and all the benefits that come with it, all the employment and everything. In many cases we were doing that in a quite efficient way, but global emissions weren't going to reduce. They were just going to go somewhere else.

That was four years ago. I think this is really playing out. People in Europe are starting to understand that if global demand for all sorts of things that require emissions stays the same and we just shift the problem to another part of the world and say, 'We've done our bit'—well, no.

We've only made our country poorer. And if we're poorer, we're less able to deal with—I acknowledge—the issues that climate change is going to throw at us. It often gets scoffed at in this place, but we should face Australia's ability to contribute to emissions reduction globally and therefore climate action, as it's called.

Various estimates have it at one to 1.5 per cent of global emissions. People like to say that the per capita issue is significant there, as if that somehow makes the emission different. It doesn't, really.

I will paraphrase a climate campaigner: it is an inconvenient truth that most of the emissions happen in Russia, India, China and the United States. If we go ahead with some of this action that's going to affect our economy and they don't, they become richer. They keep emitting, and the climate problem doesn't get solved.

We just don't have the resources to deal with it. Another point I'd like to make about the energy transition and dealing with climate change is I refuse to believe that the Labor Party are really serious about a long-term emissions reduction program in Australia until someone stands at that dispatch box as the Prime Minister in Australia and says, 'We are removing the moratorium on nuclear energy.' I think it's becoming apparent around the world—climate campaigners are starting to say—that we really do need this base-load power, the 24/7 power.

It complements renewables. Renewables can't do it all. I've talked before about Centre for Independent Studies examples and modelling from around the world that shows that renewable energy is obviously very good technology in the right place and at the right percentage of the grid.

Their assessment is that that's about 30 per cent. Since that report came out, since this government came to power, we can see now that we are going to have a significantly increased requirement for electricity in this country because of the advent of data centres. We can't really avoid that.

I think that really needs to provoke a rethink by the current government on what they do about the nuclear power moratorium in this country. I believe it will happen; I really do. I think reality will get there eventually.

We want to oppose this bill and subject it to proper scrutiny, because it will make doing business harder. That means that fewer people are employed, and that means a reduction in living standards. We're already seeing that trend damage this country and its wonderful people enormously, and we've got to turn that trend around.

So the opposition will vote against the bill. We believe it should go to a Senate inquiry so the government can hear directly from the farmers, the other stakeholders and a broad range of industry about what the consequences of this bill will be.