Mr. Paddy Purser:

I thank Senator Higgins for her questions. Carbon accounting is a very specialised subject and the answers will depend on a lot of different assumptions. It is one of those subjects where one can get the answer one wants depending on what assumptions one makes. I do not think it is my place to guess. There are national experts in that field so I am not going to get into the figures on it. What I will say, however, is that we can improve on our carbon sequestration figures in forestry by retention, thinning and diversification. However, we must be realistic as I said previously because it is not possible in many cases to do this. Often crops have gone too far, are too mature or have been grown too long without intervention and to intervene now would destabilise them and could cause massive windblown events, or similar. In many cases, we are looking at felling, redesigning and replanting with a reverse mix and a reimagining of the future management. That would be appropriate in many cases.

On the actual design, the Senator referred to using diverse species around the edges of plantations to hide or screen industrial or monocultural plantations. Policy initiatives to date have allowed or encouraged this. While we are pushing for greater levels of diverse planting, what happens is that a lot of it becomes compartmentalised so we end up with smaller monocultures. All of the diverse species go into one field and all of the broadleafs go into another but the largest part is the commercial, monoculture spruce. It is a diversification of sorts but it is not real. It does not allow for future transformation of management to continuous cover forestry. A redesign should involve the integration of species at planting stage. We have submitted proposals to the forest service on that.