Bob Loone
While climate change and other pressures puts agricultural food production under serious threat, our federal government directly promotes and subsidises the sale of farms to Managed Investment Schemes (MIS) plantation forestry corporations. There is information that already up to a thousand productive farms in Tasmania have been sacrificed to forestry, reducing the economic productivity of that land by 85%. In just two years forestry plantations on class 1-4 land have increased from 1,373 hectares at the end of 2004 to 8,672 hectares by 31 Dec. 2006 – an average increase of 154% per year. At that rate by the year 2012 over half of Tasmania’s class 1-4 agricultural land will be lost. Gone.
Gone with it will be the varied quality jobs enjoyed by sustainable communities, only a few unhealthy low potential jobs with no genuine satisfaction will be available in forestry. Gone too will be the States food production capacity. Farmers are being squeezed out of land ownership by MIS corporations. They do it with profits derived from the federal government offering 100% tax free “investments” for rich people to finance some plantation forestry trees for one cycle only at highly inflated up front prices on MIS Corporation owned land. How will we, as custodians of this land for the future generations, justify the transfer of food-producing land to plantation forestry corporations? What do we say to our children and grandchildren when the land is gone?
The Federal Government’s MIS policy is facilitating and supporting the ‘corporation’ of Australia’s farmland via plantation forestry corporations. They are too frightened to remove the 100% tax exemption status on so-called “investments” that fuel the MIS forestry corporation’s excessive profits enabling them to rapidly increase their farm purchases. The destruction of our agricultural industry is out of control! MIS corporations are rapidly expanding.
Ordinary taxpayers have to pay more taxes or miss out on public amenities. There is a loss in tax revenue of $3,207 per hectare of land purchased by MIS Corporations. The MIS Corporations would stop their frenzied buying of farms if the Federal Government acted responsibly and removed this unfair, exclusive to forestry, 100% tax-avoidance driven so-called “investment” incentive.
Bob Loone
Deputy Mayor – Meander Valley Council
