Senator WONG (Minister for Climate Change and Water) (9:55 PM) —Obviously it is a question of what the voluntary market is willing to pay for it. But, as a matter of logic, you would not anticipate that it would be the same. The benefit of it, I think, is that it does provide a ‘learning through doing’ opportunity. So if we have a range of land management practices and agricultural practices that do have environmental benefits in terms of sequestration and that are not yet ready to be counted because the research and methodology and measurement associated with those is not at a point where it should be then it is a sensible thing to try and develop methodology that enables those to be in the voluntary market so that, through doing that, it makes it easier to make the transition to the internationally agreed framework when that recognises these activities.

So I suppose it is a staged process whereby if we can demonstrate that this works well as a voluntary measure and there are sound methodologies then I think that will be good evidence internationally for Australia to continue to advocate for what we regard as more comprehensive and more sensible international accounting rules. But to do that we have to show that this can be done robustly and sensibly, that it can be measured and that people can have confidence that a tonne of carbon sequestered through these activities is in fact a tonne of carbon sequestered.