This is the 50th day that Peter Spencer has been on his hunger strike.It is unfair that all farms now must be carbon sinks with no compensation.This is making farmers tree haters.They won't grow more and the smart ones will use a slow undectable poisoning to clear their land.

We need quality hardwoods in the building industry.Currently we are pillaging the New Guinea and Indonesian forests.Why not pay farmers to grow quality hardwood.Trees like super funds take a long time to mature.Young farmers could grow their own and use it as super.

Old farmers like Spencer could lease some their land to super funds and have an income from rent but could also make money in managing the forests on their land.

Using timber in the building industry has many advantages.Steel and concrete requires a lot of coal to make,whereby trees only need sunlight,soil,water and CO2.If a variety of quality harwoods are used then this encourages native wild life.

This will get the inefficient heavy hand of Govt out of farmer's lives,improve the environment,service the building industry and make farmers tree lovers.

Arjay, I agree that the use of hard wood timbers should be promoted in the building industry. Think of the jobs it would create, also, once you use a mature tree you can replacing it with another, which is better for the corbon as trees exhaub the majority of their carbon when they grow the fastest, in the early stages.

I also think that the carbon is trapped within the timber as it is only released when it either rots or is burned. So if this is right, then every house could be used to store carbon for many years.

Sounds reasonable Arjay, just so long as we start seriously reducing carbon emissions in other sectors as well, and don’t continue with Rudd’s utterly appalling imposition on some farmers by way of locking up their land / regrowth / old growth vegetation, while we get no significant action on emissions reductions in big business and coal mining….and indeed a rapid increase in these sectors.

Carbon storage from plantation timbers can only be effective if it is locked up in buildings and the like at a high rate. But it is imperative that the rate of construction of new buildings be reduced right down in line with a policy of population stabilisation, ie; a policy of stabilising the number of energy consumers and polluters.

Even if a lot more carbon-sink plantation timber is to be used in the building industry, the amount of energy, which currently means fossil fuel energy, used to process this timber, to manufacture other building materials and to build the buildings would completely override the carbon storage gains.

But there is one very good reason for boosting our plantation timber industry – to get away from being a party to the rape and pillage of forests in New Guinea and Indonesia, as you mention.

Thanks rhctub and ludwig for you comments.

There are practical problems here but we have not tried to solve them.Trees in dry areas take a long time to grow.We however have not spent money on developing faster growing native species.Presently we grow a lot of bluegum in wet areas but ignore the other species such as tallow wood and iron bark as a forest species.Our trees unlike pine forests can withstand bush fires.We have to explore many ways to develop forests such as using sewerage for moisture and nourishment.

The super funds would be a good source of finance.This could be encouraged by Govt tax relief.Perhaps Spencer's land is not suitable for forests but we have been too lazy and not explored ways to make it work.Human ingenuity is an amazing thing and we have been too defeatist recently in tackling the problems we now face.

It is nonsense that farmers are not conservationists. The keyboard greens in cities ought look first to their consumption before criticising farmers.

For decades our family resisted the demands of government to drain a large and attractive coastal lagoon on a property. We were threatened with all sorts of legal action. Coastal lagoons were not PC at a time when the council was looking for more land for developers and then there was the 'problem' of salt water mozzies.

Other property owners around Australia with fresh and brackish water lagoons finally gave in to the threats of government and pristine habitats were lost forever while profits were made by the white shoe brigade and councils pushing development to increase their rates base (and councillor remuneration). The only friends (and stalwart ones a that) of farmers who tried to preserve their lagoons were the local duck shooting clubs, who had had always been active in conservation and where they could, bought up low-lying swamp land.

The Queensland government presumes to tell farmers how to manage their land while it was angered by protests against its own plans to build over a section of the Brisbane River, having destroyed the mangroves and fish breeding flats along much of the same river. Resorts are regularly built on drained salt water swamps - no wonder fish numbers fall (cynically, recreational fishermen are blamed).

If government was really interested in conservation it would change its approach to land zoning, which has been responsible for the growth of hobby 'farms' that destroy bush and the loss of prime farming land.

As well, there would be an immediate, lasting reduction in the ridiculously high population growth targets that are being achieved by record immigration numbers. How else can the environment be protected, along with the new PC carbon sinks, other than by focussing on sustainability, NOW.

Cornflower,I don't disagree.The heavy hand of Govt is having the opposite result to what everyone wants.We have to get authoritarian Govt out of our lives since it is having an adverse effect on both farmers and the environment.

We have exteremists who want to ban cows etc and make us all vegos.Well I like my protein but also a like nuts.We could have a balance here whereby we do subsidise our protein needs with nut trees.This will have added advantages for humans as well as the environment.

It is all a matter of education and developing better technologies to make nut protein cheaper.Peter Spencer could have the Govts carbon sink in the form of a nut farm,but alas the purist gestapo green movement want nothing else but native.People to them on this planet are a pest to be eradicated,with the exception of themselves.google Maurice Strong of the UN and you will see what I mean.