Trees Before Tucker: Net Zero Land Grab Costs Victorian Families — Again
Family First's Jane Foreman says a Herald Sun exposé revealing carbon-credit funds and big polluters are buying up Victorian farms — including an entire Alpine cattle station and as many as 30 dairy farms — to plant forests instead of food, proves exactly what she has long warned: Labor's reckless pursuit of net zero is stripping Victoria's ability to feed itself, and families will pay for it at the checkout, again.
Mrs Foreman says the Herald Sun revealed that 31,000-hectare Cobungra Station, a working cattle and sheep property in the Victorian Alps, was sold in July for more than $50 million to carbon fund Silva Capital — whose major backers, Rio Tinto and BHP, need the resulting Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs) to meet their own emissions obligations under Labor's Safeguard Mechanism, rather than actually cleaning up their operations.
It is not an isolated case. The same investigation confirmed German-owned Otway Silva has already bought as many as 30 Victorian dairy farms and converted them into blue gum forests to generate carbon credits, while the nationwide land grab has seen Tasmania's largest farm, Rushy Lagoon, sold for $142 million — nearly $70 million of it courtesy of the Albanese Government's own green bank, the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.
For big polluters, the maths is brutally simple: buying up regional paddocks for 'revegetation' is around 60 per cent cheaper than actually cutting their own emissions. The National Farmers Federation says polluters are being let off the hook while regional communities are hollowed out, and wants Australia to follow New Zealand's lead by capping farm-to-forest conversions at 25 per cent of any property. SEC Newgate's new Mood of the Bush survey confirms regional support for net zero is collapsing as the true cost of the policy becomes impossible to ignore.
"Every dairy farm turned into a blue gum plantation and every Alpine grazing block converted to forest is less milk, less meat and less food grown in Victoria — and that shortage lands squarely on the shopping bill of Victorian families who are already being crushed by the cost of living," said Mrs Foreman. "This isn't an accident, it's the direct, predictable result of a net zero ideology that lets billion-dollar polluters like Rio Tinto and BHP buy their way out of cleaning up their own mess, using cash that in some cases comes straight from Canberra's own green bank"
"Families are being asked to pay more for groceries so mining giants can tick a climate box on paper while Victoria's food bowl disappears under pine and gum trees. Premier Ben Carroll and every Victorian Labor MP need to explain why they are standing by while local farming families are outbid by carbon traders and foreign investors," Mrs Foreman said."
Family First is calling on the Albanese Government to immediately cap farm-to-forest carbon conversions in line with New Zealand's 25 per cent limit, and on Premier Ben Carroll to guarantee no further Victorian farmland is lost to carbon credit schemes without full public disclosure of who is buying, how much, and what happens to food production. Victorians deserve to know exactly how many local farms have already been sacrificed to net zero, not learn about it from a newspaper investigation.
Mrs Foreman says the farmland sell-off is further proof Victoria needs Family First's genuinely independent voice holding governments to account in the Legislative Council after November, because Victorian families are the ones paying at the checkout every time productive farmland disappears under a forest of carbon credits.
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