Australia has relied very heavily on the Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) sector to pretend we are even going close to making some headway in decreasing our greenhouse gas emissions.

In fact, the latest greenhouse gas emissions data claims that LULUCF emissions have decreased by 110.5 per cent since 1990 and, just this year, accounted “for a net sink equivalent to 3.5 per cent of Australia’s national inventory” in the year to March 2019.

We started claiming net reductions from the LULUCF sector in the September quarter of 2014.

The latest State of the Forests report states that “The net increase in forest area over the period 2011 to 2016 was 3.9 million hectares.”

That sounds good except we just lost over 1 million hectares in a few days and, from what I can gather, that won’t be considered.

The Focus on Land Sector Estimates fact sheet states that “These estimates of forest change attempt to abstract from temporary factors affecting area of forest cover including from fire and cyclical climatic effects.”

What does that mean?

Are we assuming that everything that has died from drought and fires will all come back quickly and so we just pretend they are still providing a net sink? Do we not count the emissions from the burning of over 1 million hectares of forest and grassland?

From the outset, Australia has been manipulative and dishonest. We insisted that we be allowed to include LULUCF data and deliberately chose base years with very high land clearing rates (1990 and 2005). We insisted we be allowed to increase emissions and then, when we didn’t increase them as much as we had insisted we must, we are now wanting to subtract the difference between how bad we could have been and how bad we were, from how bad we are now.

We then embarked on the ridiculous Emissions Reduction Fund where we pay farmers who say they won’t clear a bit of land if we pay them not to. Or we pay them to replant trees which then die in the drought – or the floods or the cyclones or the fires. But the government claims the reductions anyway, not caring if they are actually delivered or if anyone was ever going to clear that land in the first place.

Yet, in the ultimate irony, it is we people who have fought to preserve some areas of native bush and to have unique areas declared national parks who are being blamed for the devastation ripping across NSW and Queensland.

Here’s a tip for Craig Kelly, Barnaby Joyce, Matt Canavan, Michael McCormack, Angus Taylor and the other fuckwits sitting on the Treasury benches – it’s CLIMATE CHANGE CAUSED BY GLOBAL WARMING you morons and your obsession with fossil fuels is what is causing it.