Labor and Greens block Rushy Lagoon inquiry as Coalition and One Nation vow to stop farm buyouts

The Coalition will launch a legislative strike in federal parliament as soon as next month to strip the Clean Energy Finance Corporation of authority to fund farm to forest conversions. It is Opposition leader Angus Taylor's direct attack on the $142 million Rushy Lagoon betrayal, where Labor weaponised its own green bank with $69 million in public funds to hijack Australian agricultural land, the Daily Telegraph reveals.

This legislation strikes straight at the heart of Labor's shameless deceit over the transaction. Anthony Albanese's government peddled the blatant lie that no buyers existed for Tasmania's premier agricultural asset. News24 exposed that cover up, revealing local farming families put forward competitive bids, some within 3% of the final price before getting crushed by their own government's taxpayer funded chequebook.

Labor ran a deceptive charade in the Senate on 13 August, letting lawmakers waste hours debating a freeze on a transaction the government's own green bank had already helped close. Senator Pauline Hanson directly challenged Treasurer Jim Chalmers to halt settlement, warning the chamber that funds had not transferred. Not a single Labor minister had the integrity to correct the record. Yet on that exact afternoon in Hobart, Tasmanian Labor frontbencher Shane Broad admitted to state parliament that the property had settled on Friday and nobody could alter the outcome. That Friday was 7 August, six full days before Hanson was left speaking to a manipulated chamber.

Rushy Lagoon represents 21,745 hectares of productive beef, dairy and sheep operations near Cape Portland in Tasmania's north east. Labor facilitated its handover for $142 million to the Tasmania Natural Asset Trust, a foreign managed vehicle controlled by British forestry outfit Gresham House. The Commonwealth's green bank dumped $69 million of public funds into the deal for a 49% stake, while the Department of Agriculture funnelled an additional $8.8 million in seedling handouts. This green trust plans to blanket 9,000 hectares of food producing soil with 12 million radiata pine trees purely to mint carbon offsets. Big industrial polluters will buy these paper certificates to mask their emissions, taking working agricultural land out of production for decades. One News has relentlessly tracked this financial trail since Gerard Rennick and Heston Russell exposed the scheme in July and Hanson dismantled Labor's cover up in the Senate in August.

Taylor targets Labor's reckless green bank machine as Anthony Albanese faces fury at Dubbo summit

Taylor's bill aims to completely strip the corporation of its bloated mandate, exposing how Labor corrupted a clean energy bank into an engine that bankrolls corporate investment funds to crush local farmers at land auctions.

"We support practical action to reduce emissions, but it should not come at the expense of our farmers, our food security and the future of regional communities," Taylor said. "It is extraordinary that taxpayers are being asked to help investment funds outbid farmers for Australian farmland."

The economic vandalism driving Labor's agenda is brutally clear. The Daily Telegraph reports corporate polluters are snapping up productive agricultural land to plant trees because wiping out farms is cheaper than cleaning up their own industrial operations. Because seizing farmland costs less than actual pollution reduction, these multi national funds will throw around taxpayer backed cash that no regional family bank could ever match. Thousands of these carbon schemes have already spread across millions of hectares of Australian farmland.

Nationals leader Matt Canavan directly targeted Labor's destructive agenda, saying "the Liberals and Nationals will repeal Labor's failed net zero laws and stop taxpayer money being used to buy up the farms that feed us". The National Farmers Federation is demanding protections similar to New Zealand's, which legislated limits on farm to forest conversions to safeguard national food supplies.

NFF president Hamish McIntyre confirmed the agricultural sector is "concerned about whether government backed financing arrangements are creating market distortions that disadvantage other buyers". Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is expected to face questions over his government's reckless green bank rigging when he confronts angry regional communities at the Bush Summit in Dubbo today.

Albanese government peddled lie of zero interest as local bids sat within 3% of the winning price

The government's propaganda machine has refused to shift. Albanese ministers repeatedly claimed there was virtually no commercial interest in the massive asset while it sat on the market, with the Clean Energy Finance Corporation still peddling the excuse that the property had "been on the market several times since 2018, available for anyone to purchase".

News24 tore that narrative apart, revealing several local farming operators submitted highly competitive offers, with some bids landing within 3% of the eventual purchase price. On a $142 million sale, that puts local Australian money at approximately $138 million. The Daily Telegraph confirmed the final tender drew an impressive field of serious bidders, including multiple traditional agricultural producers offering amounts close to what the trust ultimately paid. Labor's green bank threw in $69 million of taxpayer money, directly manipulating the outcome and rigging the sale against local families.

The Clean Energy Finance Corporation can't claim it didn't know who it was beating, because its money sat inside the winning bid. Hanson had already told the Senate that Australian buyers offered between $70 million and $75 million across the property's earlier listings, and that the subsidised offer "effectively lifted the value of the purchase to $142 million" and priced local buyers out.

TasFarmers president Nathan Cox called out the sheer absurdity of Labor's green funding model when speaking to News24: "If the carbon credit business model would appear so successful, why would it need that amount of government funding to get it off the ground?" A regular farmer coming forward with an enterprise requiring that level of subsidised backing, he noted, "we'd never get it. The banks wouldn't touch it. The government wouldn't touch it."

Labor's green bank payout completely buried local competition in the final round of bidding. According to News24's reporting, local farming offers reached within 3% of the final total, coming in around $138 million against the winning $142 million bid.

Local offers in the final round, about $138 million

The winning bid, $142 million

The Clean Energy Finance Corporation's $69 million injection handed the Commonwealth a 49% stake in the buyer. Australian farmers lost their land by a narrow margin that taxpayers' $69 million cash splash covered 16 times over, only for Labor to turn around and falsely tell the public that nobody else wanted the farm.

Deceptive timeline reveals Labor let the Senate debate Rushy Lagoon days after secret settlement

Line up the dates and Labor's deliberate cover up completely unravels.

Labor Minister Tim Ayres dodged direct questions from Senator Pauline Hanson on 13 August, attempting to hide behind obscure soil classifications and bogus job projections. Either the minister was completely clueless about a massive land deal his own government co owned, or he knowingly misled parliament and allowed the Senate to spend hours debating an intervention on a sale that had already been quietly finalised behind closed doors.

The official paper trail exposes the exact same culture of deceit. TasFarmers president Nathan Cox slammed the government's lack of transparency, telling News24 that "every federal Labor minister has been evasive", while legal freedom of information requests filed by the public were stalled with "extension after extension" before being returned "so heavily redacted they are not much use at all". His scathing assessment leaves no doubt: "There's definitely something to hide here."

Rebecca White's own father says the "no buyer" story is nonsense

The political uprising against Labor's green bank land grab has erupted inside the party's own inner circle. Lindsay White, a respected Tasmanian farmer whose daughter Rebecca White serves as Labor's assistant health minister and federal member for Lyons, openly condemned the Albanese government's funding of the buyout.

"They say they couldn't find a buyer, but I think that's nonsense. Why not let the farm be divided into 22 lots and have 22 farming families. Suddenly you have a whole community," Mr White said.

His daughter was forced to admit the total breakdown in government transparency that her own ministers refuse to acknowledge. "I do know there has been a gap in information for a lot of Tasmanians and I think that's regrettable," Ms White told News24, attempting to defend the move by arguing that because the green bank "has decided to become a joint equity partner", the public "will get the return on that investment". That promised payback consists solely of paper carbon credits and pine logs, with the very first commercial harvest sitting roughly 30 years away.

TasFarmers chief executive Nathan Calman exposed how Labor ministers are actively abandoning their statutory duties to push this green agenda. He warned that under the Carbon Credits Act, Agriculture Minister Julie Collins, the Labor member for Franklin, holds direct legal responsibility to guarantee an approved carbon project will not compromise regional food security. That key obligation, Calman stated, "isn't being taken seriously" by the Albanese cabinet.

Labor and Greens cartel blocks scrutiny of Rushy Lagoon buyout while local MPs push inquiry through

Labor and the Greens have repeatedly teamed up in a desperate bid to shut down public scrutiny and block every attempt to investigate the deal. The Labor Greens coalition deliberately ran out the clock to kill Senator Richard Colbeck's federal Senate inquiry on 12 August, before moving to vote down Premier Jeremy Rockliff's state inquiry the very next day. That state motion barely survived, passing 17 votes to 15 only because courageous independents David O'Byrne, George Razay, Craig Garland and Carlo Di Falco refused to let Labor bury the truth.

Labor politicians openly sneered at accountability. Labor's Dean Winter mocked the attempt to inspect the deal, sarcastically declaring "Welcome to Tasmania, please take a seat in the witness box" to attack the idea of putting investors under oath. Tasmanian Labor shadow minister Shane Broad went even further, dismissing the parliamentary committee as a "sham kangaroo court", while Timber, Furnishing and Textiles Union state secretary Danny Murphy chimed in to smear the investigation as a threat to local jobs.

Despite Labor's frantic wall of silence, the government's narrative is falling apart from the inside. Labor's own deputy leader in Tasmania, Janie Finlay, shattered party unity by condemning the federal decision as "a terrible decision". Meanwhile, Premier Rockliff blasted the sheer stupidity of the Albanese government's green bank intervention, stating point blank that the deal fails every basic pub test. "To use taxpayers money to convert Tasmania's largest farm into trees is one of the dumbest things I've seen in 25 years in politics," the Premier declared.

Labor spends 69 million taxpayer dollars to turn working food bowl into 30 year pine tree scheme

Taxpayers still hold one final lever to halt Labor's payout. The remaining $8.8 million seedling grant, which Senator Richard Colbeck referred to the Auditor-General as a direct violation of the program's own funding rules, has not yet been released. Asset manager Jonno Craven confirmed the public funds "will only be paid after the planned planting activity occurs", with 12 million pine seedlings currently sitting in a Devonport nursery waiting to be dumped into productive agricultural soil.

One Nation launched the attack on Labor's reckless agenda early. Senator Pauline Hanson told parliament on 13 August that the deal "stinks all the way from Tasmania to Canberra", while Senate whip Sean Bell declared to the chamber that "this is why One Nation will scrap net zero". One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce summed up the Albanese government's madness in five words: "Canberra is off its chops."

The green bank's executive director Heechung Sung defended the deal, insisting "carbon markets are not an existential threat to farming" and claiming green offsets and food production "can and do sit side-by-side". Labor's green bank just burned $69 million of public funds proving that claim completely false. Once those seedlings hit the ground and the Albanese government hands over the final $8.8 million cash splash, 9,000 hectares of food producing land will be locked away for 30 years growing paper carbon credits instead of feeding Australian families.