The Labour Party has said it will bring farmers into the Emissions Trading Scheme, or ETS, in 2013, two years earlier than planned, if it wins this year’s General Election.

At the weekend Labour announced its intention to introduce a 12.5 percent tax credit for businesses investing in Research and Development – worth 800 million dollars and said it would fund the move by making farmers pay for the greenhouse gas emissions of their livestock.

Labour’s economic development spokesman, David Parker, says that there is no rational reason for delaying agriculture’s introduction to the ETS until 2015 and the money generated could be well used.

“New Zealand’s in an economic malaise at the moment and it’s clear that we need not just a strong export performance from the rural sector which we have currently.

“We need to grow our exports in other sectors as other countries do, in order to do that we have to do what others countries do and that’s encourage research and development through a tax credit and we’ve announced we will introduce a 12.5 % R&D tax credit to encourage that size of the export economy.”

Mr Parker says at the moment all New Zealanders are subsiding agriculture’s emissions which he says have increased by 10 percent since 1990.

Parker says Labour is only asking farmers to pay for 10 percent of their emissions which effectively represents the increase since 1990 – and that agriculture will also benefit enormously from the R&D tax credit scheme.

However, the news has gone down like a cup of cold sick in rural New Zealand.

Federated Farmers president Don Nicolson says the move is simply outrageous and will undermine agriculture.

What they’ve done, it’s been quite useful in many ways.

“They’ve just now decreed that the ETS that they’ve sold in the past was going to save the planet from global warming, it’s now has confirmed by the Labour Party it’ just another great big dirty tax.

“And the Labour Party has just confirmed too that we can’t have cars in the country, we can’t have cows, can’t have coal, can’t have carbon dioxide and we haven’t got commonsense.”

Mr Nicolson says that Labour is making farmers out to be public enemy number one in a bid to gain votes. 

“This is a campaign that started as I said last week when Stuart Nash releasing that tirade of information about farmers not paying tax.

“He just happened to pick a selected year where farmers didn’t pay much tax because they had a loss thanks to international market place activity that Labour Party don’t seem to care about.

“They’re only worried about the here and now and the favouritism they can get out of a majority in a metropolitan or urban electorate – they don’t care about rural New Zealand.”

However, David Parker denies those allegations – saying it is simply a matter of fairness.

“Are we attacking farmers? No we’re not. We’re actually saying that everyone should pay their fair share. At the moment the agricultural sector is exempt for their agricultural emissions – they pay for their transport and power emissions just like the rest of us.

“But we pay for their increases, and the rest of the economy pay for their increases in their agricultural emissions and that distorts the economy. 

“It’s boom time down on the dairy farm at the moment and we need the money as a government to fund the Research and Development tax credit so we all in New Zealand get wealthier.”  

But it seems that it is the federations’ view which is shared by farmers around the country.

Waikato dairy farmer Neil Bateup told Country99TV he was really disappointed by the government’s move and that it would hamper New Zealand’s competitiveness in the international market place.

Ashburton sheep farmer, Verne Thomas, says while he needs to study the announcement more closely his first reaction was that it was madness.

“It’s bloody dangerous isn’t it – it’s like Russian roulette.”