Nine months ago, when John Howard was still running the place, his government introduced into Parliament a piece of proposed tax law that stank of a rort. The date was September 20.

We didn't know it at the time, but when Parliament adjourned that night it wouldn't meet again before Howard called the November election that killed his government and evicted him from political life.

First, though, there was the bill entitled Tax Laws Amendment (2007 Measures No. 6) Bill 2007 that so offended Tasmania's Greens senator, Christine Milne, when she saw it that September morning last year. 

"I find it disgraceful that any government should be so keen to rush this through without appropriate scrutiny," Milne told the Senate. She was "appalled" that "this appalling bill" was not being sent to a parliamentary committee for "proper analysis", and she pledged to make it an election issue in country seats if the Coalition tried to "drive it through the Parliament". The Democrats' Andrew Bartlett agreed. "The last thing I want to see is tax deductability that ends up being a big taxpayer-funded rort," he said. 

The Howard bill proposed two measures. One, it offered grants for tobacco growers who left the industry. And two, more significantly, it offered lucrative tax concessions for the establishment of so-called forest carbon sinks. That is, corporate investors could put money into plantations of new trees as a tradeable tax break to offset the carbon emissions being belched into the atmosphere by Australian industry. 

Or as Christine Milne put it, with heat, last September: "I don't know if the [Howard] Government knows what it is doing with this legislation, but there will be a riot in rural Australia when they find out that the cashed-up large emitters - that is, the cement companies, the aluminium companies, the energy corporations - can effectively use their profits to take land [and water] out of agricultural production [to establish plantations of trees] in the context of setting up a national carbon emissions market … 

"You have logging going on in primary forests in Tasmania, Victoria and south-east NSW. You are knocking down primary forests and you now [propose] giving tax deductions to the big emitters to drive farmers off their land and take more water out of the system. You cannot intervene to distort the carbon market, to porkbarrel the forest industry and the big emitters at the expense of farmers. This is an appalling piece of legislation." 

So what's happened under Labor? 

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