This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

A conversation with an unnamed Yass farmer, not the interests of his farming family, had spurred the minister for energy, Angus Taylor, to seek briefings from the environment department about a listing to protect native grasslands, he told parliament on Monday.

In a personal explanation to the House of Representatives, Taylor sought to deflect further questions and a possible Senate inquiry into meetings he had with bureaucrats on the grasslands laws in 2017.

The inquiry moved by Labor and the Greens into the conduct of Taylor and the former environment minister Josh Frydenberg was narrowly voted down after it failed to gain support from One Nation senators and Cory Bernardi.

Taylor has been grilled for the last fortnight over the clearing of native grasslands at a property near Delegate on the Monaro plains owned by a company called Jam Land.

The company is chaired by his brother Richard, and Taylor himself has an interest through his family company.

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An investigation by the Guardian revealed that Taylor had asked for briefings by the federal environment department within a day or two of compliance officers attending the property to discuss the illegal land clearing with Jam Land.

But Taylor has defended his request for briefings and says that it was motivated by constituent concerns. While his family’s properties are in the seat of Eden-Monaro, there are also some of the critically endangered grasslands in Taylor’s seat of Hume, which is further north and centred on Goulburn.

“In late 2016 and early 2017, I spoke with farmers from Boorowa and Goulburn, in my electorate, and Yass, which had been in Hume until mid-2016, about this listing and their concerns with the listing,” he told the parliament.

“On 21 February 2017, I spoke with a farmer near Yass who expressed strong and detailed concerns about the revised listing, pointing out that it had occurred despite the concerns of the National Farmers’ Federation and NSW Farmers, and with little consultation with farmers themselves,” he said.

“All of these farmers were completely disconnected from our family farming operations. There had been strong antagonism expressed by the farming community about federal and state native vegetation regulation for some time,” he said. “The concern was very serious.”

He said that on the basis of these concerns, he contacted the National Farmers’ Federation to get their submission and also sought a briefing on the revised listing from the then minister’s office. He said he “made it clear [the briefing] was not to include any discussion of compliance matters”.

He said the FOI documents, obtained by the Guardian, showed that the meeting was “to answer questions on the technical aspects of the listing outcome” and that they would “stay out of completely” any compliance action under way.

The documents highlight that departmental officers were acutely aware that there was a potential for serious conflicts of interest to arise because the Taylor-controlled Jam Land was under investigation and could be facing hefty fines or an order to rehabilitate the grasslands.

Taylor said he attended a meeting on 20 March 2017.

“At no time during this meeting, was any compliance matter, or any personal interest of mine, discussed. At that meeting we discussed precisely what the department had said we would discuss.

“I have had no association with the events leading to the compliance action that has been the subject of these allegations, and I have never made a representation in relation to it. I never would. All available information supports my repeated statements that the compliance action was never raised,” he said.

“My focus was advocating for the interests of the farmers in my electorate and across the region. This is my job as the elected representative for Hume with a large farming population and agriculture sector,” he added.

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Taylor also tabled a 2014 letter from the National Farmers’ Federation that expressed “serious concerns about the revised listing”.

The letter says the federation was worried individual farmers would not be able to assess their responsibilities under the EPBC Act and that more work should be done mapping the distribution of the grasslands.

However, a departmental briefing note, produced ahead of Taylor’s 2017 meeting with department officials, and obtained by Guardian Australia under FOI laws, states the “NFF did not oppose the listing but asked for further clarification on some issues with the listing assessment and raised some concerns about complexity for farmers”.

The department said it had responded and addressed the NFF’s concerns and some broader issues raised regarding the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. It said the NFF didn’t reply in writing again, but there were “ongoing conversations” with them for two years following their submission until the then environment minister Greg Hunt made his final decision in 2016.

“This culminated in publication of a post-listing information guide that the NFF helped the department draft to address their concerns about helping farmers better understand the listing,” the briefing states.

Labor used question time on Monday to again grill Taylor over the matter, including whether any constituent concerns had ever been expressed to him in writing.

The opposition’s leader of business, Tony Burke, said Taylor had now given the parliament three reasons for his meeting with the department.

“One, somebody wrote a letter six months after the meeting that was addressed to somebody else. Two, somebody wrote a letter three years before the meeting that was addressed to somebody else and, three, he had a conversation with a bloke in Yass,” Burke said.

“Isn’t the only consistent interest here his own?”

Labor’s Senate leader, Penny Wong, told the Senate Taylor had failed to “provide any evidence he was representing anybody’s interests but himself”.

Taylor defended not disclosing his interest in Jam Land in his pecuniary interest statement to the parliament.

He said he had properly disclosed the two holding entities, Gufee, his family investment company, and Australian Farming Partnerships, which he described as a legal partnership with his brothers and a business associate, Tony Reid.

If the Register of Interests were required to record minority, non-controlling interests held at three levels down in a family company structure, this would be a major change to the current practice.