FEDERAL Agriculture Minister Tony Burke isn't one of the government's regular heavy hitters. But every now and then he produces a classy cameo. 

He did on Thursday, bringing a little relief to a question time otherwise full of sound and fury over jobs and the mess over SAS pay.

Burke started deadpan, recalling the government was funding research to see how different feeds and breeding could cut the methane produced by cattle, sheep and goats - the third biggest source of greenhouse gas in Australia.

That would ensure farmers a bright future.

Burke moved slowly to his real point.

He'd watched Malcolm Turnbull being interviewed the other night. It was compelling television. He'd had to check he was on the right channel and not watching Animal Rescue, The Biggest Loser or Wipeout Australia which were on the others.

Turnbull, he continued, had a CSIRO report which apparently showed 146 million tonnes of carbon could be abated through planting nine million hectares of trees.

Burke thought it was such an extraordinary amount of planting that he got hold of the report himself. It had a number of projections and Turnbull had chosen the highest.

He brandished the report, which had dots where tree planting could occur.

All the way down the Queensland sugar coast, prime agricultural land would be taken over by trees. Even, shock horror, Nambour, hallowed home town of the prime minister.

Burke went round Australia - prime agricultural land in New England, in the Tasmanian midlands, in the West Australian wheat belt.

Turnbull tried to stop the torture, saying Burke hadn't been asked to attack the CSIRO. Speaker Harry Evans gave him no respite.

Burke continued: "Only one person chose to engage with the highest projection, one on prime land, though not on his farm, by the way."

He scorned Turnbull's idea as a scheme "in which everyone is a winner, unless you require food".

And then: "The leader of the opposition has designed a world where you will sequester heaps of carbon, but there will be a lot less to eat."

"There's a reason why it looks too good to be true and that's because it is."

Then it was back to Wayne Swan telling us, for the umpteenth time, how the government had acted decisively on the economy.

AAP