Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

( The opposition will not be supporting this amendment. As I indicated in my speech during the second reading stage, we have enough concerns about this legislation at the moment. I reject the minister's comment earlier that all we are looking to do is delay. What we are looking to do is allow industry and our trading partners enough time to put in place the measures that will effectively allow them to comply with this legislation. That is the concern that we have. In fact, our leader has written to the Prime Minister to express those concerns. The government rejected that opportunity.

With this clause, what the Greens are looking to do in bringing the term 'sustainability' into the whole argument—rather than the purpose of this legislation as it was originally designed, which is to deal with illegal logging—is to provide another layer in a weapon that would be used by environmental groups against industry. If you look at the Australian forest industry and the commencement of the arguments, we started off talking about old-growth forests and logging in old-growth forests. The Greens moved on from that process and started talking about high conservation value forests. In fact, some of those high conservation value forests are actually regrowth forests. Former Senator Bob Brown recently made a very glowing statement about a coupe on the back of Mount Wellington that is 'full of biodiversity, full of different species, a magnificent example of Tasmanian forest'—it was clear-felled and burnt in 1963. In the Greens' terms it was destroyed in 1963, but the Greens now claim it is a high conservation value forest and want to lock it up.

We are now talking about all native forests. The sustainability argument is one about the Greens being able to continuously redefine the argument to continue to campaign and achieve the objective of trying to kill off the forest industry—which is completely and utterly absurd when you consider that timber is the only renewable and sustainable building product available in the construction industry. Here the Greens are trying to provide a mechanism for their environmental groups, particularly some of the more activist ones, to continue to redefine the argument, to wind back the industry, to make attacks on the industry and to sustain their own political party. They have absolutely no interest in peace in the forests of Australia because then they would have nothing to argue about. The opposition will not be supporting this mechanism that the Greens have put up because it is just another mechanism for them to beat up on industry and redefine the argument to suit themselves.

This bill is about illegal logging. As the minister rightly said, the coalition has played a constructive part in the process of developing this legislation. We are disappointed that the minister has not been prepared to come as far as we might have liked to give industry—