Julia Irwin (Fowler, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Just before the budget was released, the Prime Minister announced that Australia would fund the Global Initiative on Forests and Climate. The fund would be used to assist developing countries faced with illegal logging and forest clearing. But it struck me that this $200 million program was just another one of those back-of-a-napkin policies that this government is desperately putting together as it faces annihilation at the next election. There is definitely genuine concern at the rate of forest clearing in tropical parts of the world, and illegal logging for timber products is a problem that needs attention, but the Howard government has become so accustomed to throwing money at problems that it thinks this will do the job again. If the government is asked what it is doing about climate change, it can say that it is spending millions to save the tropical forests. But, when it comes to the causes of the greatest deforestation in the tropics, this government cannot see the forest for the trees. The slash-and-burn operations which are devastating large areas of forests in South-East Asia and South America are not only to exploit the timber resource; increasingly the main objective in forest clearing—

See this speech in context