Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Environment and Water) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Mackellar for her thoughtful contribution, the work she's done in preparing these amendments and the spirit in which she offers them. I know that she is absolutely determined to see better outcomes for nature in Australia. They are very important issues that she has raised, and I've been working overtime on exactly these issues because I agree with her that they are absolutely critical to the success of nature protection in Australia. But, as I have sought to explain, the bills we are dealing with today and have been dealing with in the last few days are setting up the mechanisms our new laws will operate under. The new laws themselves will be part of stage 3 of our law reform process, and I'm not willing to bring forward the complex negotiations that have to go into the issues she has raised into stage 2. We'll continue to work on them for stage 3.

In fact, I've made clear that there are six priority areas where there is still a pretty broad set of disagreements between stakeholders on a way forward; they're the six areas the department is particularly focused on with continuing consultations. Regional forestry agreements is one of these. We have said that national environmental laws will apply to regional forestry agreements, and we're working through right now how we do that. The other areas where we're continuing to focus our consultations are the assessment and approvals processes, restoration contributions, First Nations engagement, exemptions and continuing use provisions—I will go to those suggestions of the member for Mackellar in a moment—and climate change considerations.

Returning to regional forestry agreements: it's important to note that close to 90 per cent of forest products now come from plantation timbers. We want to see more plantation forests and more jobs that come with them. We're investing $300 million to grow plantations, to modernise our timber manufacturing infrastructure and to build the skills of our forestry workforce. We've also put aside $500 million in the National Reconstruction Fund for forestry, fisheries and agriculture. Last year, the Minister for Climate Change and Energy changed the rules so that burning native timber is no longer classed as renewable energy. It is bizarre to think that it ever did.

I'm not going to agree to amendments to regional forestry agreements that affect an entire industry and the jobs that rely on it without a thorough, thoughtful and consultative process. The same applies to continuing use provisions. I'm currently consulting on options for tightening and clarifying continuing use provisions, but these are complex issues, and I want to work through them with stakeholders in a mature and methodical way. I thank the member for her contribution.

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