Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to know, if that is the case and if Senator Bushby can inform me. I would appreciate knowing that. I would like on the public record for Forestry Tasmania to tell me exactly the extent of their subsidising of Ta Ann. When they are in debt up to their necks, how can they possibly be subsidising this particular operation?

I think that it is incumbent on the Commonwealth to recognise that the $250 million that it expended in 2005 to 2010 has, in large part, been wasted. Even the Commonwealth Auditor-General when he had a look at these grants pointed out how utterly disgraceful the Commonwealth oversight of the grants was during that period. It will shock people to learn that you could apply for a grant for second-hand equipment. As the person applying for the grant, you could nominate the sum you thought that machinery was worth and then you got the grant even though you did not specify the make of the machine, what year the machine was made or what condition the machine was in. All you had to say was, ‘I would like to buy that excavator and I estimate that it is worth X dollars.’ That was it. You were also supposed to say as part of these grants how many jobs you would secure and what sort of future there was for the enterprise—but how many jobs in particular were there was the key. On almost all of these grant funding approvals they did not meet compliance on the number of jobs.

So the point of my standing here today is to say: yes, I support the principles; I think that it is fantastic if we can reach an end to the conflict in Tasmania over native forest logging, and I absolutely support that. But I do not support Commonwealth money being expanded until such time as we have a moratorium in place on the high conservation value forests and, as the money is expended, it is overseen by the Commonwealth. Frankly, Forestry Tasmania’s record for the management of money and its current financial status is so appalling that you could not trust that the money you allocated would be spent for the purposes that it was allocated. The Commonwealth must take control of this process. The Commonwealth must put in place rigorous performance audits on any grant money that it provides. It must be able to track that and it must be transparent and open.

The Commonwealth needs to go back and see who it has given money to in the last five years and whether in fact that money was spent on what it was meant to be spent on before people apply for another round of grants to exit the industry. In some cases people applied for millions of dollars in 2006-07 for their contracting businesses. Now, when many of them are insolvent, is the Commonwealth in any position to retrieve some of that money, as it should be under its contractual obligations? Let us get the actual coverage of the finance right and let us get the moratorium in place, because if you hand over the money without the moratorium all that will happen is that you will see more logging, more conflict and more outrage as the partners to this agreement actively undermine it and defy the principle and the investment of faith in the process, because they never wanted to end native forest logging in the first place.