Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Environment and Water) Share this | Hansard source

Sure. It sounded like you were asking if there would be education and information about the fund, in particular. We've only just announced the Forestry Growth Fund today. I heard Senator Canavan making fun of the fact that we are saying that we will work with industry, unions and governments to design the fund, as if it's a bad thing that, in designing a fund, you would actually talk to the people affected.

What we've attempted to do today is to announce the dollar figures—$300 million—and the types of things that we would see those funds being used for, and we've said we want to work with all the interested stakeholders on the proper design and determine the very best use of those funds. As I've said before, it's actually about supporting the forestry industry to grow—to move up the value chain, to produce higher-quality, higher-value products, and therefore to ensure that the jobs in the industry don't just stay but grow, going forward. That's really broadly what it's about.

In the hours since this was announced, both the forestry minister, Julie Collins, and I have undertaken a fairly brief but important meeting with a number of industry players about the changes that we're making and about the fund. We also did take the opportunity to point out to them that certain coalition members have—I'm not sure whether you've done this, Senator Cadell, but certain coalition members have—misrepresented what we're doing here, so we took the opportunity to make very clear what we are doing and what we are not doing, despite what some people might be saying. Clearly we will need not only to develop this fund—exactly what it can be used for, who's eligible, when the payments are available and that kind of thing—but also to inform people about that fund. It was only announced at eight this morning, so we'll need a little more time than that to get the information out to people.