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

Senator Cadell, it's a reasonable concern for people. They want to understand what this government policy means. Again, I'm not accusing you, personally, of doing this, but one thing that would really help would be for people to resist the temptation to go out and misrepresent to people what these changes are. We've seen, over the course of the day, members of the coalition, state and federal, and also members of the Greens party, state and federal, suggest that what we're doing here is closing down native forestry, or that this is another step towards native forestry, which it's not. So it would really help, in terms of not alarming people unnecessarily, if people didn't go out and misrepresent the situation.

One of the statements that Minister Collins and I made in that briefing of industry players earlier today was that we recognise that people want more information, and I get that. Over the course of the next few days and weeks, we will be providing further briefings to industry generally, including to unions that represent the workers in those industries.

I will say, there have been some discussions, over the course of this consultation process for these laws, about what, if anything, we should do regarding RFAs, given the recommendations Professor Samuel made. You know, we haven't just dreamt this stuff up. There are two clear recommendations in Professor Samuel's review that we're implementing. People might like them, and people might not like them, but the recommendations are there. Clearly, day one is not the day that you give everyone every bit of information, because people need a bit of time to absorb it, think about it and have that information provided. But, absolutely, we will be doing that.