Ross Cadell (NSW, National Party, Shadow Minister for Water) | Hansard source

If only life were so black and white as they would have you believe over in the Greens. If only everything were so absolute and so easy. We see the interesting conversations here. We heard the previous speaker talk of complex creatures that are wonderfully magnificent in these forests. But these same creatures, things like the wonderful koala—which we love so much in Australia—become nothing but tree rats when they're on a wind tower location. They need to be eradicated—knocked over the head and got rid of—if they sit where a wind tower should go. The inconsistency here is amazing when we go forward.

We see a fine example of ignoring what happens when you stop logging. I give you the Pilliga example in New South Wales. We lost timber jobs, we lost regional jobs—I see that—and it was all to save a native koala habitat. They estimated there were 18,000 koalas in the Pilliga across New South Wales. I hear you ask: what happened after we shut that down? Let me tell you. Unmanaged, a bushfire went through and destroyed everything because we didn't maintain the fire trails; we didn't have logging trails; we didn't have anything. We now have a functionally extinct koala habitat in the Pilliga. They're functionally extinct. We didn't protect them. We didn't protect the animals. We didn't protect the area. In fact, invasive species of trees have taken over because of these fires. The Pilliga is now nothing like it used to be when it was being managed.

They talk about the massive carbon output of having these things. They don't talk about the carbon sequestration that forests have when they're growing. They take carbon in at a much faster rate when they are growing than they do when they are there. In fact, recent studies have come to show that forests in states of decline can emit more carbon as rotting timbers come out than they soaked up during their life. It is best practice to take timber and let it grow and absorb carbon in the world.

When we see what the alternative is if we don't take Australian hardwoods—there's a joke that goes around in the timber industry. Why does Merbau flow red when it gets rained on when you're building an industry? Because it is the blood of orangutans when they come from Borneo, Indonesia and other sources when they go there. Because if we don't take Australian hardwoods, we take them from Indonesia; we take them from Papua; we take them from Brazil; we take them from other sources—