John Cobb (Calare, National Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

So it was 1995, and I thank the Minister for Finance and Deregulation. I believe that was one of the few occasions when the people of Australia were given a very real insight into what the forestry industry in Australia was all about. Up until that time people had misconception that this was an aesthetic argument—all head and no heart. I recall footage taken very early in the morning up in the hills during the course of that blockade that suddenly changed public opinion very quickly. The pictures shown during that blockade—when then Prime Minister Paul Keating was refusing to negotiate over the RFAs and over the forestry industry—were of mothers and young children, some babies in arms. The mothers were actually going up in the mist to defend their husbands’ right to work and, by doing so, were defending—and stopping extreme greenies from sabotaging—sawmilling and logging equipment up in the hills. Suddenly Australia realised that the logging industry, an industry that had served this country so well, was about people, about jobs, about families and about security.

I started by saying we were importing twice as much, by value, in timber products as we were exporting. We are importing $4½ billion worth; we are exporting timber worth something over half that. I think it is time once again that the Labor Party and its government made it plain that they will stand behind an industry for which women and children will get up at daylight and walk to the top of a mountain to protect the jobs of their husbands, themselves and their lives. The timber industry, be it the sector which has plantations or the sector which reuses timber over many years, is a very strong industry in Australia. It does the right thing. The industry is world’s best practice. The Labor Party should stop unnecessarily locking up forests just to catch a green vote.

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