Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to use this opportunity, during the debate on the Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2009-2010 and the Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2009-2010, to reflect on some of the issues in my electorate of Farrer and particularly the rally—the protest that we saw in Canberra yesterday—which a great many people from the New South Wales Murray attended. They came up in buses, many of them leaving the day before or very early yesterday morning in order to make the point to a government which seemed reluctant to listen that, through the actions of this government, their rights to farm and to be part of a productive agricultural economy are being gradually eroded and taken away from them.

I would like to go back to last week, when I attended a meeting organised by the Natural Resources Commission, an advisory body of the New South Wales state government. The commission met with the community in Deniliquin in New South Wales to explain and describe the recommendations that it had recently made concerning the ongoing forestry activities, particularly in the Millewa area of the New South Wales central Murray and also extending to much of the red gum forests along the Murray, Murrumbidgee and Lower Darling rivers. This issue has captured and terrified—I do not think that is too strong a word—our local communities for many months now. We have seen an appalling series of blunders and mismanagement by New South Wales—not helped, I have to say, by a sudden switching of premiers late last year.

On the last day that he was Premier, Nathan Rees made the announcement that the Millewa State Forest, the Gunbower-Koondrook-Perricoota forest and the Werai State Forest would come under the supervision of the National Parks and Wildlife Service, New South Wales. So I guess he jumped the gun on a debate that was unfolding. I am not sure why he did that—I think perhaps it was to punish his enemies in New South Wales Labor, and that was certainly the word on the street—but in any case he pre-empted a report that was underway, that he had commissioned and that was being led by Dr John Williams, an ex-CSIRO scientist. He made that announcement, so that threw our communities into total confusion. As you can imagine, they did not know what the future of their industries would be and they were enormously concerned about this. However, the report process continued and took its course, and the Natural Resources Commission finally handed down that report towards the end of last year.

The meeting in Deniliquin yesterday was for the commissioners to explain what that meant to the local community. I have to say that they were not there because they wanted to be there; they were there because they were told to be there. They were uncomfortable and realised that what they were saying was very unpopular. They did not do a very good job of explaining their recommendations. There were 16 recommendations. The problem that I have with those recommendations is that many of them cannot actually be implemented by New South Wales at all. So what business is it of a New South Wales advisory body to make recommendations and hand them to the Premier of New South Wales, in the full realisation that they can only be implemented by the federal government?

The overwhelming take on these recommendations is that our sustainable red gum forestry operations in the New South Wales Central Murray can no longer continue, that the carefully controlled, monitored and, I have to say, very environmentally sustainable red gum harvesting can no longer continue. This is not just some gung-ho activity where people go out into the bush and harvest the timber they want, when they want and how they want. The care and consideration that is given to the sustainability of these forests is quite remarkable. It is all done under the close supervision of New South Wales state forests, because it is on state forest land. So the attendant bureaucracy, care and consideration that is given has really made this a great success in the past—so much so that the area has been listed as Ramsar, which is a recognition that it is an international, world-class wetland that is managed for sustainable production. So when we say ‘logging in the Central Murray’ or ‘logging the red gum’, it is very important to understand that that is an activity that is carefully controlled.

However, the New South Wales Natural Resources Commission has recommended that this end, effectively, and that total control of these forests be placed in the hands of the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service. I think it is fair to say, without putting too fine a point on it, that the people in western New South Wales have very little respect for the National Parks and Wildlife Service. I do not mean that as a criticism of the individuals who work within the organisation, because I have met many of them and they are very good people. But it is horrendously underfunded, and every year it appears that it has to manage a declining budget and more and more geographic area of national park, because there is this hunger, this frenzy, within New South Wales—driven very much by the green movement in the New South Wales upper house—to buy up more and more farmland and turn it over to national park. With that purchase comes promises to the local community that are never, ever met.

I use the example of Yanga Station near Balranald, further west in my electorate. Bob Carr made the announcement that New South Wales was going to go $30 million further into debt in, I think, 2005—a few years ago—and purchase Yanga Station, which was a prime station producing cattle and wool and which had a sustainable timber industry as well. The purchase of Yanga Station was conducted swiftly and in haste, with no proper procedure. But the community, as I said, were promised much. They were told that the workforce would come from the local community, that Indigenous employment would be given a focus and that 50,000 tourists a year would come to Yanga. About four tourists a day at the very most come to Yanga, so that might add up to just over a thousand a year. None of the local Indigenous young people have been given a job. We have been trying, and there is a great group, Balranald Inc., which was here yesterday talking to the minister to try and encourage some sort of Indigenous participation so that those young boys and girls can get jobs at Yanga. The station is not even managed from the local community; it is managed from the nearby town of Hay. So none of these promises came true, but the same set of promises is being rolled out for the proposed purchase—and I note that it has not finally been approved—of the Barmah-Millewa Forest on the New South Wales side of the river.

I come back to the meeting where the Natural Resources Commission was trying to explain its 16 recommendations. The mood in the room was furious because people did not want a group that they believed had no real connection with or understanding of their way of life and their industries telling them that their forests were overlogged, that their communities could adjust perfectly well with tourism, that 50,000 tourists a year would come and that camping areas, picnic areas and fire trails would all be maintained. We come to the issue of fire trails. It is topical in a country that burns the way Australia does. The people who maintain the fire trails in the forests now are those that work in the forest. So they are the contractors, the private industries and the state forest personnel themselves that actually maintain that network of fire trails in the forest. If they are removed from the management of and involvement in the future of the forest then they are certainly not going to be doing that.

The other thing is that when small fires have broken out there in the past it has been the timber industry that has had its equipment on the spot and that has risked its equipment and in some cases its people to get in there, where possible, and put the fires out. If you kill off the timber industry then you will not have the equipment there to move through the forest. We have seen this in so many areas: soon the system and network of fire trails deteriorates and it is almost impossible to get it back. The real criticism I have with the recommendations about the future of the Milawa forests is that they were pie in the sky—an impossible dream. Governments were being asked to provide some sort of pot of gold at the end of this rainbow that the commissioners were describing to us. So they gave a set of recommendations that have no basis in realistic funding. They simply said, ‘Government’s should fund,’ and went into a range of things that governments should fund, including proper social and economic studies about the future of this proposal and taking away the forestry option. We know that just to fund those studies alone would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars—let alone the ongoing package. People are sick of being told about packages that will help them adjust, because they know it is all complete nonsense.

If you are a young person growing up in a town like Deniliquin, Barham, Mathoura or Balranald then the activities of Canberra or Sydney are a million miles away for you. I think these country kids deserve a job when they leave school. Maybe it is in the timber mill. Maybe it is in the rice mill. Maybe it is in the shearing shed. Maybe it is as an apprentice in town. All of these options are being closed off to them. They are being told about tourism—about an interconnected global economy and financial services and IT. It is just another world away. We saw writ large in the Deniliquin RSL in the middle of last week an outlook, a theory and a set of recommendations that just made no sense. When the members of the community spoke to me after that meeting the one thing that I sensed, apart from their anger, was their bewilderment, because they knew that the underpinnings for this whole discussion were unreal in the first place.

I suspect that the Premier of New South Wales will get these recommendations and she will say, ‘Well, many of them are federal government recommendations so I can’t do anything about them. But there’s a couple here that I can do something about and they involve the creation of another national park in New South Wales. So I will sign off on that and then I will have fulfilled my obligations. It would be really good if the federal government could fulfil theirs, but of course that’s not my problem.’ We will be left with the worst of all possible worlds because we will have the recommendations that create a national park without the recommendations that consider the social and economic impacts of a future with no timber industry and the associated support.

I do not agree with any of the recommendations, but if we are going to have a national park then we need the rest of the recommendations. We heard the commissioners say that they were men of integrity and men of science. I do not question that for a moment—even though I disagree with their recommendations. I said to Dr John Williams, ‘I would ask you to add an additional recommendation to these 16—that is, that if governments cannot accept all 16 recommendations then they should accept none.’ That was clearly approved by most of the people in the room at that meeting. They recognised that we need not have this second-best solution. I renew that call. I maintain that call to Dr John Williams. As he said to us there at that meeting, these recommendations belong together. He used the term a ‘suite’. He called them a package. If you pull one or two out then they will not work. Then he was asked, ‘Do you think governments will accept them all?’ He said, ‘Well, it is unlikely.’ He has been around the game. He knows it is unlikely. So, please, Dr Williams, you do not have to undo anything that you have done but just say to the Premier, ‘Unless the 16 recommendations are accepted together none of them should be.’ It is really our only hope.

We have struggled in these towns with the drought and with low water allocations. The way a lot of people look at it, and the way I look at it too, is that if we are doing these things for the benefit of all Australians, if we are resuming environmental flows in the river and if we are saying that certain forests cannot be logged—I do not agree with that because they were being logged sustainably, but if we are making that our value and we are creating that policy—then it is not fair that one sector of the Australian population should always be the ones that have to pay.

If you drive through inner Sydney you will see signs saying, ‘Save the red gum forests in New South Wales’. I do not know how many of the residents of Surry Hills, Paddington or Darlinghurst have been to look, learned and understood the industry for themselves—I suspect not many—but it sounds good: ‘Oh gosh, there are people out there knocking over timber and we’ve got to keep these forests. We’re losing them forever,’ et cetera. Such is the nonsense that is spoken by the Australian Conservation Foundation and the Wilderness Society on this matter. Those people are not being asked to give up anything at all, but they are being asked to support a campaign. They may make donations. They are being asked to support a campaign that has seen protesters tie themselves to logging equipment in the tops of trees and a police force powerless to get them down. And then, when the poor local contractor who has a family business—and he was here yesterday taking time out of his business to protest on the lawns of Parliament House—tries to get some prosecution for this outrageous attack on his equipment, his lifestyle and his family into the court system, out come all of the high-flying barristers and legal people that can hired by the conservation movement and the green movement. They just crush him, because what else would they do? And the contractor gets nowhere. He has lost weeks of production from protests. He has no recourse to the law. He has no recourse to government. He has a set of recommendations from people who understand nothing about the industry he is in or the importance of that industry to the community of which he is a part. As I said, he came to Canberra yesterday to voice his protest on the lawns of Parliament House. He was due to speak at the rally—I am not sure whether he did. His wife and family were there to support him. I certainly was there to support him as well as many of the other farmers there.

I do not approve of the action that Mr Peter Spencer took by climbing up his pole and threatening his own life. I do not approve of it at all. I make no apologies or excuse for it. I do not know Mr Spencer. But what I responded to yesterday by attending the rally, and why the government members should have been out there attending the rally, are the sentiments, the feeling, the frustration, the anger and the disappointment. These reached a point that I have not seen in eight years of representing those communities.

I do hope that, with the prominence that that protest received and the ongoing efforts of those involved, we will see the government start to pay attention. There are a couple of things they could do. They could demonstrate their care. The Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry could demonstrate his care and compassion for farmers by announcing that exceptional circumstances support, which is due to run out on 31 March, will be extended for at least another six months—12 months would be better. At the moment people are in limbo land. They do not know what is happening. They know that the exceptional circumstances support runs out on that date, but they have been told nothing.

The other thing that the government could do is that the Minister for Climate Change and Water, Senator Penny Wong, could purchase water from our communities according to a plan. I do not agree with the way that this water is being resumed for the environment, but I particularly do not agree with the fact that it is being resumed with no plan. So we have, as we well know, the swiss cheese effect, where a bit of water comes from this area and a bit of water comes from that area. The interconnected irrigation equipment is left to deteriorate between those two areas, or the company is forced to supply a small amount of water at the end of a long channel where everybody has sold their water, completely without a plan. The government could resume exactly the amount of water it seems to want—and it has an insatiable appetite for it—without actually approaching it in this way, by just consulting with the local communities and the irrigation corporations, and coming up with a plan that closes off one section of an irrigation area and leaves another open so that we can maintain that efficiency with the small amount of water that we are being left with.

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