Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities) Share this | Hansard source

I want to thank the member for Lyons for asking a question about an issue that we have been talking about all term in here as to whether or not we could get the stakeholders from each side of the Tasmanian forestry debate to agree and then whether we could get that agreement to go through the Tasmanian parliament. I am very pleased to say that since this parliament last met the forestry deal has been endorsed by the Tasmanian parliament and is now being rolled out. This is something that ends 30 years of conflict in Tasmanian forestry and has extraordinary outcomes for both Tasmanian jobs and conservation.

We have had a significant shift in the forestry industry for some time now. Markets that we used to be able to rely on started to disappear or demand that they would only buy timber product, whether it be woodchip, peeler billet or sawlog, if it had the Forest Stewardship Council certification on it. None of the native forestry run by Forestry Tasmania was eligible at that point for FSC certification. Now, with the agreement in place, we are seeing the process for certification for the export of timber products from Tasmania moving quickly.

Tasmania will be leading the nation. It will be the one state whose official forestry body has gained Forest Stewardship Council certification and which has opened itself up to those export markets around the world. On the different exit packages that have been offered I have heard the comments of the Leader of the Opposition, who has said that his side of politics would never pay people to leave, completely forgetting the exit packages over the years, pretending they never happened. What will occur is where people have already seen the massive drop-off in demand they now have an opportunity to take up that slack through the exit packages and then reinvest in their businesses. This is a good outcome for jobs in Tasmania. This opens Tasmanian forestry products back up to the world. At the same time it means that conservation outcomes that previously would have been thought to be completely unattainable are now possible. We now have in the order of half a million hectares of forestry reserves coming into place, taking in some areas within the Tarkine, areas such as the Blue Tier. But the most highly contested forests, areas like the Weld, the Styx and the Upper Florentine, are currently before the World Heritage Committee in Paris to enable them to get the full level of conservation protection and to be put on the World Heritage List.

This is something where the conflict options that have been there for the last 30 years have been entirely rejected by this government. We have worked with stakeholders, with the Tasmanian people, who have wanted to move to a future that is very different from the past with a combination of conservation and jobs. (Time expired)

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