Eric Hutchinson (Lyons, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

On Monday evening, our time, in Doha on the other side of the world, the World Heritage Committee rejected Australia's bid to have 74,000 hectares of productive, working forest removed from the listing of 172,000 hectares made in 2013 by the former Labor government. This listing was a product of the Tasmanian Forests Agreement, which was born out of the Tasmanian state-Commonwealth intergovernmental agreement—which was the direct result of a minority green government calling the shots from Hobart and relying on support from Canberra.

I wish to advise the House that, prior to this decision last week, I wrote to the Auditor-General at the Australian National Audit Office seeking clarification regarding the Independent Verification Group appointed as part of the TFA, specifically asking: did any member of the Independent Verification Group declare an existing or potential conflict of interest and if so, how were these conflicts of interest managed?

Fifty-two per cent of my state is already in formal reserves, including national parks and World Heritage. But the very notion of what it means to have a World Heritage listing is about community support and community ownership. Without community ownership, the listing means nothing. We are simply abrogating our responsibility for managing special areas to international bodies, in this case the World Heritage Committee. Not even those supporting and passionately advocating for the 2013 listing disputed the fact that these forests have been, until recent times, working and productive forests. With proper forest management these areas have provided specialty timbers for boat-building and furniture and eucalyptus for sawmilling, house building and flooring. In addition, large areas of the Styx and Florentine valleys were granted concessions and regularly harvested for Australian paper mills based at Boyer in my electorate. These concessions are well documented. It was the professional foresters that identified extraordinarily tall trees in these areas and put in place appropriate protection and management plans to leave these superb specimens undisturbed. This is an uncomfortable fact for those ideologues opposed to the sustainable use, harvest and regrowth of native forest in my home state of Tasmania.

In excess of 90 per cent of the old-growth forests are in permanent reserves, protected in perpetuity. This is something to rightly celebrate, but for some every tree is sacred. These are the ideologues committed to seeing no industrial activity in the forests that cover my state. These are the same people who formed the IVG. They have clear links to the Wilderness Society and other environmental groups openly committed to destroying Tasmania's native forest industry. This was a political construct that failed to consult with more than 1,000 adjoining property owners directly impacted by the substantive changes to the boundaries in 2013.

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