Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Minister for Fisheries, Forestry and Conservation) Share this | Hansard source

If you want to eat meat, you have to accept that there are going to be abattoirs. If you want to use paper for your mammoth number of press releases, you have to accept that there will be paper machines and pulp factories around the world to create that paper for you. So it is singularly disingenuous of the honourable senator to suggest that somehow this would be a dirty, polluting, nasty pulp mill. If we do not build this pulp mill but the insatiable desire of the Australian Greens for their press releases continues, where will they get the paper from? They will get the paper from dirtier mills in Japan. Yet their slogan is: ‘think globally, act locally’. No, they are saying, ‘Think locally and put all the pollution and other things somewhere else in somebody else’s backyard.’ They think that is somehow meeting their responsibility to the world environment. That is fraudulent; it is disingenuous to suggest to the Australian people that a cleaner pulp mill in Australia would not be better for the world environment than the dirtier mills everywhere else in the world.