Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern Australia) Share this | Hansard source

Bury it? I accept that some of that is needed for the ecology. Some little lizards do like living in those sorts of things, I understand that. But it is a resource. It is there, it is the waste product from a sawlog industry. It should be able to be used as part of a renewable resource, a renewable electricity-generating activity. I can never quite understand the Greens’ opposition to this. We have, for a long period of time now, accepted that waste product from sawlogs can be used to create energy, and that should continue. That is one of the reasons the coalition will not be supporting this amendment.

In fact there are many calls for the facilitation of and an increase in the use of wood waste for the creation of electricity. It is a renewable resource; it will grow again and it has grown again. If you look at the forests around Australia, in many cases they have been logged for sawlogs for over 100 years and those forests are still magnificent. Compare that with the forests in Victoria that were decimated in those horrific bushfires earlier this year. One of the reasons that the bushfires were so intense was that pressure from people like the Greens political party had stopped the proper management of fuel in those forests. Because fuel could not be managed as it should have been, those fires were more intense and more destructive than would have otherwise been the case. The number of trees in the forests that were destroyed in the bushfires as a result of bad management of the forests—that is, not being able to manage fuel—is just mind-boggling.

If the Greens want to talk about the destruction of forests in Australia, perhaps they could give us a bit of a lecture on what happens when those intense fires go through the native forest and the intensity increases because people like the Greens political party will not allow proper management of the fuel and the understorey system. I might also say that, in the days when these forests were sustainably managed, you had on the spot a workforce of trained, experienced people who watched out for fires and who, at the first indication of a fire, had a team of people, trucks and equipment there to put the fires out. Unfortunately those days are long gone because logging is not allowed in most Australian native forests now.

In the old days, there were logging tracks through the forests. They were there to enable the selective logging of timber and for the timber to be hauled out. They provided egress and ingress for the industry’s vehicles. But they also had a very important role in firefighting. If fires were around, there were trained people able to use these tracks to get in and deal with the fires straight away. Yet the Greens have succeeded in persuading governments—I might say mainly Labor governments, although one or two coalition governments have been confused or conned by the Greens into thinking they would get preferences if they shut the forests down or created some reserves—to shut down many native forests. It has never worked, although I am pleased to say the Labor Party has now realised that you cannot keep shutting down these sustainable forests.

But when you do have sustainable forestry, as we do in Australia, there is wood waste which should be used for creation of renewable energy, amongst other things. For that reason, amongst other reasons, and because of the job-destroying nature of these amendments, the coalition will be opposing the Greens’ amendment.