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

Senator Milne, I did not quite hear the interjection, but it is typical of the Greens: destroy the forest industries at all costs. It has been the thing that spawned and converted the Greens from the old very ultra left-wing Communist Party of Australia into a Greens party. Here was a way they could perhaps do what the old communists used to do: destroy industries and jobs by using the veneer of an environmental approach.

As I was saying before I was interrupted, we have a sawlog industry that is sustainable. It is very, very useful. Of course, if you do not use logs in construction, what do you use, Senator Milne? Steel? Concrete? Those sorts of resources, rather than a renewable resource like timber? I talked about hypocrisy before. The Greens would have us build everything with cement and steel rather than renewable timber.

There is a very good, very sustainable job-creating sawlog industry in Australia. When you saw a log, you have waste: there are leaves, there are branches, there is bark. There is a lot of the tree that cannot exist in the sawlog that is being created. What do you do with that? Let it rot on the ground?