Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

You are quite right, Deputy President. Senator Cormann needs to show a little bit of patience. The point I was trying to make is that if there is urgency in this motion, extra urgency has been engendered by the Liberal Party and its rally in Hobart on the weekend. The motion not only notes the ongoing attacks but also provides for the Senate to have an opportunity to condemn the opposition's failure to provide a constructive alternative for scores of contractors facing now market downturn in Tasmania. In my proposed amendment I previously had 'business ruin, closures of three export woodchip mills'—and that is the case at the moment—'and regional areas of Tasmania welcoming the development opportunities the package will provide'.

This is urgent, because at the moment, under the intergovernmental agreement, it is proposed that $276 million be given to Tasmania. The opposition wants to block Tasmania from having that money. In the urgent immediate term, some $70 to $80 million is going to contractors who do face business ruin, and that is a matter currently in progress. The opposition is saying that it does not want those contractors to get that money. It wants that $80 million to stay here in Canberra with the Gillard government, not with the contractors in Tasmania who are facing bankruptcy because this industry cannot exist without massive public supplements in the world market.

I remind the Senate that this is an industry that has had $1 billion in public largesse—a lot of it coming out of Canberra—in the last three decades, in which time it has shed more than 5,000 jobs, closed scores of small mill operations, failed to carry out the community extension we would have expected and failed to have a proper ministerial overview of the self-invested and industry oriented activities and failure of proper administration of Forestry Tasmania. If the opposition are aiming to get a debate on this this afternoon—and I hope they are—then bring it on, because we will be wanting, in the full debate of this urgent matter, to discover Senator Abetz's role in the administration of $250-plus million of public money that the Howard government gave to this failed industry in 2004. I am sure my colleague Senator Milne will be able to come up with some specifics there that might properly, in this public debate, be accounted for by the failure of administration of public funds by the last Liberal government, and indeed— (Time expired)