Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to follow on from Senator Abetz's presentation yesterday in response to Senator Bob Brown's motion in relation to the Tasmanian logging industry, which was passed in the chamber. The focus of Senator Brown's motion was to ask why the proceeds of the Tasmanian Community Forest Agreement, which was obviously a feature of the coalition's election package in 2004, had not prevented a reduction in markets in the Tasmanian forest sector. Of course, as is usual with the Greens, the intent of the motion actually does not deal with what the intent of the Tasmanian Community Forest Agreement was. It was not about creating or maintaining markets, and I will come to that later.

The Tasmanian Community Forest Agreement was a widely supported election commitment by the then Howard government, so much so that it is credited with being one of the reasons why the coalition won two lower house seats in the north of Tasmania, in particular Braddon and Bass. In some of the forestry communities, such as Circular Head, we saw close to 15 per cent swings in those particular seats because the Howard government was prepared to provide support to the forest industry. Unfortunately, that point in time when Mark Latham was the leader of the ALP was about the point in time when the previous bipartisan relationship and support for the forest industry in Tasmania started to fall apart. The Labor Party decided that they would go off and chase Green preferences and the rest of the industry were left to their own devices.

The funding uses for all of those elements of the Community Forest Agreement were and are actually on the public record, mostly because the Greens have FOI'd them all, so they know what the money was spent on, they know why it was spent and they know the focus of it. But they choose not to be honest in relation to how they represent that now. It is not because of the Tasmanian Community Forest Agreement that there are issues with markets in forestry in Tasmania; it is because of the Greens and the environmental groups that work with the Greens actually going out and destroying markets. The Greens are the only political party in this country that I know of that actually talk this country down. They talk the country down and they talk our industries down. Quite frankly, it is a disgrace that they would go into our international markets and talk down our local businesses and tell them not to buy products from Australia. It is outrageous. We have the government and senior union officials talking about a crisis in manufacturing yet here we have the Greens going into international markets talking down industry. We also have the NGOs and the greens in Australian markets. I am sure members of the Wilderness Society would like to know what happened to some of the money that used to belong to the Wilderness Society and now appears to be turning up within an organisation by the name of Markets for Change. My information is something around the $7 million mark has been siphoned off out of the Wilderness Society into Markets for Change to actually campaign against the Tasmanian and Australian timber industry in Australian markets: people campaigning against Harvey Norman, for example, seeking a commitment from Harvey Norman that they will not buy any furniture built out of timber coming from Tasmania. This is the sort of campaign that is actually having the result that Senator Brown talked about, which is loss of markets. So you have environmental campaigns which were recently described, in one media article that I saw, as anti-logging activism morphing into extortion. That is effectively what they are doing. They are saying to companies like Harvey Norman, 'If you don't stop buying products from this particular market we will campaign in your stores and we will destroy your reputation, just like we have attempted to destroy the reputations of other people in the industry.'

Senator Brandis interjecting—

I will take your interjection on that, Senator Brandis. They have an exemption under the Competition and Consumer Act to do this sort of thing, which is something that I am very concerned about and perhaps I will talk to my learned colleague Senator Brandis about that again later. But it is the Greens and their activities that are destroying markets for the Tasmanian timber industry, so it is groups like them that are causing the fundamental job losses in the Tasmanian community and the rest of us should be standing— (Time expired)