Joe Ludwig (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

Broadly, if you look at the global trade, it is sometimes very hard to be accurate by individual countries. If you had a sense of that then you might have a different approach. You can do an assessment but it is very hard, until you put a framework in place, to look at the particular size and nature of illegally logged timber. The broad assessment would be that it is about $400 million, if we are to use a figure, but again I would not say with any degree of accuracy that that is the number. The legislation will look to ensure that we minimise it—

Senator Xenophon interjecting—

Yes, that is in Australia. The global figure is much bigger; it is about $60 billion. It is worthwhile to reiterate the three steps to the due diligence process. It is about identifying and gathering information to enable the risk of procuring illegally logged timber to be assessed, then assessing and identifying the risk of timber being illegally logged based on this information, and then mitigating this risk depending on the level identified. I always talk about a framework, so firstly you have the due diligence process in place, which is about identifying, gathering, and assessing and then having a compliance framework to ensure that the risk is minimised. We do not talk about a zero tolerance because it is a risk based framework. The aim is always for a zero tolerance but the risk based system will provide that the compliance framework is in place to ensure that illegally logged timber coming into Australia is minimised.