Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The minister has just completely undermined himself. Anyone who has dealt with the Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport Committee knows that the committee has very little confidence in the import risk assessment matrix when it comes to biosecurity. We have been through it a thousand times. You say that you identify the risk and it is all managed, and everything. Our experience is—and Senator Boswell will confirm this as well—that the risk assessment has been absolutely hopeless. We all know that.

On that, Minister, I do not know if you heard Background Briefing over the weekend. I was completely horrified to hear about the level of illegal import of birds into Australia. The fact is there was an aviary full of diseased birds and when the vet informed the owner of the aviary that the birds were diseased and that the disease could only have come in on an illegally imported bird, the aviary owner sold all the birds in the aviary all over Australia—presumably spreading that disease all over Australia. No action could be taken because the disease was not on the list of prohibited diseases in Australia. That is how the import risk assessment works for biosecurity. We have seen it.

If you tell me that this is going to be an import risk assessment of whether timber has been illegally logged then I can tell you now there will be zero prosecutions under this. What assessment are you going to make of the level of risk that timber coming from Indonesia has been illegally logged? What level of risk are you going to give timber coming from PNG having been illegally logged? What is the level of risk from the Congo? There is no way that you could import those things without saying that there would be a high level of risk.

Now that the DNA technology is available, you can trace where timber comes from. That is how they traced back the floorboards in the stadium at the London Olympics to timber logged out of Tasmania's forests. That is how they did it. That is how we can do it. If you are serious about illegally logged timber, that is what you would be doing—going to DNA testing not to a matrix of risk. There is so much corruption in these countries in handing out logging licences that they may well comply with the law, but the fact that they have been illegally allocated in the first place cannot be covered in your so-called risk matrix.

I will be fascinated after a short period of time to see whether there have been any prosecutions. Frankly, how is an importer of a lounge suite going to make an assessment about whether the structural timber in that lounge suite has been illegally logged? How are they possibly going to do that? I am intrigued as to how you can apply a risk matrix to that. Minister, I would like to specifically know: now that the technology exists, why would you not include DNA testing and coupe identification? In that way you would have an absolutely foolproof system—you would not be able to deny where the tree came from in the first place.

It seems to me that, if you are not going to go this way, we are going to end up with window-dressing around illegal imports of timber. When and if you try to prosecute an importer saying that they have imported illegal timber, they will simply say, 'When we did the risk analysis we determined that there was a low level of risk that it would be illegal.' How are you ever going to prove it is not, anyway? It seems to me that what we are seeing now with the refusal to do this is we will get a piece of legislation but it will not deal with the kinds of serious undertakings to stop the importation of illegal timber that you say you are trying to stop. I want to know why you think an import risk assessment matrix is superior to DNA testing at the coupe level, whereby you can take a sample of any product, any time, anywhere and away you go.