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

I reject the notion. The minister says, 'An importer could use that technology.' They cannot use that technology unless there is a record of a sample being taken at the point at which the coupe is identified. Otherwise, yes, you could get a DNA test that would tell you something about that piece of furniture, but it does not tell you where it came from if you do not have an original sample to measure it from. That is the whole point: to give yourself a benchmark against which any derived product can be measured.

It is quite clear that the government is going to go down this path which I think will be ineffective. The technology already exists to do a much better job in terms of due diligence, but it is obvious that the government is not going to support that happening.

I think we are going to end up with a piece of legislation where the due diligence and the declaration form are superseded and we are going to have a below-average kind of system. It would have helped us a great deal if we could have seen the form that we are going to use before debating this here, rather than just having a vague reference to it.