Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Agriculture) Share this | Hansard source

The original submission is actually a public document. What we should do is respect genuine wilderness. We should not be using this process, as the previous Labor government and Senator Milne and her colleagues have done, to destroy an industry.

The special species sector is under particular threat from this listing. We know that there have been existing forestry activities. The Greens pretend 90 per cent of this area is old-growth pristine forest. That is not the case. According to the figures that have been provided to us by Forestry Tasmania, only 28,530 hectares of the 74,000 hectares are actually old-growth forest. It is not 90 per cent as the environmental groups would have you believe. In fact, 9,580 hectares of it is not even forest at all. So when the green groups put out photographs of nice forests with a bit of cloud over them they are, as they quite often do, really misrepresenting what is in those forests. So 46,000 hectares of the 74,000 hectares is classified in other ways. We know that, post 1960, 10 per cent has been harvested. But we also know that some of these areas have been harvested back into the 1900s. So we are taking this action for one good reason: to respect the real values of genuine wilderness, which should be respected. We do not believe, as the Greens do, that we should destroy the forest industry in Tasmania.