David Bushby (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise to take note of answers from Minister Abetz. As Minister Abetz noted when he provided the answers to the questions on this matter, the people of Tasmania have spoken on this issue. Both the federal and state elections saw a resounding mandate provided to the Liberal parties at federal and state level for the policies that both those state and federal parties took to the respective elections.

In the federal scenario, we saw massive swings in Braddon and Lyons, those being the electorates in Tasmania most heavily affected by forestry—particularly Lyons, where Eric Hutchinson, the excellent and very strong member for that federal electorate, achieved the largest swing of any winning seat in the country. That, to a large extent, is because of the strong support for him by the people of Lyons because of this issue and the stance that he and the Liberal Party took on it. Similarly, at the state election, Labor received an absolute thumping—the biggest thumping it had received since 1992. And nowhere was that bigger than in Braddon, an area also heavily impacted by decisions to wind back forestry.

The fact is that the boundary adjustments of the year before last occurred as part of a flawed political process. Tasmanian Labor went to the 2010 election on a bipartisan ticket to support forestry, as it had done for decades. But it ended up in minority after the 2010 election, and it did a dirty deal with the Greens. Part of that deal was the so-called forest peace agreement which they put together. Out of that forest peace agreement came the boundary adjustment under which Labor gave in to the longstanding claims of the extreme environmental movement who want nothing more than to shut down the forestry industry in Tasmania completely. They did that by reducing the areas of forest available for harvest to below viable levels. This was achieved through this flawed, rushed process which saw the WHC list these additional small adjustments to the existing World Heritage areas.

It is worth looking for a minute at the truly sustainable state of what the forest industry used to do prior to the IGA being put in place in Tasmania. Back then, only a few years ago, on the rate of harvesting that was occurring at that time, in 100 years time there would have been 103 per cent of the native forests in Tasmania that there were at that time. There was more native forest being replanted than was being harvested. In 100 years time, there would have been 103 per cent of the native forests in Tasmania that then existed.

What, you might ask, was being planted instead? Were we putting in plantation forests or something that was changing the nature of those forests? No. With every coupe that was being harvested through Forestry Tasmania in Tasmania, they would go in beforehand and harvest seeds from all the plants in that very coupe, to maintain the genetic material of that coupe. They would then go off and take those seeds away and start growing them. They would come in and do the harvesting of the forests, and then they would go back and plant the same seeds from the same trees that were harvested in those coupes. Five years down the track, if you were to go back and look at those coupes, you would see that there was lots of healthy growth with a mix of plants that reflected what was there before. In 20 years time, if you were to come back you would not know it from the coupe next door that had not been harvested. And in 100 years time, there would be big trees and everything—and 100 years time is what we are talking about, when there would be 103 per cent of the native forests. That is the standard of the forest practices that were occurring—and what they were trying to stop here.

It is also important to remember this. I think Senator Thorp mentioned eagles and other issues of concern to many people. Well, if there is an eagle's nest found in a forest, I cannot remember exactly but I think they were not allowed to log within five kilometres around it. If there were streams or waterways, there was a buffer of half a kilometre or something similar to that where they could not log. These were the practices that were in place for Tasmanian forests. They were outstanding. They were world's best practice. And they protected all the sorts of environmental values and heritage that Senator Thorp was saying were threatened by our attempted delisting. We do it so well, in fact, that a lot of the areas that were added to the World Heritage area through the boundary adjustment were areas that had been previously forested and had regrown. The environment movement now claims that these are so well regrown that they are now World Heritage in terms of the standard of their forests.