Lisa Singh (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I move items (1) to (4) on sheet 7712, together:

(1) Title, page 1 (lines 2 and 3), omit "and the Renewable Energy (Electricity) Regulations2001".

(2) Clause 3, page 2 (line 11), omit "(1)".

(3) Clause 3, page 2 (lines 15 to 17), omit subclause (2).

(4) Schedule 1, Part 4, page 13 (line 1) to page 15 (line 2), omit the Part, substitute:

Part 4—Wood waste

Renewable Energy (Electricity) Act 2000

47 At the end of section 17

  Add:

Wood waste

(6) Despite anything in regulations made under subsection (3), wood waste does not include waste, or a product or by-product, that is, or is derived from, biomass from a native forest.

Labor's amendments remove the provisions in this bill that seek to reinsert native wood waste into the Renewable Energy Scheme and amend the act to prevent any future regulation being made by the government to reinsert native wood waste into the scheme. This attempt to reinsert native wood waste into the Renewable Energy Scheme is nothing more and nothing less than a cynical red herring. It is not an issue that was raised with our shadow minister during negotiations. We all know that those negotiations went for some 12 months or more and yet it was never raised during all of those negotiations. It was a critical issue for industry, but it was certainly never, ever raised.

Native wood waste is neither clean nor renewable in the modern-day sense of the term with respect to the Renewable Energy Scheme. Boosters of this provision like to pretend that they are talking here about small amounts of waste, small amounts of refuse that are left, say, on the forest floor after some harvesting. But what we clearly know is that the definition of 'native wood waste' would involve the whole of any tree that is harvested but not ultimately saw lopped. So the industry definition of 'waste' is not waste in the sense of the residue—that is, the leaves, branches and stumps—left after logging on the forest floor. The definition of 'waste' or 'residues' that is built into the regulation allows for whole logs to be burnt for power production. Wood waste, for instance, from plantation logging is already an eligible source in the current renewable energy act. But including wood waste from native forests would allow native Tasmanian trees, for instance, to be logged and burnt for power production because waste can be defined as any log that is harvested but not ultimately saw lopped or that has no higher commercial purpose. So in this way a pulp log, for paper production, is of lower value than a sawlog for sawn timber, so the pulp log is considered waste, even when pulp logs comprise 90 per cent of the timber extracted from a forest.

So Labor is not willing to see the Renewable Energy Scheme used to provide an alternative to the hard work of debating serious questions around the comprehensive inclusive and long-term solutions for our traditional logging industries. So it is for those reasons and for the reason that the reinsertion of native wood waste into the scheme was never raised during the some 12 months of negotiations with the opposition that I move the amendments that are before the Senate.