Jonathon Duniam (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Environment, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:

This is a very important motion. There's lots happening in the chamber today but this is an important item for discussion. I was pleased to attend the Australian Forest Products Association dinner last night, along with Minister Watt, Senator Ciccone and a number of other members of this parliament, to talk about what is an extremely important industry, one that sustains thousands of jobs across the country and does so in a sustainable way.

What we're talking about here is a resource that is, as the industry itself says, the ultimate renewable. Trees grow; you cut them down; you use them for the resources that we see displayed proudly in this chamber here; you replant them, as we are required to by law in this country; and they grow again. That's the wonderful thing about this forestry industry.

What's more, we do it to world's best standard. Our forests, be they plantation or native, hardwood or softwood, are managed to world's best standard. And, of course, the forests we harvest and manage here are certified, unlike 80 per cent of the forests from across the rest of the globe, which are not certified. I'll come back to those forests from other parts of the world, where, frankly, standards of forest management are much lower—if indeed they exist at all—than they are here in Australia.

It brings me to what's happening in the state of Victoria, which is a deeply disappointing decision. We all knew back in 2019 that the Victorian Labor government had made their plans, and set them out clearly, to phase out native forest logging by the year 2030. That was a long period of time for that government to work with industry to phase it out. I disagreed with their decision, but at least there was time for them to work with industry to phase out logging of native forests in that state. Now, the reason I disagreed with that is that it was not based on science. It was not based on fact. It was an emotive decision. Mayors of local councils in Victoria, representatives of the industry, workers from the contracting sector and anyone who is interested have been seeking the science that the decision was based upon, yet it has not been forthcoming. There is no document that the government have been able to table to point to and underpin the decision they made to shut down the native forest industry and displace the hundreds and thousands of workers whose incomes are dependent on this, as I said before, sustainable industry, and that is a crying shame.

What's worse is that in their budget the Victorian Labor government made a decision to press fast-forward on this phasing-out of native forest logging. We had seven more years to phase out this industry. A decision bad enough in itself, not based on science—but they brought it forward to seven months. They fast-forwarded it by seven years. So, by the end of this year, that industry, which is sustainable, based on science, world's best practice and good for the environment, will be gone. But you know what won't be gone, President? It's demand for the product that that industry generates: hardwood products of an appearance grade and strength grade to be used in applications that plantation timber can't be.

Australians are still going to want that product. A huge proportion of what we use here we already import. When that demand is still there and we're not producing it in Australia, we're bringing it in from countries that, quite frankly, don't give a damn about the environment. It's those forests, those native forests across the rest of the world—including in the Congo basin where, sadly, trees are ripped out of the ground; deforestation does occur—that we are going to get our timber from. Today we're already importing timber into Victoria from Tasmania.

The pie is not getting any bigger with our sustainable world-leading forests; it's getting smaller. We're dealing ourselves out of the game to make ourselves feel better. We don't have to look at clear-felled coops. We don't have to see that end of the industry. We just get the nice products. We don't care where they come from overseas. And, in the process, we're sending jobs offshore. So there are bad environmental outcomes, because we're seeing deforestation occur—I'd also argue that there are some modern slavery implications to some of these decisions when it comes to the jurisdictions we're taking timber from—but we're are also having an economic hit, with thousands of jobs in regional communities lost, never to return, all based on emotion, to win over inner-city votes in downtown Melbourne. The federal Labor government needs to stand up and stop it.