Slade Brockman (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

talking about, Senator McKim, the sustainability of the well-managed Western Australian native timber harvesting industry. This was the Labor minister who gave a speech talking about how well managed and sustainable the native timber harvesting was and how it would be there for the long term. Just a few months later, they chopped it off at the neck and ended it overnight.

I come from one of those communities. I was born in Manjimup and raised on a family farm in Pemberton. My dad's best mate was a timber industry worker who worked for the government—the then Department of Forestry. We had lots of friends in that community. Something happened in that community almost overnight. When my dad ran for parliament in the 60s, he lost because it was a safe Labor seat on the back of a unionised timber workforce. When Labor betrayed those workers, as Labor always does in the bush, it flipped and became a safe Liberal seat pretty much overnight. That is the outcome that we see here. We see a betrayal of these communities to the point where long-held beliefs have to be thrown out the window. Those communities are undermined and betrayed by their political leaders when they do things like this.

The very small harvest that was taken from Western Australian native forests sustained a small industry at the end—I'm happy to acknowledge that. It wasn't a massive industry anymore. It had been cut down over the years and made into a relatively small industry. But to those few towns that relied on that industry, it was a key economic driver. To those small towns in the south-west of Western Australia harvesting basically two timbers, karri and red gum, it was a key component of the fabric, the history and the economic wealth of those communities. They had that chopped out from under them with no warning and no transition time and, in fact, when just a few months before the Labor minister was saying that the industry was sustainable and had a long future. How can you do that to a community? How in all conscience can you do that to a local community? It's just a disgrace.

Unfortunately, Labor governments have form in the bush, whether it be in native timber harvesting in my home state of WA or now in Victoria. We see exactly the same process occurring in my home state of WA in the sheep industry—a decision taken with no evidence, no scientific review and no examination of what the industry had actually done to improve standards over the years. As Senator Tyrrell so rightly said, we should look at things like standards, we should see how industries are being managed and we should look at the way that industries are operating now, not as they used to operate 30 years ago when the Greens were formulating their positions on this. We should look at how the industries are operating now and make decisions based on the best science. Are these industries sustainable? Are their practices at world's best standards? Are we delivering sustainable jobs into the future? The answer on all those marks, for both native timber harvesting and—in my home state also—the live export industry for sheep, is, 'Yes, they are sustainable.'

The trouble is that federal Labor and state Labor just don't care about the bush. I would even go harder than that: they hate the bush. They don't care and they— (Time expired)