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

I'll take that interjection. Senator Pratt asked me if I have seen the state of the forests in Western Australia. Yes, I have. Have you seen the state of the forests in the Congo basin, Senator Pratt, where we rip our timber out of if we're not getting it out of Australian forests? I bet the answer to that question is no. The timber that comes out of those forests has tinges of modern human slavery attached to it. It destroys the environment. It results in huge acceleration of carbon emissions, but, hey, it's not happening in our backyard, so it doesn't matter. Not only are we offshoring the jobs through a broken promise of Labor governments—while this federal Labor government stands idly by, the former friend of the worker, and lets Labor state governments get away with economic carnage like this—but then they go and defend these decisions by saying, 'Have you seen the forests?' Yes, I have. It's not a pretty industry, but that doesn't mean it's environmentally destructive. You need to go and talk to scientists. You need to go and talk to the people in the industry who know what they're talking about, not people who operate on emotion and lack fact in their debate.

When we shut down this industry, we send it offshore. We send the jobs offshore. All of those people I talked about before, the contractors included, lose their jobs. The communities they're a part of lose their heart and soul—the footy club, the RSL, the school, the post office—as all of those amenities and the community itself evaporate. That is factored in nowhere in their thoughts, their policies or the decisions they make as they go about recklessly breaking promises.

Of course, when it comes to promises, I don't remember the Australian Labor Party promising at the last election that they'd fund a stadium in Tasmania, but they are. While doing so, of course, they're dudding—