Kerry O'Brien (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Transport) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to address the Senate tonight to correct the record regarding the Labor Party’s support for the Tasmanian forestry industry and, in particular, the Tasmanian Community Forest Agreement. First, let me say that the media release issued today by Senator Abetz is just plain wrong. The Labor Party categorically supports the Tasmanian Community Forest Agreement reached between the Commonwealth and Tasmanian governments. As far as we are concerned, the war about Tasmanian forestry is over. On 12 May 2005 that is effectively what the opposition leader said. I quote:

Federal Labor accepts the agreement announced today by the Prime Minister and the Labor Premier of Tasmania, and broadly supported by industry, unions, and timber workers.

I sincerely hope this can be the beginning of an end to conflict in Tasmania.

While we have not yet had the opportunity to fully examine the details of the agreement, we understand another 148,000 hectares of Tasmania’s forests will be preserved for future generations, most of it old growth forest.

I particularly welcome the announcement of an end to clearfelling of Tasmania’s old growth forests.

Importantly, affected sawmills cooperated in an industry restructuring exercise that will move them to alternative wood supply sources, create more jobs, allow them to introduce better technology, and upskill their workers.

Labor has long advocated this approach, emphasising value adding in forest industries.

This agreement is not perfect, and it does not give everyone everything they want ...

I hope that this agreement will secure once and for all the long term sustainability of Tasmania’s tourism and forest industries, and a better future for all Tasmanians.

That is what Mr Beazley said.

Whilst it is true that this afternoon Labor voted against the motion moved by Senator Watson, the Labor Party intends to move its own motion tomorrow in support of the Tasmanian forest industry and in support of Gunns, which, as Senator Watson noted in his motion, has been falsely represented by the Rainforest Action Network. It is our view that the motion moved by Senator Watson did not go far enough. Labor’s motion will make the point that the Rainforest Action Network has been writing to Gunns’ customers in Japan saying:

You must know that these parties can profit from deceiving you. Also they may indeed intend to compete with you if they build the new pulp mill.

In other words, ‘Let’s take action against a potential competitor’—an action against Australia’s interests. The Rainforest Action Network clearly believes that it is the judge and juror for the global community when it comes to determining what are acceptable social and environmental practices in the forest industry. In the same letter to customers, it says:

You should be aware that by refusing to engage in constructive dialogue with RAN—

Rainforest Action Network—

you could be misinterpreted as implicitly supporting egregious social and environmental practices.

That sounds awfully like a threat to me and to Labor. Clearly, as far as the Rainforest Action Network is concerned, no-one else in the world is capable of determining or competent to determine appropriate social and environmental practices. This is typical of parts of the green movement.

No industry is under as much pressure from our trading partners as the forest industry. Australia has 164 million hectares of native forests—four per cent of the world’s forests—and it has 1.7 million hectares of plantations. About 10 per cent of our native forests are managed for wood production, with less than one per cent being harvested in any one year. That small proportion of forests harvested annually is regenerated so that a perpetual supply of native hardwood and softwood is maintained in this country. Australia’s rigorous forestry standard, the Australian Forestry Standard, has global mutual recognition under the Program for the Endorsement of Forest Certification, the largest international sustainability recognition framework for forestry in the world. But the environmental movement is running a duplicitous campaign around the globe to undermine the status of the standard. At the same time as the greens are trying to discredit Australian forestry, they are running a campaign against illegal logging in Third World countries, a problem they are directly fuelling by their failure to back responsible forest industries in places like Australia.

Make no mistake: these are not environmental campaigns; they are political and they are commercial. Increasingly, environmental NGOs around the world, with the complicity of governments, are embedding themselves in policy and regulatory frameworks in which they have commercial interests. They do so with no mandate from the people and with no accountability. The forest industry provides a classic example. Instead of endorsing the AFS—developed in accordance with the usual rigorous standards processes used in Australia and New Zealand to govern all kinds of industries and products—green groups have been lobbying to discredit the standard internationally. Instead, they favour accreditation under the Forest Stewardship Council, or FSC, an organisation created by the World Wide Fund for Nature with the clear intention of sidelining elected governments when it comes to forest policy. Beyond its foray into the forest certification business, the WWF has a history of establishing buyer groups that effectively boycott timber products that are not FSC certified. Consequently, producers and suppliers are pressured to obtain FSC certification to maintain market access. The FSC’s business interests are effectively protected by environmental NGOs, who have mounted a concerted attack over recent years on other certification schemes. The AFS is just one of those.

It is instructive to take a look at the membership and governance of the FSC if there is any doubt about this. In Australia, there are just 10 members, including five environmental NGOs—Friends of the Earth, the Wilderness Society, Friends of Gippsland Bush, the Western Australian Forest Alliance and WWF Australia. The executive director of the FSC hails from the WWF and the members of the board are a very interesting group from Greenpeace, a cardboard manufacturer in Colombia, two members described as ‘individuals’ from Bolivia and Argentina—and the list goes on. While there is some industry representation, it is very limited and multilateral organisations and governments are excluded despite the fact that governments are major funding donors. Furthermore, it is our view that the FSC certification does not provide the guarantee of sustainable forestry that is claimed. For example, over 40 per cent of the total area of forest certified by the FSC is certified without any approved standards and over 80 per cent of the countries with FSC certifications do not have FSC approved standards. Despite the fact that 550,000 hectares of plantations in Australia are FSC certified, as of June this year there was no Australian FSC standard against which to certify.

It is also my contention that the vast majority of FSC national standards and forest certifications would simply not withstand scrutiny by the International Accreditation Forum or by the International Organisation for Standardisation, recognised by the United Nations. The body which recognises FSC principles, the International Social and Environmental Accreditation and Labelling Alliance, has seven full members, none of whom are national or international standards bodies but two of whom are the Rainforest Alliance and the FSC itself.

The Australian Forestry Standard is proceeding through the very rigorous processes of Standards Australia and the PEFC towards full recognition, however rocky the road may be towards consensus, and the organisation and its members are to be congratulated on their perseverance against the odds. We would equally welcome an Australian FSC standard were the FSC prepared to meet the same rigours of Standards Australia, the JAS-ANZ, the ISO and the IAF. But we will not support it while it makes its own standards, accredits its own people as certifiers and switches hats with environmental NGOs when it needs to protect its business from competition. The FSC logo can be used for woodchip and fibre products when only 17½ per cent of the total wood fibre or 30 per cent of virgin wood fibre is FSC certified. It does not matter where the rest of the timber comes from! And the ‘FSC mixed’ label can be used on any wood product even if only 10 per cent of the total material is FSC certified.

The sustainable expansion of Australia’s forest industry is very important to meet global demand and to contribute to our own economic prosperity. Most estimates are that a third to a half of the world’s forests have already been burnt or chopped down. That makes it more critical than ever that the world’s remaining forests are managed sustainably for conservation, for the world’s future forest product needs and for the enormous environmental services that they perform in maintaining global biodiversity and providing carbon sinks to manage climate change.

Madam Acting President, I seek leave to give notice of a motion in relation to what occurred today. I am happy to give notice of that motion now if leave is granted. If leave is not granted, I will give notice of that motion tomorrow. I now seek that leave.

Leave granted.

I give notice that, on the next day of sitting, I shall move:

That the Senate—

(a)

notes the vital role played by the forestry industry in the Tasmanian economy, and the need to support this industry and the building of a pulp mill in Tasmania;

(b)

condemns the misrepresentation of Gunns Limited by the Rainforest Action Network which has been actively campaigning against Tasmania’s forest industry in its overseas markets, notably Japan, and which has been:

(i)

portraying to Gunns’ Japanese customers that a Tasmanian pulp mill will be a competitor for Japanese industry and actively lobbying to keep Japanese pulp mills producing at the expense of Australian investment, Australian jobs and import replacement to offset the $2 billion trade deficit in the forest and forest products sector,

(ii)

falsely claiming that Gunns’ logging practices are listed amongst the worst in the developed world according to the World Conservation Union (IUCN), when in fact this is the claim made by environmental non-government organisations (NGOs) in a submission to the IUCN, and

(iii)

implicitly threatening Gunns’ Japanese customers if they do not engage in constructive dialogue with the Rainforest Action Network about their serious concerns about Gunns as a woodchips supplier;

(c)

calls on the Government to take urgent measures to address the dishonest campaigns and secondary boycott practices of environmental NGOs being used against the Tasmanian and the Australian forest and forest products industries in their Australian and international markets; and

(d)

condemns the Government for failing to move quickly enough to provide a fair and level playing field for Tasmanian and Australian forest products in both their Australian and international markets and for failing to take action against illegal timber imports into Australia.