Mark Arbib (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister for Government Service Delivery) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On behalf of the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Mr Burke, I table a ministerial statement on preparing our forest industries for the future.

Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

This statement is a commitment by the Rudd government, after 11 years of Howard government commitment, to the continued destruction of Australia’s native forests and woodlands and, with them, the habitat of the wildlife that they contain through the unnecessary process of providing export woodchips— with Gunns Ltd, the world’s biggest hardwood export woodchipper, being the big driver in Tasmania—to make wrapping paper and ultimately greenhouse gases, in Japan, and for other purposes, when the two million hectares of plantations which the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry in his statement notes that there are now established in Australia can provide all the wood needs of the nation for house building, paper and all other uses combined.

It is also an enthusiastic endorsement from the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, and his cabinet of the proposed Gunns pulp mill in Tasmania. There is no doubt that the 100,000 people of the Tamar Valley will be shuddering at the way in which this has been pitched, nearly at the end of June, to prop up the faltering expectations by Gunns Ltd that they can get investment on the international markets. The CEO of Gunns, John Gay, announced for the third or fourth time—I do not know how many times, but not for the first time—a couple of months ago that finance would be forthcoming and he would be making a statement by the end of June. Once again, we are very close to that date and that statement has not been made. But one wonders, in reading this document of enthusiastic support for John Gay and his board—which does include the former Liberal Premier of Tasmania who Senator Milne referred to a short while ago—whether the department has some knowledge about that financial situation. We will wait and see.

I also know, however, that the statement completely leaves blank the negative impact of this vastly polluting and destructive pulp mill on both the farmlands and the economy of many small businesses in the Tamar Valley which is estimated to be between $2 billion and $3 billion per annum and the impact that this gargantuan consumer of forests, with its attached forest furnace, would make on 200,000 hectares of Tasmania’s native forest if it were to proceed. We know that in recent months some of the machinery needed to establish the forest furnace has been landed from international ships at Bell Bay at the site of the proposed pulp mill, and there is no doubt that Gunns, if it does not get the go-ahead for the pulp mill, still intends to build the forest furnace which would produce as much electricity as the Franklin Dam by burning wood from the native forests of Tasmania with a plantation component as well.

As stated in their prospectus for the pulp mill, the intention of Gunns is to sell the electricity as green energy onto the market. That means the Melbourne market.  People in Melbourne would be deceived into believing that the electricity which was heating up their toasters in the morning and warming their houses at night was coming as an environmental bonus. Indeed, that deception would be enhanced under the laws being promulgated by the Rudd government. In fact, where it would actually be destroying the forests in Tasmania and the habitats of wildlife, the electricity would be marketed as green and, presumably, under the rubric of ‘Green is good’. It is a Faustian line of presentation and part of the deception which covers a villainous attitude towards forests by the people making money out of them—and they are a very small group of people. Much of the money flows out through the Sydney and Melbourne stock exchanges to overseas interests. It does not stay in this country, and just as is largely currently the case with the woodchip export industry it will be the same for the pulp mill: any profit coming from it will flow out of Tasmania whereas the small businesses in the Tamar Valley put their money back into the community, thereby keeping jobs and sustaining the local economy.

That has not stopped a process in Tasmania of authorisation of this pulp mill. Serial Labor premiers have ignored the public concern. For example, the former Premier Jim Bacon conducted the biggest community consultation process with the people of Australia to protect the Tasmanian wild forests, but he abandoned it, totally ignored it and proceeded to authorise the continuation of woodchip exports out of the state. In the 2004 election both Mr Howard and Mr Latham offered similar packages to Tasmania, but Mr Latham offered a more generous financial package. Then Tasmanian Premier Paul Lennon gave his endorsement in the run-up to the election, as the public understood it, to John Howard and helped him win the next election. He was in league with the then Liberal Prime Minister of Australia, John Howard, and let down the prospective Labor leader, Mark Latham. The CFMEU, with red flags flying in the Albert Hall in Tasmania, came to the aid of Prime Minister Howard to dump a prospective Labor government. In a twist of political fortune and allegiance that many people will never, ever forget, the people of the logging industry were manipulated through a union and through a failed Tasmanian Premier. There was so much public misinformation that Mark Latham’s offer was lost and with it a potential $700 million of investment in Tasmania which we will never see. That is the way it went and that is the way it continues to go.

I went and saw the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Mr Burke, some months ago in his office. He had a great array of people from his department outside and asked if I wanted them to come in. I said, ‘No, I don’t, I want to talk to you.’ I am not going to comment on anything he said, but he listened intently for the best part of half an hour while I told him about the important other values of the wild forests of Australia, not least those of Tasmania, and invited him to come down and see them. I told him the massive value the forests have as carbon banks, as a hedge against climate change, which is discounted to zero. He mentioned it once in the statement, but it is seen as a zero. In the mention he gave in the statement, he indicated that cutting down trees and turning them into other produce is a good way to save carbon. It is part of this colossal spin and deception upon which this industry is based these days. The minister and the Prime Minister turned down my offer—and it was a heartfelt offer—to go to Tasmania without the media just to look at the other side of the coin and see forests such as the Upper Florentine Forest, where good-hearted Australian citizens are at the moment camped out in wintry weather trying to defend the forest against this Rudd government and the Labor government in Tasmania.

Of course the minister did not accept my offer. He flew down before Christmas after his appointment—and no doubt has done so many times since—to communicate with the logging industry and be totally taken into their camp. As the minister for forests, I suppose one cannot cavil too much with that, but then one has to ask where is the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts, whose job is to go in and advocate for the forests, not against them. He refuses to come and talk to the community groups who want to take him out to the forests in Tasmania. He has also turned down my repeated requests for him to come and do what he is beholden to do as duty minister for the environment—that is, to go and see these forests and the wildlife and the alternatives, because I repeat that this is a totally unnecessary industry, as was whaling before Malcolm Fraser put a stop to that in 1978. (Time expired)

Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This ministerial statement from the Hon. Tony Burke, the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, is entitled ‘Preparing our forest industries for the future’. The title in itself is misleading; it should be ‘Sandbagging our forest industries and keeping them on corporate welfare’, because that is precisely what this ministerial statement does. I just cannot understand why there is not any movement from either the Labor Party or the Liberal Party at the federal level or the state level to move to protect forests when everybody knows that we are losing those forests at a faster and faster rate and that we are losing species that are being driven closer and closer to extinction—and it is being funded by the public purse.

These native forest industries have not stood on their own two feet for generations. Forestry Tasmania loses money every year. Forestry Tasmania runs up massive debts, and the legislation that has gone through here to guarantee state governments’ ability to borrow will see Forestry Tasmania sending Tasmania bankrupt. We have rescued them time and time again, and this forest industry keeps on saying, ‘Give us more Commonwealth money and we will make the transition out of native forests.’ And, year in, year out, the Commonwealth provides multimillions—$45 million to $50 million in recent years—for this transition out of native forests, and all that happens is that it entrenches the industry in native forests.

The industry go out and buy equipment to keep on logging native forests. They keep on putting people into jobs logging native forests. There is barely even an attempt to make a transition, and there is never any performance assessment of this Commonwealth money that is ploughed in in corporate welfare to keep on logging forests. There is never any assessment of how effective the move has been. Nobody will forget the CFMEU outside the Albert Hall with the former Prime Minister John Howard, encouraging people to vote for the coalition because they would see to the logging of more forests than former leader of the Labor Party Mark Latham was prepared to see happen. Prime Minister Howard stood up there and said that the Florentine would be protected—and it was not; that was misleading. They went ahead and let it be logged.

We are now seeing a minister making a statement to the parliament saying that there will be no more native forests logged for the pulp mill than are currently logged. The Wilderness Society assesses that 200,000 hectares of native forests will be logged for the pulp mill. That is apparently what Minister Burke thinks is fine. That is the end of some kind of transition out of native forests. If there is a transition out of native forests to plantations, why did Gunns require a 30-year agreement to log native forests? It is because they want to log native forests, they want to send woodchips overseas and they want to have the native forest woodchips that they cannot sell overseas—the ones that are poorer quality—so that they can burn them in their forest furnace.

This Rudd government is going to declare that green energy under the renewable energy target legislation and allow people to think they are buying renewable energy when they are seeing the burning of Tasmania’s precious forests, our carbon stores. It might occur to people that Minister Burke is now saying, ‘We are going to count the carbon in furniture, in forest products’. Less than 10 per cent of the carbon from a forest that is logged ever makes it into a durable piece of furniture or a wood product. The rest goes, and a huge amount goes to atmosphere. One of the biggest sleights of hand is this notion that we are somehow getting a net benefit by logging native forests. What we need to do is separate out the emissions from the logging of native forests from the soil carbon, from the burning of native forests, and at the same time look at the uptake from native forests, look at the carbon store and then at the flux.

We need to look at this thing properly, not at this sleight of hand that is here. Minister Burke’s statement several times mentions balance, and every time you hear the word ‘balance’ you know it is a socioeconomic political construct that will see destruction of forests or the environment. It is part of the view that all that Australia is good for is digging up, cutting down and shipping overseas. The minister makes all sorts of claims about jobs, and the wildest claim in his ministerial statement suggests that there will be 8,000 direct and indirect jobs because of the pulp mill and 1,500 jobs created during its operation. Gunns itself says that 292 jobs will be in the factory and that there will be 1,600 jobs during construction, so it does not even pretend that these thousands of jobs are out there.

Furthermore, there have been studies about the jobs that will be lost to the fishing industry and the tourism industry. But the horror for people in the Tamar Valley is the statement in the minister’s statement that is about setting up the forest industry leaders ministerial roundtable which will have the job of securing industry investment, a government and industry collaboration to secure investment—code for: ‘Stock market, listen. The federal government is coming to the rescue of Gunns.’ The second thing is that Minister Carr has another group, the Pulp and Paper Industry Strategy Group. What is its job? It is to develop a plan to encourage innovation and attract investment in pulp and paper manufacturing in Australia—code for: ‘We are going to use taxpayers’ money to bring the heads of the logging industry to Canberra and we are going to work with them to use our embassies around the world to do whatever it takes to try and get investment in logging native forests.’

It is not going to work, because the investment community knows that they cannot afford to compromise their social responsibility and their environmental codes of practice by getting involved in this disgraceful, polluting pulp mill that will log native forests, that will have a wood-supplying agreement of 30 years, that will pollute the atmospheres of the Tamar Valley and Bass Strait, that will diminish housing values in the Tamar and that is not wanted by the Tasmanian community. I think it is important for Tasmanians to realise that they have got Jodie Campbell, Sid Sidebottom, Dick Adams, Duncan Kerr and Julie Collins, who are all Labor members, in the five Tasmanian electorates, and they are standing there with the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, who has said:

I want to see the Gunns Bell Bay Pulp Mill built.

He went on to say:

The Bell Bay pulp mill will be good for jobs, good for industry and good for Australia.

Interestingly, he does not mention the environment, because it will be bad for the environment, and bad for the environment is actually bad for Australia. It will not be good for jobs. It is a net jobs loser. You cannot promote yourself as a natural destination and go and log your native forests.

Let me also add that in the assessment process the impact of this pulp mill on the forests was not assessed at the federal level. Why not? Because Liberal and Labor collaborated in this place to make sure that in the assessment conditions under the EPBC Act they excluded the assessment of the impact of this project on the forests. So nobody has looked at the impact on the forests. Nobody has calculated it. In fact, the greenhouse gas ramifications of logging a native forest coupe have been excluded. Nobody will be counting the greenhouse gas emissions from the native forest burning furnace, because under their accounting practices it does not count.

This is a disgraceful effort, and I will tell you why it is here. It is here because the Tasmanian industry is in a state of collapse; $620 million of taxpayers’ money has been thrown at them and they are still in a state of collapse. They are losing money hand over fist. They are losing jobs hand over fist, and so they are asking to get on the public welfare system, on the taxpayer dollar. We are told there is no money to do all sorts of things around Australia, including looking after our horticultural industries and every other industry. We do not have money for that, but apparently we have millions more to give to the logging industry to destroy our forests. This is an opportunity to restructure logging outside of native forests, while the industry is in a state of collapse, while the mills on the north-west coast are about to close. That is what the government should do, not just give another sop and a huge bucketload of Commonwealth taxpayers’ money to this industry.

Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I welcome Minister Burke’s first ministerial statement on forestry since he was appointed as minister. It has taken 18 months for it to arrive and I would have to say, disappointingly, it does not actually say all that much.

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

Senator O’Brien interjecting—

Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I take the interjection from Senator O’Brien. We all understand the hyperbole from the Greens with respect to forestry and all of us understand that their objective is to close the forest industry down. That is their sole objective.

Steve Hutchins (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We’ll live by candles!

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

Senator O’Brien interjecting—

Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That may be the case. I should not be distracted by the interjections, but I am afraid I cannot help myself because I can only agree with them. The frenetic nature of Senator Milne’s last presentation gave it away. It was quite out there. The false, misleading and hyperbolic statements that Senator Milne and Senator Brown put on the record as part of their presentations were extraordinary. Senator Milne made a reference to balance, and I would have to say that is one thing you will not find from the Greens, particularly when it comes to forestry.

I am pleased to say that, on most forestry issues, there is largely a bipartisan approach. There have been some famous moments, which again Senator Milne referred to, where there has been a divergence, but I think it is important that the community understand that the reason that the Labor Party and the Liberal Party generally agree with respect to forestry is that we take a balanced view of it. We take a considered view of what is a very important industry for our country and for jobs within our communities, particularly rural communities. It is a very important issue.

I might take up one of Senator Milne’s points. In respect of the debate on climate change, forestry, as she said, can play a very important part. But she seeks to deny one of the things that can assist people to understand much better how forestry can play an important part. In Europe, energy generated from wood waste is seen as a good thing. It shows how far behind the Greens here in Australia are when it comes to this issue. They are in the prehistoric age. They are not up with the latest thinking with respect to forestry. They are way behind, and there are real opportunities for the forest industry in Australia to move forward.

The concept of considering carbon stored in furniture and timber products is a very important step forward for the forest industry and an opportunity for the industry in this country. Senator Milne seeks to deny that, but it is only reasonable to consider that your timber kitchen table is in fact a carbon sink. It stores carbon and locks it away. The research now shows that a properly sustained and maintained forest that is harvested over a reasonably long cycle will in fact sequester more carbon over time if it is properly managed and harvested than it would if it were just left to grow on its own.

The Greens talk about these highly carbon dense forests that exist within some of our native forest areas, but they completely disregard the fact that those same features exist in some of our regrowth native forests. So you will find the same carbon density characteristics in regrowth native forests, not just the old growth native forests. It is a very important point to remember but something that the Greens continue to deny.

Can I just make a few comments with respect to the minister’s performance in the portfolio. I have to say it has been very disappointing to this point in time. When we investigated the progress of election commitments at estimates, we found it has been extremely slow. Back in November, after 12 months, nothing had actually been commenced. It was all in review and for decision by the minister. Some of it now remains at ministerial council but without too much underway.

I welcome the minister’s statements with respect to the pulp mill. I think it is fantastic that the government, through Minister Burke, is talking about support for the pulp mill. I do remain, however, concerned about statements that are being made as part of the approval process by the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts. It appears that, at every occasion, he seeks to enhance his environmental credentials by talking down the pulp mill at Bell Bay. It does send shockwaves and shivers through the markets when they hear the person who has the last stroke of the pen with respect to this project making negative comments. Reports back to me from industry with respect to the skills training programs are very positive, and I congratulate the government on those programs. They have been very well received. The companies undertaking them are very proactive. I think that is good news. It is also assisting with encouraging people into the forest sector.

I have to say, though, that there are some things that are missing out of this report. Minister Burke talks about the possibilities for forestry and climate change, but one thing that he does miss out—and one thing that nobody has been able to get answers on to date—is the fact that forest contractors are left out of the fuel rebate scheme under the CPRS. I cannot understand why that is the case. Farmers get it and heavy transport gets it, but forest contractors do not get it. I had a forest contractor in my office this morning. When we were talking to him he said: ‘I run a farm. I run a forest contracting business and I run a transport business. How do I deal with the red tape involved in separating all of that out.’ There has been absolutely no satisfactory explanation from the government to anybody—the forest industry, the contractors or anybody—with respect to what might be going on and why the decision was made to exclude forest contractors from the fuel rebate scheme under the CPRS.

We saw again with the review of the EPBC Act coming through—and I note that the minister has referred to the review of the EPBC Act in his statement today—the report from Green and Labor senators on the EPBC Act. It is very concerning that that report cast doubt on the future of the RFAs. The minister says he is committed to the RFAs into the future but he places a caveat on that. I can recall, going back to the early nineties, when there were huge debates about sovereign risk of investment into forestry and the RFAs were part of that process. Again, it was a bipartisan process. It took a long time to get them into place. But they are the foundation upon which investment in the forest industries is built, and companies, contractors and people working in the industry have confidence in the security of the resource. The reference in the minister’s statement to that is extremely concerning. When you put it alongside the recommendation in the Senate report, that really does cast doubt on the future of the RFAs. I congratulate coalition senators on their recommendation that put the coalition perspective on the table well and truly—that we would continue to support the RFAs.

Again, it is pleasing to see some activity from the minister with respect to his portfolio responsibilities for forestry. As I said, there are some pluses and minuses in what really is a pretty bland statement, but at least he has put something on the record. I would urge him, however, to double his efforts to ensure that the RFA process is protected—that is absolutely vital. And I would like him to stand up for his portfolio constituents, particularly the forest contractors, with respect to the development of the CPRS and include them in the fuel rebate scheme as part of that process.

Question agreed to.