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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (Senator Ludwig) to a question without notice asked by Senator Milne today relating to the Tasmanian Forests Intergovernmental Agreement.

I note that clause 25 of the intergovernmental agreement says:

The State will immediately place the 430,000 hectares of native forest identified in Attachment A … into Informal Reserves.

That is: immediately into informal reserves. Clause 26 goes on to say:

The State will ensure that, until the further independent verification process required under Clause 20 is completed, wood supply required under Clause 17 will be sourced from outside the 572,000 hectares of ENGO-nominated High Conservation Value forest area unless the remaining State Forest area is insufficient to meet the contractually specified quality and quantity of wood supply. Where this is the case, the Tasmanian Government will ensure that wood supplies are sourced outside the 430,000 hectares placed in Informal Reserves.

That is: outside the 430,000 hectares. This is a critical matter, because when this intergovernmental agreement was announced my colleague Senator Bob Brown and I stood up and said, 'Not one hectare is protected from logging under this agreement.' The Prime Minister came out with the Premier of Tasmania and said: 'That is wrong. The 430,000 hectares are protected.' Well, they are not. Those 430,000 hectares are not in informal reserves and are being logged as I stand here and speak.

A further clause, 27, said that if any of those areas inside the 430,000 hectares were required then compensation would be payable, not that they would be logged. I got the distinct impression from the minister, who in answering the question today avoided any mention of clause 25, even though I asked about it three times, that there is negotiation going on between the state and federal governments to give over to logging, permanently, some of the 430,000 hectares that have been reserved, and that clause 27 has not been invoked. Clause 27 says clearly: compensate them; do not keep logging going in the 430,000 hectares.

Today the minister avoided that deliberately in answering those three separate questions. The question now is: why is the federal government not getting onto Tasmania to stop the agreement being breached? Clauses 25, 26 and 27 are very clear, yet Tasmania is defying them. When the Tasmanian government is asked, it wrings its hands and says: 'We can't control Forestry Tasmania. They're in there doing it and we can't control them.' Forestry Tasmania are just a government business enterprise. They can be controlled. They are so far in debt that they have had to get a third letter of comfort from the Premier of Tasmania to continue to operate. If they were a private business they would be in receivership and under administration right now because they have so badly mismanaged Tasmania's forests over such a long period of time. The government is quite happy to give them a letter of comfort to allow them to keep operating but wrings its hands and says it cannot stop a rogue organisation from continuing to log within the 430,000 hectares which the Prime Minister put her signature to an agreement to say would be in informal reserves and—clause 26—would not be logged.

I am very frustrated that the government is not forcing the Tasmanian government to do its bit. All we have seen is federal money being handed over to the logging industry to keep on logging. We have had plenty of money freed up to give to the logging industry, but the quid pro quo, the protection of areas in permanent reserves, is not happening. We are seeing ongoing logging, which defies the very thing that the Prime Minister and the Premier said would occur when the intergovernmental agreement was announced.

This was a process that the loggers asked the conservation movement to engage in. If they had not come to us and started this process they would all be completely broke now. It is Commonwealth money that is propping them up, in absolute defiance of the conservation outcomes that were supposed to come out of this agreement. If anyone thinks this is going to generate peace in the forests, they will be wrong until the Commonwealth actually requires Tasmania to adhere to the agreement and to stop breaching it on a daily basis.

Question agreed to.