|
senate vote 2020-12-10#13
Edited by
mackay staff
on
2021-01-02 11:15:07
|
Title
Regulations and Determinations — Industry Research and Development (Forestry Recovery Development Fund Program) Instrument 2020; Disallowance- Regulations and Determinations - Industry Research and Development (Forestry Recovery Development Fund Program) Instrument 2020 - Disallow
Description
<p class="speaker">Janet Rice</p><p>As I was saying yesterday, this fund will be subsidising ongoing destructive native forest logging. It is clearly recognised as being destructive by the Federal Court, by the government conservation regulator in Victoria, by the amazing scientists who have put in decades of research on these forests, by First Nations people and by the communities who are living with seeing their precious forests being devastated and who are putting their bodies on the line to protect these forests. There are brave, incredible community groups like Environment East Gippsland, the South East Forest Alliance, Friends of Leadbeater's Possum, the Knitting Nannas of Toolangi and Forest Conservation Victoria. This is what this fund would be doing.</p><p>I'm really pleased that this debate has continued across to today, because just this afternoon I received some answers from some questions on notice that I asked at estimates in October. I asked: what proportion of the forest reserves system was burnt in last summer's fires? The answer for the worst fire-hit areas was really sobering. In East Gippsland, 71 per cent of the forest reserves were burnt. In south-east New South Wales, 70 per cent of the forest reserves were burnt. In north-eastern Victoria, it was 67 per cent. And yet these are the very forest areas that this fund would be subsidising the further logging of—the forests where over two-thirds of the reserves were burnt, where there were massive deaths of precious wildlife and where every single bit of unlogged and unburnt forests that remains is incredibly precious. We would be spending $40 million of taxpayer funding to subsidise the ongoing logging of these incredibly precious bits of forest. This logging has got to stop rather than be propped up by further subsidies, and the regional forest agreements that allow this logging must be scrapped.</p>- The majority voted against a motion to disallow the [Industry Research and Development (Forestry Recovery Development Fund Program) Instrument 2020](https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/F2020L01081), which was introduced by Victorian Senator [Janet Rice](https://theyvoteforyou.org.au/people/senate/victoria/janet_rice). This means the motion failed.
- ### Why was this motion introduced?
- [According to Senator Rice](https://www.openaustralia.org.au/senate/?id=2020-12-10.204.2):
- > *this fund will be subsidising ongoing destructive native forest logging. It is clearly recognised as being destructive by the Federal Court, by the government conservation regulator in Victoria, by the amazing scientists who have put in decades of research on these forests, by First Nations people and by the communities who are living with seeing their precious forests being devastated and who are putting their bodies on the line to protect these forests.*
- ### Motion text
- > *That the Industry Research and Development (Forestry Recovery Development Fund Program) Instrument 2020, made under the Industry Research and Development Act 1986, be disallowed [F2020L01081].*
<p>I want to finish by noting that not only are our forests and wildlife that live in them in a desperate situation, not only have we got logging laws that are resulting in our wildlife hurtling towards extinction, not only do we have this slush fund that we're considering today that would prop up and subsidise native forest logging, but yesterday we saw Senator McKenzie's bill that would make things even worse. Her bill would mean pretty much open slather to native forest logging. Her bill would completely exempt logging from our national environment laws in order to overrule the Federal Court decision that found that logging in Victoria that impacted on critically endangered Leadbeater's possums and threatened greater gliders was illegal. When you find something that's illegal—they have been breaking the law—what do you do? According to Senator McKenzie, you change the law. You don't fix it in order to protect the animals; no, you change the law.</p><p>Senator McKenzie's bill would be a licence for extinction and should be renamed the 'killing animals bill'. Instead of propping up a failing industry, we should be doing everything we can to protect our precious forests, to acknowledge that we've now got almost 90 per cent of the logging industry in plantations, to celebrate the plantation based industry, to shift the remaining 10 per cent as quickly as possible out of our native forests, to protect our precious forests, and to see them valued for their beauty, for recreation and tourism, for wildlife, for water and for carbon. If we really care about our forests and care about how important they are to us, to all Australians and, in fact, globally, we can start caring about them and show that care by disallowing this fund today.</p> <p class="speaker">Bridget McKenzie</p><p>The hypocrisy is actually mind-boggling here tonight—absolutely! This is actually what the Greens are arguing for: we have one of the most ultimately renewable industries in our sustainable Australian forestry industries, employing over 200,000 Australians right across the country, contributing $24 billion to our economy, a renewable and sustainable, well-managed, world-class industry, and they want to stop it. You know why they want to stop it? Because the foresters in our regional communities do not vote for them, because they want to ensure that foresters and their families have no future.</p><p>This illogical disallowance motion only reinforces what rural and regional Australia already knows: the Greens are anti-agriculture, anti-farming, anti-forestry and also anti-fishing—aren't you? Oh, yes! Let us not actually harvest the bounty of the sea in a sustainably managed way! It isn't about raping and pillaging; it is about using science and data to set up a regime where we manage these resources appropriately for the benefit not only of the people who work in these industries but of the regional communities that support them and, indeed, of the world.</p><p>The hypocrisy is mind-boggling, again, because the Greens are in here arguing to shut down our sustainable forestry industry every chance they get. Where will we get our timber products from? Will we get them from other countries that do not have the environmental regulation that our industries are rightfully governed by? To get up in this place, time and time again, and assume that either party of government is not really interested in ensuring good environmental outcomes through our forestry industry is an absolute misrepresentation of the truth. Do you know what happens if you don't use the highly regulated Australian timber products? Where do we get them from? It's a bit like saying, 'Don't eat beef, because it's bad for the environment.' Where do you think people will get their protein sources from? Will they get them from other countries, where rainforests are being denigrated and orangutans are threatened species, where there are land-clearing laws to ensure that they grow protein through beef farming, when here, in our country, we do it in a sustainable and environmentally responsible manner? Instead of knocking Australians and their hard work and knocking these industries and communities, the Greens should be standing up and saying, 'Thank God I live in Australia, and I'm very proud of our forestry industry.'</p><p>Yesterday, I had a few people here from the forest industry for my private senator's bill, which I'm glad the senator mentioned in her contribution. It seeks to amend the EPBC Act to remove the ambiguity and to ensure that the relationship and arrangement between Commonwealth and state governments for the last 20 years, through regional forestry agreements, is not able to be overridden by activist justices that just ignore the regulatory framework of any given state. I had foresters come from Eden, Gippsland—and a big shout-out to Heyfield and Bairnsdale, and the McNultys in Benalla, because they care about their children's future. I always hear, 'Why don't you care about your children's future?' I actually do care about my children's future. I am the daughter of—</p> <p class="speaker">Honourable Senator</p><p>An honourable senator interjecting—</p> <p class="speaker">Bridget McKenzie</p><p>It's funny you say that. I'll tell you what the background of my family is. My dad was a blue-singleted worker, a logger, in a little country town called Marysville. His first job was driving a Bedford truck up and down very, very dangerous roads in very, very difficult circumstances. I care about my children's future. I care about the futures of the communities I represent, and that means backing in a sustainable and renewable industry, such as the Australian forestry industry.</p><p>One of the things that the foresters talked to me about yesterday was how tough they'd done it in the bushfires. It was actually these forestry workers who risked life and limb actually fighting the fires. They knew the tracks better than some of the fire crews that had been brought in from city areas or other districts. They knew those forests like the backs of their hands. The forestry industry is not just about producing world-class fibre and timber products; it is also about managing our natural resource appropriately, making sure that we do have tracks throughout our forest areas and making sure they're upgraded so that, when we do have a bushfire event, we can access those more remote areas easily. It's the forestry industry that undertakes that task.</p><p>Post the bushfires, our government is very proud to help rebuild this industry and the regional communities that rely on it. We don't back away from supporting workers at all. We don't care if you're a worker in a small business. We don't discriminate against workers. We don't say that some workers are more deserving of support than others. We very proudly stand with the industries where there is hard manual labour, such as the forestry industry. Devastation was wrought particularly on the New South Wales and Victorian forestry industry, but the South Australian forestry industry was also hard hit by the bushfire. We stand by them to ensure they have the support they need to rebuild and to continue to employ people in this sustainable industry. We're doing this by providing $65 million in targeted support. The government has established the $40 million Forestry Recovery Development Fund Program. This provides grants of up to $5 million to support processors to address future wood supply shortages through innovation and product diversification.</p><p>One of the great timber product manufacturers that I got a chance to meet with yesterday was a company called ASH. They operate out of Heyfield. In terms of advance manufacturing, you could not get better than this particular company. The technology that they've implemented down in Heyfield means that they use every single part of a harvested tree, which is fantastic news because we don't want to waste this very precious resource; we want to be very diligent in how we use it. ASH's implementation of this superadvanced technology means that they are not only providing hundreds of jobs in the local community but producing a great product that Australians can use to make kitchens et cetera, rather than sourcing timber from overseas, which may not have been as sustainably produced as it is here in Australia.</p><p>We're providing $15 million for salvage log transport assistance to help Australia's sustainable forestry industries in their immediate recovery from bushfires. One of the greatest frustrations I heard from these foresters at the time of the bushfires was that state governments, particularly that of my home state of Victoria, were not allowing the forestry industry to salvage the logs that had been cut down as a result of a bushfire. They were to be left on the forest floor to potentially become undergrowth and fuel load for the next bushfire season, which is absolutely abominable. The foresters who came to see me yesterday were just in shock that city bureaucrats and Labor Party apparatchiks were making decisions about their communities, putting their communities at risk—</p><p class="italic">Senator Rice interjecting—</p><p>Because they couldn't salvage the logs, Senator Rice, that had already gone through the bushfire and were a danger. We had people coming along with chainsaws to clear them so that it was safe to move through a community. Rather than letting this industry, which has been so devastated because the resource has burnt, to use those logs and do what they could with them to make sustainable products, decisions were made outside the community with no understanding of how we live and work out there. It just beggars belief and causes a whole lot of frustration, and it probably explains, Senator Rice, why your vote in places in Heyfield is as it is.</p><p>We're also providing $10 million for the Salvage Log Storage Fund, to establish storage facilities for fire affected salvage logs during the COVID-19 pandemic. So I say to state governments that halted the ability of the foresters to collect and use the salvage logs: we're providing the money for storage, we're also providing the money for transport, but we have to be allowed to get the things off the ground, right? You've got to allow them to get them off the ground. Jaclyn Symes, I hope you're listening tonight.</p><p>This support keeps mills operational and people employed and it ensures Australians can enjoy sustainably grown Australian wood products, rather than what the Greens would like, which is unsustainably produced timber products. That is what they actually would prefer was used by Australians who may not be able to afford the types of timber products that they can in the suburbs that they represent. But the average Australians in suburbs right across our capital cities are very proud of the richness of our timber product. I think they should be able to have their kitchens in it, build their houses with it and have some great decking, rather than using unsustainably produced timber.</p><p>Every tree that is harvested as part of native timber harvesting in Victoria is regrown, because do you know what happens? You actually plant a tree, and over time it grows again, right?</p><p>Honourable senators interjecting—</p><p>Something that my father did, some of the senators over there deride as if he was some rich guy just doling out the money. One of the things my father did after he and his crew went through and harvested the timber for places like Mount Buffalo was to then go through, in the mid- to late sixties, and replant everything. Do you know what? Those trees—I'm 50, so they're 50 years old now—are just ready to harvest. Fantastic!</p><p class="italic">Senator Gallagher interjecting—</p><p>Sorry, what was that, Senator?</p> <p class="speaker">Katy Gallagher</p><p>You can't possibly be 50.</p> <p class="speaker">Scott Ryan</p><p>Order!</p> <p class='motion-notice motion-notice-truncated'>Long debate text truncated.</p>
|