Wednesday, 8 February 2023

Motions

Timber industry

Jeff BOURMAN (Eastern Victoria) (15:45): Congratulations on your ascendancy, Acting President. I move:

That this house:

(1) notes that:

(a) the native timber industry will not last until 2030 as planned given the ongoing throttling of timber supply and the constant ‘green lawfare’;

(b) the timber industry provides jobs both directly and downstream to rural and regional areas which need these jobs as our society urbanises;

(c) trees are a renewable resource, they can be and are replanted, completing the cycle of life;

(d) carbon is captured by new trees and trapped in harvested timber providing a vessel to store it; and

(2) calls on the government to immediately mobilise all its available and appropriate resources to reinvigorate the timber industry and allow the industry to flourish and provide regional areas with security and a future.

My region, the eastern region, and part of the northern region are heavily reliant on the timber industry. In fact my own personal family goes back in eastern Victoria to the early to mid 1800s, where my great-grandfather, who I mentioned as a winner of the military medal, when he enlisted was a sawyer out Boisdale way.

This is not just an industry that has come up and got going or anything like that. It has been in the region basically since settlers got here. It has provided a lifestyle, it has provided income, it has provided jobs, it has provided security and, in case most people have not noticed, it has provided trees, because when they cut down the trees they do replant them.

I had the interesting experience of talking to a candidate from another party who actually did not believe that you could replant trees in a clear-felled area – truly did not believe it. It blew their mind when we explained that that is how it works. It is surprising how many people just do not believe that it is a renewable resource. I do not know how that can happen, but it gets down to the part about the urbanising of Australia, which I will go on to later.

We have lost touch with how the world works; we have lost touch with the realities of things. We can talk about veganism and this and that, but the timber that is harvested, as long as it is done appropriately – and I am not for logging national parks; I am not for logging places that actually have proper old growth. Now, my version of old growth is at least 80 years. Other people’s is a bit less. But a lot of the eastern region of Victoria lost its trees in the 1939 bushfire. Prior to that a lot of the area probably had been over forested, but it has grown back. A lot of what we now are logging is not old growth. It is actually proof that the cycle works that these 80-or-so-year-old trees are now ready for harvesting.

That is where we have the problem. The problem is that with all the stuff going on in this world – in Victoria – the industry is on its knees. I remember when it was brought to this place that the industry was going to finish in 2030 – which seemed like a long time away. I cannot remember if it was 2015 or 2016, but it seemed like a long time away. But it is getting closer and closer and closer. I do not think it is going to last until 2030. I do not think it has got a chance of lasting until 2030 whilst VicForests, for good or for bad, whatever people think of it, is getting less and less trees. Things are slowing down. The Maryvale white paper pulp mill is now deciding its future. Nippon Paper cannot just keep on running a charity there – they have got a business to run – but the problem is that they have a supply issue. The problem is that with all the constant lawfare that goes on, with all the constant injunctions that take time and take money and stop work, it is just not happening. The whole thing is grinding to a halt.

It may well surprise people that I am not a fan of trying to wipe out species, but it also seems to me that when people look for the sugar gliders, the Leadbeater’s possums and so on, they look in the coupes – or the proposed coupes – and they find them. I have never had a straight answer from anyone as to whether they have done a wider search of the areas not proposed to be logged. Data is the key here, and I am always happy to be corrected – if the data says that they are only in those particular areas where we are only looking, then so be it – but the only time I ever hear about finding a new colony is when it is where they are about to log. Coincidence, deliberate, I do not know, but until there is an actual proper study done of the areas not being proposed to be logged, I think the whole thing is a bit of a fallacy. The fact that every time there is a logging coupe starting they stop and look and find something just smacks to me of opportunism. It just smacks to me of waiting until the time is right and looking where they want to go just to stop this.

I appreciate that people want a decent natural area. Personally I am quite fond of the bush. It is not just to wander around and shoot deer and things like that. I actually enjoy the serenity and the natural environment, and I would suggest so do all the hunters, because no-one wants to go hunting in a wasteland. Also, no-one really particularly wants to go hunting through somewhere that has been clear-felled, but if it is part of the cycle, you do.

It just seems to me that the throttling of the supply is being done in such a manner and is unfortunately being aided by people who I would say are using the law to the best of their ability – which is I guess why we hire lawyers; after all, you do not do brain surgery on yourself – but I think it has come to the point where it is being unfair. I think there is plenty of timber out there in places where the forest area is not new, where the timber is of a reasonable, harvestable quality and quantity and yet it is just being stopped. I recall earlier today mention was made of the Wombat State Forest, but it was fallen down trees, if I remember, that they wanted to harvest. That brings up another thing. Timber supply is timber supply: if all these harvestable trees are on the ground, then why shouldn’t they be taken? They can wait there a bit longer if they want and burn in the next bushfire, but it is timber. It is not part of a clear-felling arrangement, it is not part of a logging coupe, but it is there. I could talk for ages about bushfires, but I will not. All I can say is that if there is no fuel, it does not burn; it is pretty simple.

The timber industry in rural and regional areas, and obviously to a degree in the building industry in the urban areas, provides a lot of jobs and a lot of security. As I mentioned, my great-grandfather was in the logging industry. People have been living in those areas for well over a hundred years – 150 years – on this job. It has given the area an identity. It has given it a reason to be there, and you cannot just ignore that. As I said, at the risk of repeating myself, it has all been cut down before, at least the areas we are looking at logging. It is not like it is just going through actual old growth stuff that has never been touched.

The fact that it is coming down to the wire – frankly I will be surprised if the industry does last much longer with the way it is going – is basically wrong. It is taking these people’s ability to pay their bills; it is taking their self-worth. I have been unemployed for quite some time myself before, and after a while you do wonder about yourself. You can only have so many baristas, I have got to say, in the country areas. You cannot retrain them all to serve coffee. There has got to be something to replace the industry if it is going to go. Frankly, as much as I do enjoy a good coffee, I am not going to expect to find a cafe out in the middle of nowhere with 10 or 15 people who used to be timber workers running a coffee shop and finding it to be a viable business.

Also, it is not just the timber industry that will die with this. When you think about it, you have got all the houses, you have got the towns and this and that and people living their lives and doing their thing. They need bread, they need milk, they need fuel, they need shirts and they need stuff for their kids – schoolbooks and all that. All those things exist in those regional and rural areas now, and as the jobs in that area shrink, so will those downstream jobs. There have been many things said in this place about the number, but let us just say there are a lot of downstream jobs and the loss of this industry is going to hurt. It is hurting already, from the people that supply the fuel for the bulldozers all the way to the people that supply the fuel to the people taking their kids to school. In the end if all those jobs go and there is nothing else to do, it is only going to end up with them going on to welfare. Then people will have less disposable income, they will spend less – that is just the nature of the beast – and they will end up having to watch as their once-thriving communities end up shrinking. There are small towns now that are probably on the brink, but there is still time to repair this. And again, I must point out that I am not advocating for wholesale slaughter on all the trees around the place. It has still got to be done in a proper manner, but if I recall correctly, there is 1 per cent of the 6 per cent of public land available for harvesting that is being used. That is not a big number.

Trees are a renewable resource. There is an ad on TV for a superannuation fund that actually points it out very well – an acorn grows into a massive oak tree. It drops acorns, and planted properly they will grow into another massive oak tree. That, as I understand it, is storing carbon. Now, when you cut down the tree and do your thing with it, the carbon stays in the wood. The new tree that is growing will capture more carbon, and notwithstanding the natural way that stuff deteriorates, as time goes on the carbon capture will actually go up. So not only is it renewable, it is actually working on the whole carbon thing. Frankly, I think it has got to be a better idea than the last plan I heard, which was to stick it under the ocean floor and store it somewhere under there. It does not seem to me to be a particularly productive way of using it, because if I go back to my year 12 biology, you need chlorophyll and sunlight to turn carbon dioxide into something else and oxygen. It has been a while –

A member: Starch.

Jeff BOURMAN: Thank you – starch. That shows how long it has been since I have been to school, but the point is that carbon dioxide is needed for plants, and by growing more plants – even if it is by cutting some down and growing new ones – then you are actually doing a positive thing towards the whole carbon cycle.

The government I suppose is getting close to the time to when it is going to have to make a decision. If the white paper pulp mill closes down – because I believe the brown paper one uses pine and that sort of stuff – I believe that will have a ripple effect, and that is something we really do not want to see. As you keep on pulling at the bottom of an industry, sooner or later you are going to pull out one little twig and the rest will come down. There will always be timber harvested from plantations, and I of course support plantation timber, but to get the quality and quantity of hardwood timber we need we would need to have started about 80 years ago. So the fast-tracking of the industry going on now is not giving time for the plantations to be able to get to a usable point. Of course they might be able to get to a point where you could use them for, I think it was, D- or E-grade purposes, but that is not where we are at. Most of the stuff we are looking at in the scheme of native timber hardwood is for dressed timber and things like that – for stairwells and stuff where you are actually showing off the timber.

So the purpose of this motion was to try and get the government to at least consider doing something other than just finishing this industry off. I contemplated carrying on about how the Labor government used to be the party for workers and things like that, but at the end of the day it does not matter. That is just partisan politics. What matters is we still have time; we still can fix this. If they want to end it, then end it in a time frame and a manner which is not just going to train baristas and move people into town – because that is what will happen – is not going to put more people on the dole and is not going to create more socio-economic disadvantage for the rural and regional areas but is going to give it time to actually gracefully go across, because frankly as it is there is nowhere near enough time.

I will be amazed if it makes it to 2030, the way it is going. Much has been said about VicForests and its viability. Well, you know, just with the constant attacks on it, it is amazing that it is even still going. I really think calling its viability into question is not really a fair thing when the whole industry they are working in is under constant attack. Anyway, I have given this a fair go already. I think what I will do with this is leave my contribution, but I do urge the government at its highest levels to rethink the time line. 2030 is too soon.

Sonja TERPSTRA (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (16:01): I rise to make a contribution in opposition to Mr Bourman’s motion in regard to the native timber industry, and I note that this motion being brought today is also on the back of earlier questions in this chamber today to Minister Tierney in regard to the same subject matter. I reflect on Minister Tierney’s response to Mr Bourman’s questions earlier today as well and note that the matters that I will be speaking on in response to this motion will follow a similar vein to what Minister Tierney put earlier. I just note that it seems that we have the two ends of the spectrum here, where we have got Mr Bourman from the Shooters and Fishers saying it is too early to bring an end to native timber harvesting while Dr Ratnam and the Greens think we are not moving quickly enough, so it is the direct opposite of what Mr Bourman wants.

The approach that this government is taking is to strike a balance in regard to this matter. Again I will note what was mentioned earlier, that the government has spent a lot of time working on and creating the forestry plan, which is a 20-year plan that is aimed at helping the industry transition, because one thing that we know on the government benches here is how important it is to make sure we protect and conserve and look after our environment. But what we also know, obviously, being the Labor Party, is how important it is to ensure that workers have livelihoods, that the communities in which they reside are not left behind and that those communities are supported when an industry is transitioning into a new phase, because we have seen what can happen. I will use the example of what happened when Kennett privatised the SEC. You had complete destruction of towns and livelihoods and people. This is what unfortunately the Greens do not clearly understand: that when an industry transitions there are people who work in that industry and they have jobs, and you cannot just flick a switch and turn those jobs off, because that has real-world consequences for people who work in those industries. We know that. We understand that, because we are the Labor Party. We get that. Basically we have strong roots and strong underpinnings in supporting working people.

So we have been very careful and done very thorough and detailed work with the forestry plan to make sure that not only are we supporting workers but we are supporting businesses that might want to transition to perhaps undertaking different methods in the way in which they continue to operate their timber businesses. One of the things that I learned when we were debating the forestry plan and talking about that in this chamber last year was that – and I did not know this; it was something that I learned – if you have a business and you are sawmilling hardwood, you cannot just flick a switch and go to softwood. You actually need to change your equipment over. This is something that perhaps may not be well understood by people by and large. One of the focal points of our forestry plan was to make sure that businesses that wanted to stay in the industry of sawmilling timber could transition to a different way of continuing to work in that sector, and that meant upgrading their equipment.

We have consulted deeply and widely, not only with workers who work in the sector but businesses as well and of course the communities and towns that really have their livelihoods attached to these sorts of industries. We have undertaken very detailed work. As I said, the forestry plan is a plan that is aiming to look at transitioning over 20 years, and again that goes to a lot of other detail, but one thing that we have committed to – well, there are a number of things that we have immediately committed to, and I will talk about all of those things in a minute because they are quite detailed. They go to all the things that need to happen to make sure that nobody is left behind.

Again, we have extremes over here with the Greens saying, ‘Let’s turn it off right now. Flick the switch and it will all be good.’ Well, that is not going to be the case. What we commit to is continuing to support impacted timber workers and businesses through this challenging period. We remain committed to a just transition for timber workers. We welcome the involvement of workers – and not only workers but their unions – in this process, and there have been detailed consultations with unions around this as well.

This has been backed by a $200 million investment through the Victorian Forestry Plan, $120 million of investment in the Gippsland plantation investment program and continued support payments for stood-down workers. That goes to all the things that I just mentioned. The government is exploring potential long-term solutions to the current supply challenges because we know there are challenges with supply. That is obvious. But we also understand the imperative that we must look after our environment and protect our old-growth forests. The government is continuing to deliver support payments to sawmill workers, forest contractors and Opal Maryvale mill workers who are stood down. An industry-wide worker support service and dedicated Opal Maryville mill worker support service has been activated to support these workers. And the sawmill opt-out scheme application process is underway to enable mills and mill workers to transition out of the industry ahead of the planned 2024 step-down in native timber harvesting. Applications to the sawmill opt-out scheme are currently being actively assessed. You can see that right now as I stand here in this chamber today there are things that are being actioned in a very real world way to ensure support for working people and to ensure that no-one is left behind.

We immediately ended harvesting in old-growth forests aged up to 600 years old, and this was around 90,000 hectares across Victoria. We protected 96,000 hectares of high conservation value habitat in new immediate protection areas across East Gippsland, the Central Highlands, Mirboo North and the Strathbogie Ranges, and we have invested over $560 million to protect biodiversity in our natural environment since 2014 – the largest ever investment by a Victorian government.

You can see just by going to the detail of some of the things that we have invested in and the detail of our forestry plan that this is a well-thought-out approach. It has been important to underscore that we have consulted widely with a range of stakeholders on this matter. Again, what this government has done from the government benches is ensure that we will be transitioning away. This is underpinned by a just transition for workers so nobody is left behind. It is critically important that we take this approach.

As I said before, we were on the opposition benches when Kennett privatised the SEC down there in the valley. Straightaway the switch was flicked. So many people lost their jobs and their livelihoods, and there is intergenerational trauma attached the privatisation of that sector down there in those communities. They were warned about this. The unions warned them about this, but they did not listen and just flicked the switch. We know what would happen if we adopted the Greens approach, which should be to immediately just flick the switch and cut hundreds of thousands of people’s livelihoods and their jobs. We know what would happen. We learned by watching and observing the approaches of others. We were told that was going to be the best thing for people and that privatisation would deliver all magical wonder of things, and we know that that failed abysmally.

I cannot wait to see the Andrews Labor government bring back the SEC to the Gippsland region. I know that there will be so many people who will be queueing up, and there will be good, well-paid jobs attached to that. When we talk about jobs, there are going to be other options for people who live down in the valley and who might work in the timber industry right now. You know, the forestry plan also looks at supporting workers through retraining and how they can transition into other industries. While it is sad and disappointing for some people who have many years and generations of being attached to the timber industry, there are opportunities to come as well.

Further to that, in October 2022 the Minister for Agriculture, Gayle Tierney, announced the opening of three grant programs. There was a $22 million Community Development Fund, a $2.5 million second round of the Victorian Timber Innovation Fund and the $250,000 second round of the forestry business transition voucher program. The Labor government’s $22 million Community Development Fund, which is now open for applications, will support 11 priority communities to deliver projects and opportunities identified through local transition strategies – and again, making sure that local communities are at the centre of this, at the forefront, being able to tell us and being led by locals about what they need and how they see that the transition can happen in their local communities. We will invest in exciting community-led initiatives identified through the local development strategy program, as well as in advanced timber communities such as Orbost, Swifts Creek and Nowa Nowa to plan through for economic diversity and job creation. I could go on, but I think I will leave my contribution there. I know there are other speakers who want to speak on this matter as well. But, again, we oppose Mr Bourman’s motion.

David LIMBRICK (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (16:11): I am going to tell you a story about what happens when you get green lawfare, restrictive energy policy, government-owned corporations and a waste management policy to come together so that we get this crazy situation, which I will explain in a moment, where we have landfills in my electorate of South-East Metro that are going to be affected by forestry policy. You see, at the Nippon Paper mill out in Maryvale currently – I think today, actually – their management is going through a process of trying to decide whether they are going to continue white paper production. Apparently the brown paper production, as Mr Bourman outlined, will continue, but apparently this is the last mill that produces white paper in Australia. The reason that they are closing is uncertainty about source material, some of which comes from our forestry industry.

Now, Ms Terpstra was talking about sawmill opt-out schemes and those sorts of things, but what we are really talking about is deindustrialising Eastern Victoria. What has happened is a situation where the mill has been under pressure for some time, I might add. During the waste and recycling inquiry in the last term of Parliament, that I know Dr Ratnam was on and I was on also, Maryvale paper mill featured in it, and one of the big issues that they were having was around unpredictable gas prices because of our restrictive gas policies in this state. As a solution they looked at many different options, because their mill requires a lot of energy. It does not require electricity; it requires heat, and they burn the gas to produce heat. They looked at trying to provide it with renewable energy. That was not going to be technically feasible. So what they came up with was a proposal for a waste-to-energy facility out in Maryvale which is projected, I believe, to consume around about 30 per cent of Melbourne’s landfill waste. This is connected to the Maryvale paper mill.

Now, I imagine that the management of the mill will not only be looking at the feasibility of white paper production – and frankly I think it is shameful that we are in such a state now that white paper is considered not feasible for industries to produce in Victoria – but also be looking at the waste-to-energy facility that powers that mill and whether that is still feasible or not. I do not know the answer to that, but I am sure lots of people with much more engineering background than me will be figuring out just that right now. But maybe the government should be concerned about this, because if they decide not to go ahead with this waste-to-energy facility the government has got a big problem with waste management in this state. I know that in my electorate at Hallam landfill they have extended that because of uncertainty about landfill closures and this sort of thing, and this uncertainty is only going to get worse. If the owners of the mill and Veolia start to get cold feet about going ahead with this waste-to-energy facility I think that waste management in this state is in a big crisis again.

Ms Terpstra also talked about privatisation of companies and stuff. Well, I would point out that VicForests is a public corporation – and it is not doing too well either, primarily due to green lawfare. We have these legal activists who take legal action at every opportunity to try and shut it down, and they have been very successful at that. I know that we have tried to pass laws through this house that the government has tried to put forward to stop some of these actions and limit them, but nevertheless the government appears to have failed to stop that. VicForests is running at huge losses. Workers are being stood down. The knock-on effects from that at the mill are that workers have been stood down there, and of course the owners of the mill are considering whether it is even viable. My understanding is that there are about a thousand workers at the mill alone. I do not know how many of those workers are going to be stood down permanently if Nippon Paper decides to shut down the mill and stop white paper production.

These environmental activists seem to think that stopping logging in Eastern Victoria is going to stop logging. Well, that is not going to happen, because what they are going to do, similar to many of the Greens policies, is externalise it to somewhere else, probably Indonesia. I do not know what Indonesia’s environmental standards are, but I would hazard a guess that Australia’s are a lot better, Victoria’s are a lot better. If we are really thinking about global solutions, maybe we should be thinking about how we can sustainably produce white paper for a start. I would rather that we produced much more advanced industries and were not struggling to produce paper. But we are facing a calamity which is a culmination of our forestry policy, our energy policy and our waste policy.

I do not envy the government’s problems that they are facing here to deal with this, because I am not sure what the solution is, and I do not know what the government’s solution is. Deindustrialising does not really seem like a sustainable way of dealing with this. Certainly I think that scaling down the industry over time like the government is proposing – we have spoken about this many times in the last term of Parliament – would be a sustainable solution rather than shutting it down. Certainly what the Greens are proposing, shutting it down even sooner, seems recklessly irresponsible. It is recklessly irresponsible not to consider these flow-on effects. Quite frankly I am quite scared about what is going to happen with energy and waste management in this state. But, like many, I have been a big consumer of white paper – they were delivering it around Parliament yesterday – and I think in very short order we will find that all of that paper will be coming from overseas. Let us find out where it comes from after we stop producing it in our country.

Melina BATH (Eastern Victoria) (16:18): I am pleased to rise this afternoon and put my support behind motion 14 in the name of Mr Jeff Bourman on behalf of the Nationals and my colleagues in the Liberal Party. Before I go into the contents of motion 14 involving the native timber industry, I would like to give a tiny bit of background as to why Mr Bourman might have brought this forward to us today.

I will not wave it around, but I have before me a how-to-vote card for the Morwell district at the last election. This how-to-vote card is the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party how-to-vote card. At number one, naturally, if it is your how-to-vote card, it would have your candidate there, Mr David Snelling. I have met him, and by all accounts he is a very reasonable human being – a person in it for the right reasons. But number two on this how-to-vote card that the Shooters and Fishers were handing out was the Labor Party candidate. Morwell became, with the change of demographics with the change of VEC electoral boundaries, a nominally 4 per cent Labor seat, so Mr Bourman and his Shooters and Fishers would have known when they went to that election that they were not going to win. So they then made a decision, had a conversation, did a deal, whatever that might be, that it was either going to be – and the pundits were all talking about it, Antony Green as well, prior to the election – a Labor Party seat or a National Party seat, in effect.

So Mr Bourman decided that he would put his money on the Labor Party. The Labor Party’s policy, as we know, is to shut down the native timber industry, and that was announced in 2019. So there is no ambiguity around where – in putting down number two in the Morwell electorate – that vote would have gone and what would have happened. Now, I also happen to know that in some of the pre-poll the good people who were voting for Mr Bourman’s candidate actually left the ticket and voted either for the Nationals or in smaller numbers for the Liberals.

On the back of Mr Bourman’s how-to-vote card are 10 priorities – key priorities, important ones. I will not read them out, but none of them include the native timber industry. There are 10 things that the Shooters and Fishers want to focus on and not one of them is the native timber industry. Yet here we are today with the first opportunity in non-government business, and Mr Bourman and the Shooters and Fishers are transactional members of Parliament. He is very successful; this is now his third term in Parliament. He has made this whopping great decision: ‘I’m going to go and put down on the notice paper my support for the native timber industry and I will see if I can flick it around to my electorate and say, ‘How good is that?’. Well, he had the opportunity back when we were going to the polls. He could have not put the Labor Party as a direct preference. He could have supported the industry and the candidates that supported our native timber industry.

Let me tell you, as people who have heard me speak before will know, on last count I think on 126 separate occasions on separate bills, adjournment debates, questions and whatever I have spoken on the native timber industry and showed our support not only for the people that live in our region, not only for the communities that are underpinned by the native timber industry, a sustainable world class industry, but for the environment as well, because as Mr Bourman says – and I will move to his motion, and we will support this motion – it is a renewable strategic resource that captures carbon. A dry weight of hardwood will store approximately 35 per cent of carbon in it.

This government and previous governments have stopped logging old-growth forests. Now, the Greens have come up with their own version of what an old-growth forest is, but old-growth forest is anything that is pre-1939 harvesting of a certain diameter. Anything that is post the 1939 fires is not considered old growth. I have talked to many good timber harvesters who talk about their fathers and their fathers before them. They are harvesting and harvesting again the same areas, the same coupes that were harvested 40 years ago and 50 years before that. It is a sustainable resource. I have said it before: 95 per cent of all of our timber resources in this state, in our native estates, are locked away in timber reserves, in national parks, in state forests and in zoned waterways, and that is really important. We need to have those locked away and safe from – well, I was going to say fire, but of course we know that fire does not discriminate either on where it rips through and destroys forests, native flora and fauna. But it is a sustainable industry, and this government is crippling those communities, those families, those hardworking people who protect us during the fires as well.

We hear that ultimately this is a supply issue. The government have said 2030 and a step-down in 2024, but we know they are just allowing, they are enabling the crippling of our hardwood industry. VicForests is the body that oversees a very strict regulatory system. We have got regional forest agreements between the federal and state governments. We have timber release plans. We have exclusion zones, threatened species plans. There is the thing called the timber code of practice. That has contained within it a whole raft of prescriptions that tell the industry, inform and direct the industry, about what can be harvested and what cannot be. VicForests time and time again has adhered to surveys, evaluation and monitoring. For the Greens and others to go along saying that VicForests is some cavalier entity is just the height of frustration and inaccuracy.

What we are seeing here – and we would certainly work with the government on this; I am sure I speak for my colleagues – is that in order to have certainty for the industry, to stop these court litigations, what we are asking for and will positively work with the government for is for the government to insert a wider range of prescriptions into the timber code of practice. Give the industry certainty. Put the greater glider certainty in the timber code of practice. Then you will not have these third-party litigators that take industry to court. Then you will not have any ambiguity about the legal system interpreting them or erring on the side of absolute nth-degree caution. There will be clarity, and that is what we are asking for and that is what the organisation and these communities right across Victoria are asking for.

It is a supply issue. We have heard today a very sensible speech from the Lib Dems in relation to Opal, and it is an absolute tragedy that people in the Latrobe Valley are suffering an uncertain future. In truth it is not uncertain: they are going to go to the unemployment line. And why? Because the government has not shored up this timber code of practice and made certainty for industry. Again I heard Ms Terpstra, and we got 2 minutes in before we heard the failings of Mr Kennett. That was 2 minutes. I think that might be a record; she normally runs it out to about 3 minutes.

People who live in Eastern Victoria Region totally understand that the Victorian government’s forestry plan is flawed. It is a joke. They talk about, ‘All we need to do is upgrade our equipment. Pay some money and get them to change it.’ Well, that is true. Hardwood timber mills cannot be softwood timber mills. Hardwood excavations, haulage and harvest are not softwood, are not plantation. They are not going to work. But this market is already full. There is already a full, complete raft of people working in the plantation industry. You cannot stuff more people in and just say, ‘Here, go in there and conduct your business.’ It is a flawed plan. There are no more plantations in Victoria than there were three years ago. There are no more plants being planted in the ground. There is a recycle but there is no new net to cover off. I support Mr Bourman’s motion, and the government needs to come and address this very serious issue of the loss of our lives, communities and people in Victoria.

Bev McARTHUR (Western Victoria) (16:28): I move:

That debate on this motion be adjourned until later this day.

Motion agreed to and debate adjourned until later this day.