Mr TUCKEY (Forestry and Conservation; Minister Assisting the Prime Minister) (11:05 AM) —We can almost conclude this debate, but I was anticipating a couple of other members being able to return to the House. I will respond only to the comments of the shadow minister. He said, `Our concerns are about the WA RFA.' To all the people who keep saying that they have concerns about the WA RFA and that it is fundamentally flawed, I say, `Which bit?' I would welcome the return of the shadow minister to the dispatch box to tell me what particular parts of the Western Australian Regional Forest Agreement he has concerns with.

Surely it is not that some people in the western suburbs of Perth do not like it. Surely it has to be that there are fundamentally identifiable flaws in the science. Remember that it was their budget that put together $100 million to pay people whom I find are infinitely of high integrity, infinitely decent people, be they public servants or scientists. They have great academic skills. It is their advice only that is handed on to the task force, the structure of which I think is unchanged from the original created by the Labor Party—that is, Prime Minister and Cabinet; AFFA, as it is now known; and Environment Australia. Those are the people who come along to me and say, `There's the document.'

In relation to the Western Australian document on reserve areas and those things that people sometimes wish to debate, there were three propositions and the one that was actually accepted was the one put by the Western Australian government. After a couple of visits from a couple of wealthy lawyers, they backed down on their own agreement. But it is incumbent on the shadow minister, having said, `We have to review the WA RFA in the Senate because we are concerned about it,' to let us in on it.

Let me now say something about negotiation. We did have negotiation. We were willing to consider such matters—and we made this very clear to the opposition—as a limited objects clause. We have grave concerns about an objects clause because that just opens up the opportunity for people who seem to have heaps and heaps of money to take someone to court after the event when they have committed their billion bucks in a paper making plant and say, `You cannot do this because RFA No. 5 in Victoria does not meet the objects of the act.' That is a great opportunity for a couple of lawyers to make a lot of money. The fact of life is that investors do not want that problem; they want uncontestable arrangements. That is what you achieve with an objects clause: you start to create opportunities for litigation. That is why I think it was totally unnecessary. But we were prepared to have some limited objects that we felt would not open the legislation to that sort of litigation, and we said so.

We agreed to have the annual reports and five yearly reviews tabled in both houses so they could be debated if either house so wished. We were willing to look at the establishment of a parliamentary joint committee to review implementation of the RFAs over their 20-year life, and we were prepared to consider improvements to the public consultation process for the remaining RFAs in Victoria and New South Wales. In fact, the final message that I might admit with some reluctance we passed to the opposition prior to the debate in the Senate was that we were even prepared to have the completed RFAs made available for further public consideration prior to their signing. Why we need to do that, considering the other consultation processes, I do not know. I make the point that in Western Australia there were three propositions put to the people for public consultation known as A, B and C. The eventual outcome was greener than any of them.

But, again, we have Senator Greig saying, `All those things are flawed with the exception of the Queensland one.' He apparently does not know there is not one in Queensland, so what does he know about the other ones? Why don't they get up clause by clause and identify where the science was wrong, identify where the principles of 60 per cent of old-growth forest and 15 per cent of pre-existing biodiversity has not happened? (Extension of time granted) Why not point to where they are wrong? It is all about `fundamentally flawed' or GMOs or `Frankenstein food'. What has that got to do with the science of genetic modification? Why do we let that sort of talk dictate this debate?

You can go to any of the RFAs. You have the National Forest Policy Statement, which the Labor Party wrote. You have the JANIS criteria, which they authorised and which every parliament in Australia endorsed. That is the test for an RFA, but you never hear it. You can go through 29 hours of Senate debate but show me where there is any serious criticism of any of the RFAs signed—there is none whatsoever. They say, `Tuckey's a boofhead,' or `Someone says this or that'—nothing to say they are wrong.

I think the Leader of the Opposition has doubts about the policy, but I have stuck to that policy religiously. I challenge anyone to look at any of the RFAs, whether or not I was responsible for some of them, and point to where they are grossly deficient as per the NFPS. We cop it every day from the media. You are well aware that Bob Cronin, the retired editor-in-chief of the West Australian, wrote an article in the Australian which was a peer review of the journalistic coverage of the RFA debate in Western Australia. As he said, the Greens were too smart to confuse journalism with facts; all they did was feed them `one-liners and conflict', and that is all they wanted. There is peer review. If you go to the newspapers, that is all you get.

So what I am saying to the opposition is that, if a heap of state premiers have signed or refused to sign RFAs with all the advice they have and all the science behind their departmental structures, which is much more developed than ours, why are a group of senators who get up and use words like `fundamentally flawed' smarter than the people who are involved? And why do we have this ongoing insult and degradation of scientists involved in the process? You can go to Melbourne University and qualify as a medical practitioner, a teacher, a pharmacist or a forester, and if you come out as a forester and you go to work for Norths or someone you are immediately labelled as someone who is taking a dirty dollar. Why? Do those people get a degree at a penitentiary before they come to the forestry school? Of course they do not. They are decent people and, as I meet them, they are very wise. They disagree amongst their fraternity, but you have to feed that out, and we have some very good public servants to advise us on that. There is not one scrap of evidence; the Senate just says, `They are all a mob of mugs not to be trusted.'

The pity of it is that we expect it of Brown and we expect it of Greig, but the Labor Party have a higher responsibility. I think they should put up an MPI and bring in the RFA for Western Australia and stand up on scientific principles and say where it is wrong. And don't go to Pierre Horwitz's lengthy paper, as the Greens do, and pick out one paragraph. When I met with the man he said, `Don't read my paper as one paragraph. For goodness sake, read the lot of it and you will come to a different conclusion.' There is an offer—you get three of those every sitting week. Come out and prove why you are concerned about the WA RFA other than that your leader thinks there are some votes in it, and that is his biggest mistake.

We agreed to a database. We were going to have one anyway. All of these issues were raised with the idea of undermining the fundamental principle. The Labor Party have got plans to change the RFA. They are going to make promises to the Greens and to the western suburbs in the next state election in WA. As they are going to do all of that, the last thing they want is for the dollars and cents part of this legislation to be passed. They have made the admission today that they do not want to get caught up in any compensation. That is why they put up a smokescreen of amendments which they know are not acceptable. (Time expired)