Senator BROWN (5:36 PM) —It appears that the parliamentary secretary does not have access to any information and, where she has got it—we have heard this in committee this afternoon, Mr Temporary Chairman, and I am sure you have had an ear glued to it—she will not give it. I have never seen the situation in this place before where the government could get the information and it has not. A phone call would get the information about the indigenous community. I will come back to it tomorrow and I expect the parliamentary secretary to know. The parliamentary secretary talks about grassroots communities in regional Australia—here is one which has a right to know what is happening in their neighbourhood when the interstate based woodchip corporations move in. It is simply unsatisfactory that, in this important debate, the government says, `We don't know' or, even where it does know, it says, `We're not going to tell the Senate.'

Earlier, I referred to the situation in East Gippsland, where the state's emblem, Leadbeater's possum—we have all seen that magnificent, cute little animal of which I think even Jeff Kennett would be proud—is facing extinction because it has a very limited habitat. Through the regional forest agreement, its habitat is now under threat. This is an extraordinary circumstance where, even with the state's emblem, the federal government wants to tie its hands behind its back.

We have not got the Regional Forest Agreements Bill 1998 through yet. I ask the parliamentary secretary: what effort has been made, what plan has been put into place under the Central Highlands Regional Forest Agreement, signed a long time ago, to protect the Leadbeater's possum from the high intensity burns which are going to be part of logging and woodchipping in that region, with, of course, death and destruction to everything in its way, and to salvage logging which is occurring in the critical habitat? Can the parliamentary secretary say why the recom mendation of Dr David Lindenmayer, the expert in this field—we are supposed to be dealing with science here—which would have reduced the cut in the region by 15 per cent, has not been taken up?