Senator GREIG (7:45 PM) —The Democrats support this amendment by Senator Brown. We do so because the amendment seeks—and it is the core of this issue—to take the notion of the environment and put it smack bang in the centre of the regional forestry debate, which is so lacking on the question of the environment. Earlier Senator Abetz was in the chamber and Senator Brown was speaking on the need for completing and then publishing the results of assessments on RFAs. From across the chamber, Senator Abetz interjected that that would require the felling of further trees to print the paper. There is no greater illustration than that comment as to how wrong both the govern ment and opposition are in approaching the issue of wood and paper.

As has been said time and time again—though it has fallen on deaf ears, I fear—we do not have to log our native forests to produce paper. It is that simple. There are alternatives. We must look seriously at plantation timbers, we must look seriously at hemp production and I am learning of late about the exciting prospects of a new African development called kenaf. The double benefit of that is that it contributes in terms of the carbon sink. One of the points Senator Brown is making with item (d) of his amendment is that there ought to be no increase in greenhouse gas emissions as a result of actions taken under the RFA. If we get away from the notion of logging and destroying our native forests and towards the production of alternatives, we have the potential, the opportunity, to produce thousands of hectares of hemp, for example, not only grown to be harvested and then processed into paper, saving the destruction of our native forests from woodchipping, but in the process acting as an immense carbon sink and contributing towards the reduction of greenhouse gases.

As I said, this amendment at its core forces people to take a position on the notion of `Environment'—with a capital E—in this entire debate and takes us away from this relentless mantra that the forests are there simply to be a kind of factory, to be plundered in the name of jobs, when in fact we know that there is much greater potential for labour-intensive programs under production timbers. For those reasons principally, we Democrats support this amendment.