Senator ALLISON (6:14 PM) —I think it is necessary to respond to Senator Murphy. He has made a very good case for removing native forests from this legislation as eligible sources, but he says that the reason for not doing that is the waste, which can be utilised in this process. Those of us at this end of the chamber have been listening to this argument about waste for a long time, and we know that the so-called waste is actually in the form of logs—logs which look like the logs that go to sawmills. Logs are absolutely necessary for woodchippers, because they have to debark the timber and the tallest, straightest timbers are the ones that are most suitable for woodchipping.

It is not the treetops, the branches, the roots, the leaves or anything else that people might imagine to be waste products that go into woodchipping, and those things will not go into biomass and into coal fired power stations in order to generate electricity. Those things are not the waste that will be used. There might be a bit of material that comes from sawmills, but, as the Tasmanian Conservation Trust pointed out just a week or so ago, only three per cent of the native forest timber delivered to mills in Tasmania this winter ended up as sawn timber and veneer. That was down from 3.8 per cent in the previous winter. So the remaining 97 per cent of forest wood was classified as so-called waste. It defies all credibility and all rationale to say that if we have native forests being put into biomass burners to generate electricity we are going to get the waste. This is the broadest imaginable definition of `waste'. As I said earlier, this 97 per cent of timber does not include treetops, leaves or roots. That will remain on the forest floor and will still be burned, and there will be absolutely no difference in terms of utilisation of so-called waste.

The Tasmanian Conservation Trust pointed out that the extraordinary levels of so-called waste—97 per cent—have arisen for two reasons. First, worsening market conditions for hardwood timber in the face of fierce competition from softwood plantation timber means that mills will accept only the highest quality sawlogs, with large volumes of sawlog-quality logs being designated for pulp. Second, worsening market conditions for old growth woodchips from pulp and paper mills in East Asia, in the face of similar competition from woodchips from hardwood plantations, are expected to render such chips unsaleable within two or three years.

ABS data for September shows that Tasmanian woodchip production is at its highest levels since woodchip production surveys began 30 years ago. Before the RFA process, woodchip exports were pegged at less than three million tonnes per year, but they have now reached a staggering 5.1 million tonnes per year. So it is crucial that the ALP change its views about native forests being burned for electricity. The RFA process is already damaging our forests in Tasmania, in Victoria, and in other states, including Western Australia. This will provide another impetus for cutting down native forests to use for this purpose. The government cannot satisfy us on the question of biomass and the impact on native forests, and Senator Murphy ought to talk with his colleagues and try to persuade them, to remove the doubt, to join the Greens and the Democrats and vote for our amendments, which would make that quite clear. You would be in line with the Labor government in New South Wales, which does not allow native forest products to be used in green power. I do not know what has gone wrong with the Labor Party that it cannot support an amendment which would obviously be in line with policy in New South Wales, at least.

I will always leap to my feet when I hear Senator Murphy talking about waste, because we know that waste is not real waste and that the industry has been getting away, for a long time, with trying to persuade ordinary Australians that all that woodchipping is doing is cleaning up what is on the forest floor. That is a nonsense; let us put it to bed now and recognise that the timber which goes to woodchips is fine, tall, quite large timber, and it looks very much like what goes to sawmills.