Senator MURPHY (10:17 AM) —We should not take longer than we can afford to, but there are some important matters. Minister, when you raised the issue with me and I indicated that this thing is not working, it is in fact not working. I will come to that in a minute, but I would try to impress on you that it is relevant to this legislation—

The TEMPORARY CHAIRMAN —Are you trying to impress on me or on the minister?

Senator MURPHY —Through you, Mr Temporary Chairman, I am trying to impress on the minister.

The TEMPORARY CHAIRMAN — Perhaps you would care to do that indirectly through me.

Senator MURPHY —I will endeavour to do that. Through you, Mr Temporary Chairman, I would like to impress upon the minister that it is relevant to this legislation. With regard to the process, what you outlined is correct. They do have forest practices officers who go out and do the flora and fauna assessments. They also have other officers who do assessments of the likely harvest outcomes, yield outcomes et cetera. They also employ the services of specialist people—scientists who are specialists in the fields of fauna or flora—to write reports, and they may feel that there are some species that may be of significance or may be threatened, et cetera. But what happens? Again I refer to this great body known as the Forest Practices Board, for whom the forest practices officers work. The problem is that some of those reports are not being adhered to.

You say to me, Minister, `You should go to the state body, to the state authorities, or to the state government.' I say to you, Minister—through you, Mr Temporary Chairman—that I have done that on any number of occasions, and I have also approached ministers at the Commonwealth level. I have approached them for, I would think, at least 20 years, but more particularly I have approached them on a stronger basis since 1989. That is still a very lengthy period of time. I have shown information to officers of the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry and, when they watched the videos and saw the photographs, they thought that there was something wrong. They said, `We will go and talk to the minister about this and come back to you.' That was last year.

Senator Ian Macdonald —When?

Senator MURPHY —I cannot remember the specific date, but I can give you the specific date if that is what you want. It was well before the last federal election.

Senator Ian Macdonald —So it was about mid-year.

Senator MURPHY —No, it was after July. I will give you the specific date. If my staff are watching this debate, which I hope they are, they will be looking for that date right now.

The TEMPORARY CHAIRMAN —You will give that to the minister, will you, Senator Murphy?

Senator MURPHY —That is a diarised date. There were two officers: the senior officer for forestry at that time—

Senator Ian Macdonald —Why don't you just let me know and I will follow it through and write to you about it—

Senator MURPHY —That you can, Minister, but at the end of the day we are debating a bill that, sooner or later during the course of this week, I hope, will pass this Senate. That is the problem. If you gave at least some consideration, which you wrote to me about, in respect of what I have put up as an amendment with regard to monitoring this process—

The TEMPORARY CHAIRMAN — Senator Murphy, it is rather difficult to understand, when you are saying `you', whether you are referring to the chair or the minister. I am feeling rather superfluous. You could rectify that malady if you would be kind enough to direct your contribution through the chair.

Senator MURPHY —I am sorry I am making you feel somewhat superfluous, Mr Temporary Chairman Lightfoot, because you are not.

The TEMPORARY CHAIRMAN — Thank you very much, Senator Murphy, that is very kind.

Senator MURPHY —Mr Temporary Chairman, I am pointing out to the minister and I am referring to the minister, and I apologise because I should be referring to the minister in the third person. Through you, Mr Temporary Chairman, I say to the minister that I would not mind the minister telling me to do certain things if I had not tried these things. I have tried these things. Almost six years ago I wrote to the Forest Practices Board. This was at a time when we had export controls for woodchip export licences. I wrote about an allegation of sawlogs being in the Hampshire woodchip mill yard in the north-west of Tasmania. Indeed, I pleaded with them to come out and inspect six kilometres of logs—six kilometres in length—11 metres long and on average over four metres high in stacked form. They wrote back to me and said, `No, we're not coming out with you, Senator; we won't come out and check anything.' They said that since the inception of the mill there had been two sawlogs found in the Hampshire woodchip mill yard and that they had been recovered and sent back to sawmills. I can tell you that that was the greatest lie of all time. But would that department come out and inspect? No.

I have, likewise, as I said earlier, asked the Regional Forest Agreement Monitoring Unit, which is supposed to monitor this process, to come down to Tasmania—not take my word for it; not cause me to have to get up in this Senate chamber and, in effect, take a lot of the time of the Senate debating this matter. I have said to them, `Get off your backsides and get down here and have a look. Don't take my word for it; make your own judgment.' But would they do that? No; they said, `No, Senator, we can't do that.' So I asked them, `What is your role? You are listed in this RFA newsletter as the monitor of this supposedly great exercise,' to which they replied, `We'll have to ask the minister, Senator.' `Okay, ask the minister,' I said. And what did I get back from the minister? I got a letter that said, `Don't harass my staff.' Senator, if I should so get an expert opinion that there is somehow a breach occurring in the forests of Tasmania in respect of the regional forest agreement, I then might consider whether or not I will cause an investigation to take place.' What a joke!

Through you, Mr Temporary Chairman, I say to the officers that they know it is a joke. It does not work, and this is the place where we should be trying to fix it. And I open the door again: get off your backsides and get down there and have a look, but do not do it through the process listed in the regional forest agreement that says that you have to give three weeks notice, because if you do you will get the Cook's tour—the old sanitised version of a forestry exercise. That is what you have been getting all of your life. The quicker you come to the realisation that that is not what should be happening, the better.

We have a public responsibility to ensure that these forests are managed, for a whole range of reasons. My involvement throughout this debate has been on the principal reason of employment. I am sick and tired of seeing thousands of jobs go out of this industry because of the way it is managed. That is what is happening. I get sick and tired of hearing members of this Senate, including ministers, get up here and say that this bill is relevant to employment, when that is the greatest load of crap of all time. It is not relevant to employment because it is doing nothing for employment. That is the problem.

As a former secretary of the Timber Workers Union, which subsequently became the CFMEU, I argued for workers' rights. As I said, I participated on the Forests and Forest Industry Council. I arranged blockades, demonstrations and everything else that you drive to try to get a better outcome for workers. When I see the forests being trashed and logs being piled up on the wharves at Burnie and Bell Bay to be exported to China or Korea, I ask myself: what does that do for the workers in the timber industry of Tasmania? It does not do a thing. When I see logs being left in the bush to burn and tens of thousands of man ferns being destroyed, I ask myself what that does for employment in Tasmania. It does nothing.

When you look at that and you look at the state government of the day—I do not care; Liberal or Labor—you see that it does not matter whether it is Liberal or Labor. They have both been as bad as one another and have not been prepared to do anything about it. When I was a member of the Labor Party, Jim Bacon and Paul Lennon gave a commitment to the union, in front of other union officials, that if they were successful in coming to the government benches they would do something about this problem, but then they did not do it. They tell me that they will not do that because of financial contributions from certain companies. I find that abhorrent. That is doing nothing for the workers in this industry. I will not cop that.

We have a responsibility in public life to uphold the interests of the people, and in this place in debating this bill we have a responsibility to ensure that we do it not only for the people who work in this industry but for the future generations of this country. That is why we must ensure that the Commonwealth maintain some sort of control over this process. It is not sufficient for us, for political reasons or for political opportunity, to handball this to states that are demonstrating no capacity to manage the resources of their own forests in the best interests of the community.

I again say, through you, Mr Temporary Chairman, to the minister: come and have a look; let us defer this bill; let us have your eyes opened and the eyes of your officers opened to see exactly what is going on and then you can come back here and see whether you will respond to me in the unfortunate way that you are responding at the moment. I have great sympathy for you, Minister, because you have come to a new portfolio and it is very difficult one. I do not want to be disrespectful to you in any way at all, because it is a difficult job, but it is important that you are informed to a greater degree than you currently are about what is really happening, not what some people want you to believe is happening. You might say that I am doing exactly the same, but I am not. I am asking you to go and have a look for yourself and then make your own judgment, and that is what I will continue to ask you to do.