Senator BROWN (11:48 AM) —I move Australian Greens amendment (6) on revised sheet 2432:

5A Parliamentary scrutiny of RFAs

the RFA or the proposed RFA is deemed to have been disapproved of.

the Minister must not enter into the proposed RFA on behalf of the Commonwealth.

the Minister may enter into the RFA on behalf of the Commonwealth on or after the day immediately following the last day on which a resolution disapproving of the proposed RFA could have been passed.

This amendment is about the democracy the minister has just been speaking about, which is to ensure parliamentary scrutiny of the regional forest agreements. One of the things that is happening here is that the government, with the opposition, are moving through this legislation to remove parliament's overview of what is happening on the ground in the forests of Western Australia, Victoria, New South Wales and Tasmania. The amendment, under the heading `Parliamentary scrutiny of regional forest agreements', says:

In other words, the regional forest agreement has to be brought into both houses of parliament within 15 days. It goes on:

that is, the minister has caused a regional forest agreement to be tabled—

the RFA or the proposed RFA is deemed to have been disapproved of.

This is a very strong way of saying that the RFA must shape up before parliament. Parliament needs to look at it. If it is not looked at and approved, it will be rejected. It continues:

the Minister must not enter into the proposed RFA on behalf of the Commonwealth.

the Minister may enter into the RFA on behalf of the Commonwealth on or after the day immediately following the last day on which a resolution disapproving of the proposed RFA could have been passed.

Finally, the amendment has a definitional component. This amendment is saying that regional forest agreements should come before parliament, be vetted by parliament and not be entered into finally until parliament has given authority. Why should that be? There are a number of reasons. The first is that over $300 million of taxpayers' money has been given through the regional forest agreement process to the forest industries. That is a massive amount by anybody's reckoning.

Are we as a parliament acting responsibly if we say in return that we will not have scrutiny of those agreements? I reiterate: the regional forest agreements have not been vetted by parliament. They were signed by the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister flew to Perth, to Melbourne, to Sydney and to Perth in Tasmania—where he was met with a huge protest—on a number of occasions in the last several years, and he signed the agreements together with the then state premiers. The federal parliament has not been party to those agreements, yet they involve hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers' money. It is incumbent on the parliament not to allow the executive to behave solely in that fashion with taxpayers' money. It is incumbent on the parliament to make sure it scrutinises massive amounts of taxpayers' money given to an industry which should be profitable in itself but which is actually being propped up by taxpayers.

But then you look at what the taxpayers themselves think of this industry and whether the industry itself is necessary. I am referring here to the broadscale logging of old-growth forests in Australia. The answer is negative in both cases. Australia has a two million hectare suite of plantations which has enough wood to provide all this nation's wood needs. Native forest logging was meant to be tailed off as the plantations came on stream—and these plantations were paid for largely by public money in the past in make-work schemes—so that the native forests could be saved as the plantations grew. The plantations provide wood for house building, paper and a multitude of other needs. But, in effect, the industry is making so much money out of destroying the forests that it wants to continue doing it. It is doing this subsidised by the taxpayers.

So what is happening with the plantation wood as these plantations reach maturity? It is being exported overseas as whole logs, and the downstream processing, the jobs and the money are going to Korea, China and other countries. There is always the promise of some new investment. We heard some from Senator O'Brien this morning when he was talking about whole native logs from Tasmania being exported to Finland a while ago. But it just does not happen because it is too lucrative for the industry to be woodchipping huge amounts of forests and sending them overseas and to be diverting the small percentage of those forests into the sawmilling industry when the woodchippers arrive. Sawmilling these days is a by-product of woodchipping. That sawn timber coming out of our native forests at the behest of the lucrative woodchip industry then floods the market, displacing the plantation timbers which are exported overseas. Australians lose out all the way down the line. The jobs are exported, the forests are destroyed and the opportunity for job creation in the much more job-prospective industry of presenting those forests to visitors from overseas is lost at the same time.

I have yet to see a Japanese visitor to Tasmania who did not say that they preferred to see Tasmania's forests vertical than on the back of a log truck being sent to a woodchip mill to go to Japan. Japanese visitors do not know about it and they are horrified when they find that their country is a major recipient of the devastating woodchip industry in Victoria, New South Wales and Tasmania. Japanese visitors are coming in bigger and bigger numbers to see what? To look at log trucks? I doubt it. To look at clear-felled areas? Of course they are not. To look at Forestry Tasmania plantations? No, they are not. They want to come and see the wildlife in Tasmania. They want to come and see the intact forests. They want to come and enjoy the experience of nature.

Recently in the south of Hobart an idea long put forward by conservations was taken up, and an airwalk was built at taxpayer expense—some $5 million—in the Huon Valley. Forestry Tasmania thought that this would be a good way of expending taxpayers' money to put its ecotourism veneering on display and to distract from the increasing destruction of nearby forests. It does not do that. While it has had a massive number of visitors, they have not gone to see the clear-felled areas. Indeed, Forestry Tasmania did not put up an airwalk in a clear-felled area— although the airwalk paid for by the taxpayers is of such size that you cannot miss seeing clear-felled areas when you get up there. It put the airwalk in a remnant area of intact forests—namely, the Tahune Reserve on the Huon River. I will give Senator O'Brien a little geography tip: it is just downstream, not upstream, of the conjunction with the Picton River. When you get to the end of the airwalk you are confronted with a massive clear-felled area on Pear Hill above the junction of those two rivers—ugly, diverting, distracting and degrading of that experience. Many people comment on it.

What of the Styx Valley to the north, which has even bigger forests much more intact? This is terrain in which, in future, millions of visitors from around the world will delight. It has the tallest trees in the Southern Hemisphere, the biggest hardwood trees in the world; indeed, the biggest trees in the world outside North America. When I was out there a week or two ago there were people there from Western Australia, New South Wales, Germany and America. They look at these gigantic living creatures soaring up to nearly 100 metres high and they marvel at them. Then they drive on to the next lot of tall trees but in the meantime have the intervention of a clear-felled area—total destruction of the selfsame forest.

We have got this extraordinary deception whereby Forestry Tasmania say, `We will protect any tree that is over 85 metres high.' That is nearly as long as a football field turned on end. It is much higher than the Wrest Point Casino in Tasmania. It is much higher than the sails of the Opera House in Sydney. These trees are soaring from water level right up into the high arch of the Harbour Bridge in Sydney. What do Forestry Tasmania say? They say, `We will protect a tree if you can show it is that high.' In the meantime they have undoubtedly logged many trees that high or higher in a postage stamp sized protected area.

That brings me to the asseveration of the minister, Senator Ian Macdonald, about these areas, that you will see little areas which are protected when you go to clear-felled areas, which are for the good of nature. I can show him a photograph of such an area in the Tarkine Wilderness in north-west Tasmania left to protect the nest of an endangered Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle, bigger than the mainland wedge-tail. Forestry Tasmania came along after logging and had left this area and were very proud of it and set it on fire, because that is the next thing—the firestorm—and burnt down the eagle's nest and that copse of trees with it.

We go back to the Styx, and the minister says in this place that the Forest Practices Code officers are not corrupt—`If they are, tell me about it'—that they do not breach their principles, that they go on in front of the bulldozers and make sure that the environment is looked after. Not so. Let me give a very simple but startling example. The Skelton Creek road was driven south of the Styx up onto the ridge and Forestry Tasmania, backed by the Howard government and the Labor opposition, was moving in to cut it down. At the end of 1998 the Wilderness Society in Tasmania went in and decorated one of the trees, which happened to be 76 metres high, with thousands of coloured lights and on top a four-metre-across huge star which is still there and lights up each night on a solar panel system, which is a phenomenal thing to see. The attendant worldwide interest, because this is the tallest Christmas tree ever decorated anywhere on the face of the planet, saved the day. Forestry Tasmania did not want the bad publicity it would get from destroying that particular batch of trees. In looking around there, the Wilderness Society found what the Forest Practices officers did not and Forestry Tasmania did not—that is, an eagle's nest in the vicinity. Under the Forest Practices Code, it is illegal to road or log within 200 metres of an eagle's nest, but Forestry Tasmania had already roaded right through the middle and knocked down huge trees in the process, breaching its own code. The minister is not even listening to this because he knows he cannot answer it. It was left to the Wilderness Society to do that work, and now there is a temporary stay of execution on these grand forests in the vicinity of that eagle's nest. (Time expired)