Mr KERR (9:06 PM) —This debate tonight seems to be bringing on the Olympics in political posturing and role reversals. We have just had the extraordinary spectacle of the member for Cowper berating the New South Wales Carr government for taking a position with respect to forestry which his own National and Liberal Party state colleagues voted to support in the New South Wales state parliament. We have had the extraordinary perspective of member after member standing up and saying, `Legislation such as this could never have been brought in. We couldn't have had legislation to protect resources securities. It is an outrage that Labor has any concerns about this matter, or would take any steps in the Senate.' Yet in 1991, when Labor brought in resource security legislation, the Liberal coalition parties in the Senate prevented its passage and did so notwithstanding the extreme concern of the forest industries and forest unions.

The final irony is that we have this claim that Labor is in some manner acting in an irresponsible way for pursuing in a consistent manner the very strategy that it created when it was in government, which it still maintains is appropriate for the interests of this nation. Why do we say that there are important issues that we still need to pursue? It is because without there being a follow-up on the industry side, all these rhetorical flourishes—the importance that flows from resource security; that there will be investment, employment and the like—will not necessarily come to pass.

I have gone through an extraordinary history at a personal level in Tasmania in debates about the environment. I came here at a time when I had become aware of the significance of this issue. My first involvement was when an inquiry was conducted by Merv Everett, a former state minister and later a Federal Court judge. He conducted, I think, the first major inquiry into Tasmanian forestry. He found that the then rate of removal of forests was so high it was unsustainable. It had to be cut back. And that had costs—it meant people were forced out of the industry. For the first time some reserves were secured. There were then passionate debates about Helsham, and about the area to be preserved and the like.

I came into that debate essentially holding to the view that we have greater values than simply economic ones—that there are some things that matter. Just as arts and culture matter, just as values matter, just as love and other kindnesses matter, so too does a concern for the environment matter. But in that debate I had to recognise that there were balances, and part of the balances were that it was important to secure the livelihood of those who depended on forest industries. To devise appropriate measures we had to say, `Yes, we will protect certain areas so that they are available for resource extraction' notwithstanding that they also had some environmental significance.

There is no doubt that we have made major steps forward in Tasmania in preserving large areas of great environmental sensitivity. But anyone who goes to Tasmania and says that all the areas that are now available for forestry have no environmental significance is completely off this planet. There are some very significant areas of quite high conservation value which will be available for resource allocation as part of the balances that came through that RFA. That being so, you cannot keep aboard those who recognise that there needs to be that balance—which includes the trade union movement—if government does not keep a firm hand to ensure that the industry outcomes are actually achieved.

People like Dr Bain came to me when I was shadow minister for the environment and said, `Don't press the case that you have to have an enforceable arm of industry policy mandated in legislation. Leave it to us.' I said to him, `You are in danger of finding that you are bringing together as allies the conservation movement and the trade union movement for the reason that neither will support your position.' The trade union movement was committed to the resource security legislation and the RFAs because it believed that industry strategies associated with those measures would generate jobs and investment in those industries. The reason some of the more moderate of the Green movement understood it was that they saw that it protected, under the JANIS criteria, significant areas which would otherwise have been potentially at risk. But why should either side accept a balance if at the end you are not getting those sustained employment outcomes?

And that is the problem in Tasmania now. We are finding that, despite there having been a settled allocation of resource for industry, and despite the Forestry Commission developing substantial plans for upgrading and developing plantations so that more resources will be available for pulp wood than ever before, we are at the same time having disinvestment from those forest industries.

So it rings completely false when members from the government side say, `Just pass this legislation and she'll be right.' We know that in Tasmania, where we have that legislation now at state level—we have had an RFA put in place—the proof of the pudding has not come through. In fact, it has actually proved everything that the Greens were saying. If that is the case it is hardly surprising that there is a fair degree of cynicism.

I heard the member for Indi saying earlier, `I have heard all these union people bagging the Labor Party because they are opposing this legislation.' Where the hell has he been? I do not know which union people he has been talking to, because when I was shadow minister all of the trade union members that I was hearing representations from in my own state and nationally were saying, `Unless you have an industry strategy with teeth built into it you should not pass this legislation. Unless you have a serious industry strategy so that there will be jobs, downstream processing and investment then reject this legislation—do not pass it.'

I think it is the case that there is a significant view within the mainstream trade union movement that we should bring back export controls as a lever to ensure that there is a commitment to downstream industry processing. Some organisations have fronted around this place, largely for the coalition parties and of course as a voicepiece for North Forest Products. There have been people like Barry Chipman, a very affable man. That is an extraordinarily appropriate name in the circumstances. Barry is an extraordinarily affable man and he does a very good job. Until recently many who were workers within the industry thought that their interests and his coincided. Despite the cheek of calling it the Forest Protection Society as if it were an environmental organisation, Barry purported to represent an independent view of those autonomously employed within the industry.

But that front seems to be falling away, because at the moment the large employers in Tasmania, the North Forest Products and the like, are acting in ways which are completely incompatible with labour interests—the interests of working members in the community. So it seems increasingly that those who are urging the passage of this legislation unamended are completely isolated. They are being exposed as fronts for the major transnational resource companies that essentially want to be able to access forest resources in native forests to extract from them pulp resources without a commitment to an industry strategy and without any national obligation whatsoever. Labor is not going to facilitate that. If people want to criticise us for standing up for a strategy which would insist that the valuable natural resources of this country, such as are available after the scientific assessment, are not squandered, are not wasted, do not just go off in whole logs or in chips, then we will plead guilty to that.

We have heard a cry from the member for Cowper about the New South Wales RFA, a suggestion that in some ways that had gone off the rails. Again, I draw attention to the oddity that his own state colleagues in the New South Wales parliament supported it.

Let us go to Western Australia. This legislation, if passed in the present form, would mean that, when the Western Australian RFA ultimately is signed, put together by the West Australian coalition government and signed off by the extremely environmentally sensitive Wilson Tuckey, who is sitting at the table, once that groundbreaking environmental scheme had come to pass, there will be nothing for this parliament to do for 20 years other than to compensate anybody who has interests in exploiting the resources so made available should a future government regard this as perhaps not quite as environmentally sensitive as those opposite might have it. The problem for those who wish this to occur is that almost across the board there is nobody in Western Australia who thinks that this so-called benign, environmentally positive outcome is worth a cracker.

Mr Laurie Ferguson —Cheryl Edwards still does.

Mr KERR —Cheryl Edwards apparently believes in it. Wilson has still got one true believer, but that must be all. The Nats in Western Australia walked away from the Western Australian RFA months and months ago. There is enormous unease right across the whole of the community.

I had the opportunity when I was shadow minister to go to regional areas where forestry is an important industry. I went to those townships and met with the local government representatives and met with various people who in some circumstances might be thought to be protagonists for the industry. They were not. I met with a whole range of people who told me the difficulties that had emerged because of the process that existed as a special arrangement between this Commonwealth government and the West Australian government. It is the only RFA signed after the defeat of the former Labor government, and in terms which facilitated CALM, the resource manager, also being the project manager for the RFA. There is no independence in that process. It is not like the process that occurred in other jurisdictions. Everyone in Western Australia is aware of the diminishing resource for karri and jarrah. It is an extraordinary situation. Here, of course, we have a member from Western Australia who, with Cheryl Edwards, is probably the only one who thinks that chopping all this down and sending it off as charcoal or as woodchips is a you-beaut utilisation of those resources.

This whole approach that the government has comes down to the fact that you cannot seem to value anything that does not have a dollar hanging off it. If it does not seem to have a dollar hanging off it, it is not worth a bumper. That means that there are a whole range of things that matter to our community that get overlooked in this narrowness of vision. At the macro level, it starts out with those fundamental tenets that go to human rights, that go to concern about indigenous Australians and that go to the place we all have in a future republic, and the narrowness of the debate that has occurred in those areas. Then you come down to things like the arts, where there really has been a cheapness in the debate, including advertising during the last election campaign which criticised Labor as pandering to elites, as if music, the theatre and literature are in some way unknown to those who wear blue collars or who live in the bush. What absolute nonsense.

Then it comes down to the environment and things like Jabiluka, where there could be no possible economic reason for preferring a development there when there are many other uranium mines potentially open for exploitation that do not have those kinds of immense sensitivities. We saw it as a sine qua non of this government's commitment to economic ballsiness that we had the Prime Minister stand up and wave his fists about the kind of economic vandalism that he asserted the Labor Party was playing into. It was a disgraceful performance. Then there was the complicity in the Hanson resurgence—all these kinds of things where we were treated as a community as if those higher values commensurate with commitment and soul did not matter.

Mr Ronaldson —I raise a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. I have been listening in my office to the member for Denison now for some two minutes and I do not think he has referred to timber or forests for at least two minutes. You might like to ask him to come back to the matter on which he should be speaking.

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER (Mr Adams) —I ask the honourable member to speak to the matters before us. I think the honourable member was tying in most of his comments to the bill, and I think he will get there.

Mr KERR —Thank you. I am chastened. This evening I have been very patient, though, in relation to other contributions. The member for Cowper took us through a dissertation about the evils of the New South Wales government. Perhaps I could suggest that the member for Cowper could blame the New South Wales Nationals' errors on their recently dumped leader, Mr Armstrong.

Whatever the reason, Labor has been consistent. We recognised a balance had to be struck. We stood firmly as the party that actually put the environment on the national agenda. Without Labor in government the world heritage nominations of much of Tasmania would not have proceeded. The necessary recognition that our community does value these things was inherent in what we did. But we also said that we wanted to have an industry strategy that would build jobs. We want to have a plantation based structure that will mean that we move away from native forest exploitation so that our pulp wood comes mainly from plantations and we use that which is available in old-growth forest principally for sawlogs, for veneer timbers and high quality furniture. Those are perfectly rational strategies to pursue and to advocate.

I think this legislation needs more. It needs reporting obligations included in it. What do states have to do to prove that they are meeting the JANIS criteria, that the undertakings they make in that agreement are actually being met year by year? Where are those reporting agreements? Are they public? We do not know, and certainly there is no undertaking that they be made public or that they be annual or that there be any accountability. We want to know what is being done in terms of the obligations that this government said it accepted when it undertook and signed some RFAs, for example.

Going back to Tasmania, part of the RFA negotiations in my state was to recognise that you could not meet the JANIS criteria without substantial reservations being obtained on private land. Funds were to be made available in order to secure the preservation and release of areas so that they could be maintained in perpetuity, so you would get the whole diversity that is necessary for those JANIS criteria to be met. We have not had any accounting of that. We know that there has been a fiddling of the funds under the Natural Heritage Trust. We know that there has been a rorting of those processes, but we still do not know that the outcome will meet the objectives that the government said it was going to obtain when it signed that agreement.

There is no obligation, not just there but in every state where these agreements come into operation, to show that future actions will match the commitments that the states enter into. Why should we buy pigs in a poke? Why should we sign up, as if we would give legislative, legal effect to agreements without having actually sighted them?

We know that in Western Australia even the Nationals regard with doubt the likely outcome that will come forward for signing by this benevolent, green minister for forestry, who is at the table—Wilson Tuckey, the master environmentalist, the carer of our forests. I have to tell you: I am pretty cynical that this parliament would regard that as a good deal. We would want to reserve the right to have a look at it in this parliament before it came into effect as a piece of legislation which would bind this parliament to compensation for any deficiency in it for the next 20 years. And I do not think that, if push came to shove and we were on the other side of the House, the then opposition would do anything else but say the same. (Time expired)