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Monday, 19 November 2012
Page: 8944

Senator BOSWELL (Queensland) (12:50): by leave—I have sought permission from the very generous and popular Chief Government Whip in the Senate, Senator Anne McEwen, to incorporate in Hansard the last page of my speech on the Illegal Logging Prohibition Bill 2012 and she has agreed.

Leave granted.

The incorporated page of the speech read as follows—

In most cases, they can massively out-spend the companies they choose to campaign against, companies who must comply with taxation and other rules that simply do not apply to the E.N.G.Os.

I believe the Australian public, and this Parliament, need to be alerted to what is at stake here. Australia’s agricultural, forestry and fisheries industries have a gross value of production of some 50 billion dollars. That is a huge amount of money. It is a very attractive target for E.N.G.O. strategies designed to extort money from primary industries and other businesses in the supply chain to allow them to continue harvesting and marketing their products.

Clearly, environmental non-government organisations like WWF, Greenpeace and others intend to move from one primary industry sector to the next to the next, “green mailing” or otherwise forcing them to comply with their favoured sustainability certification schemes.

Their tactics should alarm all Australians.

I believe their tactics raise important questions. They are questions fundamentally important for the way government operates … for the maintenance of a genuine, informed democracy … and for the role of science in guiding and informing decision-making.