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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 7 Hansard (18 October) . . Page.. 1771 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

Our contribution in the ACT is obviously a very appropriate one in the sense that we can set an example. We have a forest industry in the ACT which I believe ought to be a model to which other States should aspire. I cannot pretend that that is because of sound management over a long period. I suspect that it is simply an accident of history in that the ACT is not in an area in which forestry was a large industry in the first place and the Federal Government decided that, over a period of time, it would establish a local industry for the Territory. Since 1915 there has been a local forestry industry based on plantations, and those plantations have returned a small but important yield to the ACT economy. At the moment the industry employs about 300 people.

Ms Follett: It is very small.

MR HUMPHRIES: It is fairly small. It could be bigger. It employs about 300 people and brings in about $60m to the ACT economy each year, and that is a contribution which I think is worth developing. Of course, it is worth developing in the existing framework of the industry being based on plantations; an industry which does not rely on the felling of any old growth forests and which builds upon an economically viable base to produce an important return, both in terms of employment and in terms of overall return. I believe, Mr Speaker, that that is a model which other States could well employ to a greater degree.

People who have visited old growth forests in this country would be concerned about the way in which those forests have been logged for woodchipping. I have visited some of those places and I hope that all members in this place would be concerned that they need to be logged to sustain industry. Clearly, there is an argument, as Mr Berry indicated, about the employment base for people who are already dependent on the logging of those forests for a livelihood. Clearly, there is the issue of the extent to which we can readjust the parameters of those sorts of industries in a relatively short space of time. But there are also environmental values which, in my opinion, are threatened by the continued logging of those forests on a cyclical basis. The argument is put that those forests regenerate. Of course, wood is a renewable resource, the classic renewable resource perhaps; but the fact remains that logging on the scale that has been the case in this country has resulted in a significant number of changes to those forests, and those changes are not necessarily in the interests of those forests.

Mr Speaker, there is nothing inherently wrong with woodchipping. It is, in a sense, a convenient way to move small pieces of wood into a chain which results in it being produced into paper or cardboard, or flat panel building products such as particle board or MDF. The harvesting of native forests, however, to produce those woodchips is the issue of most controversy. In 1992 the State and Commonwealth Ministers from both the forestry and the conservation portfolios arranged for the development of the national forest policy statement. This was agreed to by all governments at that time and was signed on behalf of the ACT by Ms Follett, the then Chief Minister. That policy statement sought to defuse the native forest debate by a process that included the setting up of a comprehensive and representative forest reserve system, followed by a series of regional forestry agreements to ensure that all the values of the native forests in this country were available for future generations.

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