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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 7 Hansard (18 October) . . Page.. 1776 ..

Mr Berry: But you cannot change 35 per cent of it overnight. That is the point.

MS HORODNY: Mr Berry says that we cannot do this overnight. Mr Berry, we have had 20 years of an export woodchip industry in this country which, from the very start, was not sustainable. If you read the literature, if you do the research, as I have, you will know that the evidence is not there. The resource assessment report that your Federal counterparts commissioned in 1991 states quite clearly that no logging in this country, certainly since World War II, has happened on a sustainable basis. It simply has not happened. Mr Berry, if you claim to be an environmentalist - which you have now lost all credibility on, I might add - you should know at least some of these figures that you are talking about.

Talking about "by the year 2000" is another problem. The year 2000 - five years away - is, again, five years of wasted economics, of propping up an industry that will die a slow death. You talked about $53m. What did that $53m refer to? You say that the Federal Government is putting up a process to look at these regional forest agreements and is putting in $53m to facilitate that process. Why is that $53m not being used to restructure the timber industry, because that is the work that needs to happen now?

Mr Berry: That is what it is - a restructuring of the timber industry.

MS HORODNY: No, it is not, Mr Berry. Again, if you knew the facts, you would know that that is not what is happening. That money is being used to prop up an industry in a sector of our ecosystem where it is not viable and where it is not producing money. In fact, it is costing taxpayers billions of dollars.

Mr Berry's third proposition is about unprocessed woodchip. He talked about Australia's jobs growth. Again, he has not done the homework. He does not understand that jobs in the industry are in plantations, not in the native forests sector. He says that no unprocessed woodchip should be exported. That implies that exporting processed woodchip could be a good idea. Again, that is a problem. If Mr Berry claims to understand anything about the environment he would know that a log that is going to a sawmill to be processed and to be exported has the same detrimental impact on forests as a log that is going to a chip-mill, and the economics are still very poor. The figures are not there to substantiate what you are saying, Mr Berry. We are no better off economically by your proposal than by being in the situation that we are in right now, which is a political stalemate. It is something that you, as a government, did nothing about when you were in office, and you should have. It is something that you are now proposing to, again, not do anything about. Yet at the same time you try to maintain a political distance from the Federal Government. You go to woodchip rallies and you think you are going to get political credibility on that basis. That is a problem, Mr Berry, and I think you really need to show your cards on this issue.

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