Today, in the Legislative Council, I gave notice of a motion to accept the Initial Reserve Order under the Tasmanian Forest Agreement.
I did this to ensure that the Council debates this important issue.
There is no requirement to debate the disallowance motion, moved by another member of the Council, which places the whole agreement in limbo.
That is not to say that I will vote in favour of my motion, just that the debate needs to occur so the Council can make a decision to either move along or move on.
Many constituents have told me that they are sick and tired of the political grandstanding and game-playing of some over this issue.
I agree with them.
At this, stage my main concern with the agreement is the underfunding of the Regional Sawmiller Exit Program.
Initially set at $10m and based on sawlog volumes, the government has been unable to meet the expectations created by its own guidelines.
A further $4-5million is needed.
Under the Inter-governmental agreement the state Labor government received $11million dollars in untied money that was used to prop up the state budget’s bottom line. I call on the government to divert some of this money to the sawmiller exit program.
As the government found the money to compensate Gunns for their decision to exit native forestry, so should now have a moral obligation to support those saw-millers who were the real victims of that Gunn’s decision.
• Pete Godfrey, in Comments: Unfortunately Tony the issue is clouded a lot … None of this is the fault of the conservation movement; it can be firmly slated home to John Gay, Evan Rolley, Bob Gordon and Paul Lennon’s mismanagement of a magnificent resource. Our forests have been plundered. Now we will have to wait and actually restore the damage that has been done. We also need to look at whether Ta Ann’s timber supply needs to be reviewed. It is pointless supplying wood to a company that will never make a profit, that shifts any profits offshore and is deliberately run at a loss. Ta Ann have taken over where Gunns left off, Tasmania is much better off with a small adequately sized boutique timber industry. We cannot be world scale anything as we were with woodchips, we don’t have the resources here. It is time for politicians to stop meddling, the Liberals and Labor have no plans, no ideas and do not understand anything about forestry at all. They only understand getting votes to buy back their jobs every 4 years.
• Thursday, Tony Mulder: Progress on durability is insufficient at this stage for me to accept the first reserve orders
TFA 1st Tranche Debate
Statement of the Hon Tony Mulder, Legislative Council Member for Rumney:
“Progress on durability is insufficient at this stage for me to accept the first reserve orders.
• There are issues with the way government is underfunding industry assistance,
• It is not yet known whether protesting and market disruption will become a diminishing activity of an increasingly irrelevant fringe group or that we return to sustained and major protests of past years.
• The prospect for solutions for residue and Specialty Timbers is bleak.
Once again the government is making a mess of the compensation payments having woefully under-funded the sawmill exit program’s because they did not know the volumes of timber being supplied to these mills.
• Amazingly, they did not ask FT before deciding how much money was needed!!
• Furthermore, the Federal government is tying the compensation money to the passage of the first tranche when clearly there isn’t enough progress to warrant that action.
Against this I have to balance the desperate plight of those wanting to leave the industry. To achieve that balance the State government needs to increase the exit money, alternatively those proposing to form the next Federal government must commit to de-linking the $97million from the 1st reserve order.
For me to vote for these reserve orders, I want the government to find the extra money for these people, as they did when Gunns sought additional compensation.
It is unfair to use these victims as human shields and hold them hostage to an artificial timeline imposed by the government itself.
My advice is that an additional $4m could be part of the $100m guaranteed to the industry diversification program, $11m of which sits in state treasury for use as the state government thinks fit. If the government had a legal obligation to compensate Gunn’s, then surely they have a moral obligation to compensate the real victims.
