CONSTITUENCY STATEMENTS
Mr CONAGHAN (Cowper) (16:48): Last month on the mid-north coast of New South Wales, the Labor government made a horrible decision to shut down our local timber industry. The realities of the decision-handling would be comical if they weren't so devastating for so many and so futile in terms of what they will truly achieve. What we've seen is metro-centric government making a decision on the lives and livelihoods of regional communities without consultation—again—without consideration and without a real plan.
If you were not directly involved or impacted by the decision and then read Premier Minns's decision, you'd be forgiven for thinking they've got it all sorted. But what these media concoctions miss is the reality of land locking on our timber industry, on the forest industry itself and on economic prosperity of our communities and the knock-on effects for our building industry—the very industry that we need in order to address our housing supply problems.
Where will we get our timber from now? It's not going to be from Gippsland or Victoria. In the best case, it'll be imported from other states or territories, but more likely from Indonesia or South America—from countries that don't have the same gold-class environmental standards that we do.
It will no doubt add to the cost of building a home. How does this government intend to manage the 176,000 hectares of old growth to protect them from bushfires? Locking up land leaves unattended tracks and trails unmanaged and is the equivalent of throwing the very creatures—the koalas—you profess to save into a tinderbox and praying they don't meet the match.
That's before we even consider the safety of our RFS volunteers. They've imposed a moratorium—why? Is there an expectation that at the end of this period we'll say, 'The koalas are back; we can let the timber workers back in'?
What you're doing is putting the timber workers on JobSeeker payment indefinitely. There's no certainty for them. This has a serious impact on the mental health of these good, hardworking and, sometimes, generational timber workers, and it has been done to please inner-city metropolitan voters who see the fuzzy koalas on the TV during the bushfires or when the NRMA puts an ad on TV.
Our people should come first, and I condemn the decision.