REGULATIONS AND DETERMINATIONS

Ms PENFOLD (Lyne) (15:43): We just heard a speech from the Minister for Climate Change and Energy that did not mention jobs and did not mention real people once. Well, Minister, my electorate has the Herons Creek mill. The Green Mill is now shut.

Jobs are lost. Jobs started to be lost on Father's Day, when the New South Wales government announced the moratorium. Can you imagine the impact?

It's fine for you here in Canberra to say 'economic development'. There's no economic development in Herons Creek. I'll tell you what there is; there's job losses.

There are job losses, and not just for the mill at Herons Creek. The impact is on mills up and down the coast. Another one of my timber mills has seen the availability of logs smashed, and the demand for their timber is being cut by a third.

That's a small business operating in a small community. These are the impacts that are already being felt in the community. I've also got the Australasian Sports Floors manufacturer.

They build floors in sports stadiums around the world. They need native hardwood timber. My town Wauchope, where I come from, is called 'timber town'.

I live across from a state forest. Herons Creek and Wauchope—we're all interconnected. All our communities are interconnected around this issue.

When you shut down one mill, you kill communities up and down the coast. There's Gibson's in Kendall, who supply the machinery to the mills. I've been to see them, and the impact on them is acute.

These are real people and real small businesses that are affected by a decision and by a methodology that just does not stack up. The fact of the matter is that the New South Wales government announced the Great Koala National Park before it put forward the methodology. So there's no additionality.

The Greens are even saying—and conservation groups are saying the same thing—this does not stack up. It does not have credibility. Just because the minister stands up at the dispatch box and says, 'Oh yes, it's got credibility,' I can tell you, out there in the real world, out there in my electorate—I'd love the minister to come.

I'd love him to come and eyeball the real people out in the electorate and say what he said in here to them, because these decisions we make here in Canberra affect the people in my electorate and the electorate of Cowper and the electorate of Page. Real people are losing their jobs. For what?

For a methodology that simply doesn't stack up. As I said, the decision for the park was an election commitment. The political decision came first.

Then the state government said, 'How are we going to pay for it? How are we going to pay for this Great Koala National Park?' And they came up with the INFM method. I wish I could give credit to the government for seeing through this, but, sadly, the Albanese government has bought into the lie that this is somehow some genuine way of saving forests and saving koalas.

None of it is! It will not change a thing. I agree with what the member for Wannon said—that it will have an impact for feral animals.

And here we've got two governments, the federal and the New South Wales state governments, which have doubled down by taking the guns away from the very people who help control our feral pigs and our dogs. So this is truly a crazy decision. All I want to say—because I want to give my colleague here, the member for Monash, an opportunity to speak as well—is this decision helps kill the jobs of people in my electorate.

Shame on you, Minister.