Interview with Leon Compton, ABC Radio Hobart

LEON COMPTON, HOST: Murray Watt is the Minister who delivered the reforms. Minister, good morning to you.

MURRAY WATT, MINISTER FOR THE ENVIRONMENT AND WATER: G'day, Leon. Good to be with you.

LEON COMPTON: Has your government effectively traded native forest logging in Tasmania away in return for Greens' support for this deal?

MURRAY WATT: Absolutely not, Leon. I can categorically assure your listeners that we have not agreed to shut down native forestry in Tasmania or any other part of the country. Now, we all know that that is what the Greens have wanted to do, but we stared them down on that and rejected their demand to do that, just as we rejected -

LEON COMPTON: Minister, with respect, the Greens think that's what you've done as part of this deal.

MURRAY WATT: Of course they would say that. I mean, we've currently got both Coalition and Greens members running around Tasmania telling people that we're going to be shutting down native forestry, and that's because that's just a political scare campaign that works for both of them. But I challenge anyone in the Coalition or the Greens or anyone else to show me where in the legislation it says that we're shutting down native forestry, and they can't do that because it doesn't say that, just as it doesn't say that we're shutting down RFAs. In fact, we're actually keeping RFAs under these reforms. So I think it's really important that this debate is based on facts rather than fear campaigns, and that's why I was so keen to talk with you this morning.

LEON COMPTON: We appreciate you doing that. Why is it that so few in the native forest industry, so harvesters, saw millers, processors, struggle to believe what you're saying right now when it comes to the future of their industry?

MURRAY WATT: Well, I can understand that people are seeking information about what these changes are. And I think the main reason that people are concerned about the future of native forestry is because we've got Greens and Coalition members on a unity ticket trying to scare people with lies, and that's highly irresponsible for people to do that. I can tell you that Julie Collins as the Forestry Minister and all of the Tasmanian Labor members were very clear with me in the lead up to these negotiations that we could not possibly agree to the Greens demands to shut down native forestry or get rid of the RFAs, and that's why we've said no. What we're doing, Leon, is applying new national environmental standards that will apply to every other industry. So when people want to do mining in Tasmania, when they want to do housing developments in Tasmania, when they want to build wind farms or solar farms or anything else, if it's going to have a significant impact on one of the matters that we protect as a Federal Government, like threatened species or something like that, if any of those other industries now want to do a project and it's going to have that significant impact, they need to get Federal Government environmental approvals.

At the moment, under the law, what's been the case is that forestry hasn't had to do that. Agricultural land clearing hasn’t had to do that. So what we've done is basically level the playing field for those industries in the same way that every other industry has got to do. I might point out that -

LEON COMPTON: So what that effectively means, Minister, is that the feds will now take over reviews that have previously happened by the states. The perception in Tasmania is that standards that you set will be tougher, that environmental regulation will be higher, and as a consequence it will take longer and be less likely that native forest logging can take place in this state.

MURRAY WATT: I’ve certainly heard that concern, Leon. But I find that interesting, because you might remember I used to be the forestry minister, and so I've actually been to a number of timber mills in Tasmania. And I know the industry quite well, and I was always assured by the industry that their practises meet very high environmental standards. So I'm a little bit perplexed about why now all of a sudden the industry is concerned about being required to meet these national environmental standards that every other industry has to meet.

LEON COMPTON: The concern is delays. I mean, Terry Edwards, I don't know if you've been around long enough to have met a former head of the Forest Industries Association. We spoke to him yesterday. He said delays – delays are the issue for foresters who will be thinking about the industry and how it looks. The perception is when the feds are involved, things take longer.

MURRAY WATT: Yeah, well, I guess more broadly, one of the whole reasons for these reforms for all industries is to actually speed up the approval processes that we've got in place. I mean, just to divert for a moment, you'll be familiar with the Robbins Island wind farm in North West Tasmania which took many, many years to finally get an approval. And regardless of what you think about that project, we should be able to give these sorts of projects a quicker yes or a quicker no than what we've been able to do previously, and that's exactly what we've tried to do with these reforms.

Bringing it back to forestry, the other thing I think that is a little bit not understood at the moment is that we're not talking about the Federal Government approving every single coupe for forestry activities. What we're talking about is that the state government would be required to demonstrate that the forestry activities under RFAs generally, native and plantation, that those activities meet the national environmental standards. And then effectively there's federal oversight in the sense that the minister of the day, the federal minister of the day, then has to accredit the arrangements that the state government has put in place. There's no reason that that needs to take years. And if you know anything about me, you'll know that I'm not someone who wants to sit on their bum doing nothing. We want to get this system moving quickly.

LEON COMPTON: So what happens then, Murray Watt - and my guest this morning is the Minister for Environment, Senator Murray Watt - what happens then when a potentially threatened or declining species is identified in a logging coupe that is slated for harvest in Tasmania that is brought to the Federal Government, there is some sort of appeal or lodging of that prospective environmental decline? People in the industry are wondering what happens then.

MURRAY WATT: Yeah, there's been no expansion under these reforms to the rights of activist groups to take legal action. In actual fact, the only change we've made around the ability to take legal action is to restrict it in certain cases. So there's no expansion of new legal rights for people to challenge things. If anyone had an issue around the environmental practices of forestry in Tasmania, that would be something they would need to appeal against the state government's decision to approve that occurring in the first place.

The point of this is that what we're trying to do is rather than have a state system which approves and assesses the environmental impacts of forestry or other industries and then the federal government do it as well, what we're talking about doing is setting up a system where the state government does that assessment, not only to determine whether state requirements are met, but also whether federal requirements are met. And the only involvement of the federal government is to then look at that process that they've got in place to meet those standards and ensure that it's up to scratch. So any of those sort of legal actions would be undertaken through the state regime.

Can I just say one other thing, though, Leon?

LEON COMPTON: Briefly, please.

MURRAY WATT: I know there is a lot of concern in Tasmania at the moment about what this means for native forestry and generally about the industry. And you would be aware that the biggest issue facing native forestry is the challenge the Tasmanian Government has to meet its yield requirements to deliver on its contracts over the next couple of years. So if there's an issue facing the future of native forestry, it's with the Tasmanian state government and whether they can deliver the amount of wood that the millers need. And the Tasmanian Government, it's about time they come clean with what their plan is to manage that to ensure that those workers and communities have livelihoods into the future. It’s not federal change that’s an issue, it’s state change.

LEON COMPTON: Okay, so off the top of my head, Minister, the obligation is to deliver, and again, off the top of my head, 357,000 cubic metres of timber, of quality hardwood timber into the industry in Tasmania each year under the peace deal that was struck back in 2014. The challenge is the transition away to plantation estate to do that over time and whether that's practical with the millers that we talk to. We might move on just for a moment then and ask about this $300 million plan for the industry. Why did it sound like a buyout plan potentially to pay people to leave or to retool so that they could deal with plantation only estates

MURRAY WATT: Well, as you've just said, Leon, the industry is, as it is in the other parts of the country, is gradually moving more towards plantation-based operations. And that's nothing to do with any change we've made at the federal level. That's just the way the market is moving. And we have seen a number of sawmills in Tasmania already upgrade their equipment and retool to be able to handle plantation timber, which requires different equipment to native forestry. But there are some mills who still haven't made those sorts of changes. And this fund that we're making available will enable those mills that need to buy that new equipment to be able to process plantation timber to be able to do that. And that's a way of keeping jobs in those communities.

LEON COMPTON: How much of that money will come to Tasmania, Minister?

MURRAY WATT: We haven't ironed that out yet, Leon. I mean, the announcement was only made yesterday, but I think you could be confident a very substantial portion of that $300 million will go to Tasmania. Because remember, this fund is about supporting the fact that we are having these new standards in place. That really only applies to Tasmania and New South Wales, so I would think that they would have the lion's share of this funding, and particularly Tasmania. But also, even for those mills that have made that change towards plantations, there are more things that we can be doing to help those companies have higher technology equipment. We want to move the industry up the value chain.

And that's the way that, you know, far from shutting down an industry, we want this industry to grow. It might be a little bit different because it might be a bit more based on plantation timber or making different higher value products than wood chips or other things that it produces at the moment. But we want this industry to grow because we know how important it is to regional Tasmanian communities.

LEON COMPTON: A couple more questions before we leave you this morning. Environment Minister Murray Watt off the back of a significant deal that’s set to get a stamp in the lower house today and a bill to become law. Will the salmon industry, Minister, get caught up in these changes? Will the salmon industry increasingly need federal approval and oversight in Tasmania to expand, to operate? That is something that many would like to see and others would be concerned about in this place. Will the salmon industry be caught up in these changes?

MURRAY WATT: Well, for starters, there's obviously been a lot of controversy about salmon farming in Macquarie Harbour. There's nothing in these laws that will impact on the decisions that have been made about Macquarie Harbour. But more generally, whether we're talking about salmon or any other industry, if a particular industry or a particular proposal is going to have a significant impact on one of the nine nationally protected environmental matters, then already that proposal needs to be assessed federally and that won't change as a result of the changes we've made. What will change is that the processes that we've got in place will be faster and people will get faster yeses and faster noes. So there's been no change - today before the laws are passed, a proposal, salmon farming or anything else that's going to impact on those national matters needs to be assessed federally. Tomorrow when the law is passed, that'll still stay the same. But what we want to do over time is improve these processes so that we can get quicker decisions while, of course, maintaining high environmental standards.

LEON COMPTON: Senator Murray Watt, I know you've got to step into Parliament today. I appreciate you joining us. Thank you.

MURRAY WATT: No worries, Leon.