Regional Tasmania clearly remembers the dismantling of the timber industry and the massive job losses under the disastrous Labor-Green forest deal.
Now Federal Labor leader Bill Shorten is determined to join forces with the Greens to take Tasmania back to their job-destroying deal as part of Labor’s draft National Policy Platform.
This latest example of Labor’s move to the left under Bill Shorten would sacrifice the public interest for Labor’s self-interest in grabbing votes from the Greens. It would be a repeat of the disaster that unfolded last time – and that is something that should be top of mind for the electors of Prosser on Saturday.
The Hodgman Liberal Government knows that working forests create jobs, and we have been working hard during our last term of government to rebuild the industry after the disastrous Labor-Greens lock-ups.
In the five years to 2013, Labor and the Greens oversaw the loss of two out of every three jobs in the forestry industry, which saw more than 4,000 hard-working Tasmanians thrown out of work.
It was a disaster.
To give just a couple of examples, the number of forestry jobs in the Southern Midlands fell from 207 in 2008 to just 4 in November 2013. That’s a loss of more than 98 per cent of forestry jobs in the region – and had a devastating impact on families and communities.
In Glamorgan Spring Bay more than 96 per cent of forestry jobs were destroyed over the same period, and in Sorell and Tasman the attrition rate was more than 88 per cent.