Abel SteveSTEVE ABEL (Green): Thank you Madam Speaker. I appreciate having the opportunity to speak to this bill. I'm sad to have to disagree with my colleague Mark Cameron despite him being the chair of the best select committee in the House—and my colleague Mark Patterson as well.Self-regulation looks like the original problem for which the registration of advisers was brought into place. The Minister said that the sector stepped up and the sector stepped up because of the requirement of registration. It stepped up because it was made to step up by the laws that required them to fulfil the obligations of registration to keep a track of the advice they were giving to small-forest operators. So the registration system actually protects the small operators.It is not uncommon in this country for us to register professional advisers. We do it for very good reason: the reason your mortgage broker has to be registered and has to be bound by a series of obligations. The reason your real estate agent your dentist your psychiatrist your electrician need to be registered is to protect people who are ignorant of their practice who do not know who is a good operator or a bad operator. In an instance of advice to foresters who are small scale in regional areas that is exactly why it's advantageous that the forestry advisers are registered so that if they are giving poor advice—and this poor advice could come at some cost to a small operator if they're advised to log their trees too soon to prune them in an incorrect way to plant them too densely or too far apart—these sorts of advice decisions could add up to thousands of dollars' worth of lost value to a forest operator. The ability for that operator to have a recourse to a register that requires the adviser to have told that person—kept a record of what advice they've given—is a protection for the small operator.I have some experience of the arboricultural industry in my efforts to protect urban trees which is that when general tree protection was removed arborists told me that the effect of that was to de-professionalise the industry so you've got a lot more cowboy operators. Anyone with a truck and a chainsaw could clamber up your tree for a handful of dollars and cut it down in a dangerous way or prune it in an ugly way. So the actual requirement of a professional register improves the general quality of work in the industry. It causes the industry to step up.What is the burden that it causes for a professional who's serious about the practice that they offer who has a profitable business the $500 for registration? What is the burden for them? The burden is nominal but the advantage to those small operators and those foresters can be quite significant.De-professionalisation of this industry is not a good thing. The reason that we will oppose this bill—and we might be Noddy-no-mates as Mr Cameron called us—is because on principle we think that this is a way that we get a better-quality industry. As our friends on the East Coast are once again grappling with the nightmare that is another massive weather event for them they are no doubt wishing that the sort of requirements that might have seen better management of slash in the forestry sector over recent decades—had they been in place sooner had they not been weakened further this evening in this Parliament then perhaps there would have been much less damage by the floods and the extreme weather events that we've seen. So the Green Party will be opposing the repeal of this piece of legislation. Thank you.