Brian Mitchell (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Mackellar for moving this motion and providing me the opportunity to speak in support of Tasmania's native forestry sector. Few things elicit more passion in Tasmania than forestry. You are either for it or against it, or so some would have you believe. If you're for forestry, you're a redneck who hates the environment. If you're against forestry, you are a greenie who hates workers. It's a false and damaging binary, and it's time to call it out. This divisive narrative has driven Tasmanian politics for decades. It has served the Right of politics and it has served the Left of politics, but it has served neither the community nor common sense.

The truth is that native forestry and conservation are not enemies but allies. Good forestry is good for the environment. Forestry produces timber, a natural, recyclable, biodegradable and renewable product. Take a look around this Chamber and imagine it without timber. Our lives and our landscapes are enhanced by the presence of timber, and I want to see more of it, not less. Technology exists for multistorey buildings made of timber. Imagine that—the buildings of our cities transformed into carbon sinks with all the beauty that timber provides. The best use of any harvested tree is for sawmill, but every bit of a felled tree can be used, whether for pulp, paper, biofuel, veneer, or even for its cellulose, which can be processed as a bioplastic. Every centimetre can be utilised, and every centimetre can be regrown.

I have with me a sample of native forest from Tasmania. It's a prototype for a structural support beam made from offcuts of timber floorboards with a hollow aluminium core. It was developed by a young man called Nelson who, with his father, runs a small sawmill called Tasmanian Native Timbers in Elizabeth Town in my electorate. Nelson loves forests and he loves timber. Scratch a Tasmanian timber worker and you will generally discover someone who loves the natural environment.

The member for Mackellar says forestry destroyed or degraded 40,000 hectares of Australian public native forests in 2020, but it wasn't destroyed or degraded; it was harvested and reseeded and replanted. In years to come it will be ready again for harvest. It's worth noting that in a normal year 60,000 hectares is harvested, not 40,000. That's 60,000 hectares out of a native forest estate in Australia of 132 million hectares. So for one hectare harvested in any one year, there are 2,200 that are not. That's equivalent to an area the size of Tasmania being harvested from an estate the size of 20 mainland Australias with every single inch covered by trees. It's less than six trees in every 10,000. It's a percentage of 0.06 per cent. Yet we are supposed to believe it's so environmentally devastating.

To provide further context, the member for Mackellar mentioned the Black Summer bushfires of 2019-20, in which 7.5 million hectares of eucalypt forest was lost. That alone is equivalent to 125 years of Australian native forestry harvest gone, in cinders, over one devastating summer. Yet we fight with so much bitterness over what is a fraction of sustainable harvest. It's important to draw a distinction between deforestation and sustainable forestry, because I believe they are often conflated. Deforestation scours forests and does not replace lost canopy. This does not occur in Australia. By law, every harvested tree is replaced. Native forestry practice in Australia is nothing like the illegal operations that exist overseas, particularly across the tropics, and any attempt to draw parallels must be condemned.

As the World Wildlife Fund states, forests are vital to life on earth. I share the WWF's horror that in 2020 the tropics lost more than 12 million hectares of canopy. Nearly 30 soccer fields went under the bulldozer every single minute, and none of it was replaced. The WWF knows that part of the solution to the devastating deforestation occurring across the Amazon, Borneo, Sumatra and the Congo is to support sustainable forestry practices elsewhere in the world, including in Australia.

I'm proud to stand with my forestry workers and the forestry sector in Tasmania. It's world's best practice. We can be a beacon for the world. We can show the way and stop the pressure in Borneo and other places. I ask the member for Mackellar and the member for Kooyong to stand with us on that.

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