House debates

Monday, 20 March 2023

Private Members' Business

Forestry Industry

7:10 pm

Photo of Sophie ScampsSophie Scamps (Mackellar, Independent) Share this | | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) notes that:

(a) forestry destroyed or degraded 40,000 hectares of Australian public native forests in 2020, and each year releases an estimated 30 MtCO2-e of greenhouse gas emissions, equivalent to around 6 per cent of Australia's emissions;

(b) logging destroys and damages the habitat of numerous threatened species, while Regional Forestry Agreements exempt logging from classification as Matters of National Environmental Significance under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999; and

(c) logging dries out forests (increasing their vulnerability to bushfires), reduces water quality in rivers and dams by causing sediment erosion, and threatens regional tourism businesses by degrading the natural resource base;

(2) recognises the need:

(a) to rapidly end the logging of Australian public native forests; and

(b) for structural adjustment funding to support the transition to plantations and manufactured wood products; and

(3) calls on the Government to take its international responsibilities to respond to the nature and climate crises seriously, and lead the nation in ending industrial native forest logging.

I rise to present a defence of the Australian bush. The Australian bush, with all its incredible creatures, is for so many of us the embodiment of Australia. The sites, the sounds, the smells, the animals and the insects it houses are uniquely Australian, to be found nowhere else on this planet. The Australian bush is as iconic as our coastlines and our beachers. It is a source of national pride, of comfort and of immense beauty, and, of course, it is home to so many threatened and endangered species of animals and plants, but we are destroying it. The State of the environment 2022 report made for utterly devastating reading for even the most hardened of political heads. It was an indictment of the efforts of previous governments to enact even basic measures to protect our environment and ecosystems from broad and deep destruction. The worsening breakdown of our climate means that our native bushlands will continue to come under ever-increasing threats.

We all lived through horror of the Black Summer bushfires of 2019 and 2020, which burned for nine months straight. Over 243,000 square kilometres were burnt and destroyed and an estimated three billion terrestrial vertebrates were lost. The scale of the destruction was something that even the most experienced of firefighters, such as Greg Mullins, former head of Fire and Rescue New South Wales, had not imagined was ever possible. We have another El Nino looming, and megafires will continue to become more frequent and more terrible.

Add to this immense threat from bushfires the constant bulldozing of large swathes of our national forests year in, year out, deployed without constraint from our national environmental laws. In 2020 logging destroyed or degraded 40,000 hectares of Australian public native forests, 40,000 hectares of what were thriving ecosystems. Logging also contributes to climate change. Each year, logging releases greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to around six per cent of Australia's annual emissions. Trees are our most effective carbon capture and storage units. Logging also destroys critical habitat for threatened species. We are facing an extinction crisis here and the continued logging of our native forests is one of the major threats facing species like koalas, greater gliders and the Leadbeater's possum. Logging dries out forests, leading to increased risk of bushfires, and younger trees are also far more flammable than decades-old trees. Logging also reduces water quality in rivers and dams and undermines regional tourism. Perhaps one could understand the persistence of the native forest logging industry if it made good financial sense, but it doesn't. The forestry industry must be propped up with federal subsidies to survive.

In the face of all these risks and with plantation forestry and alternative wood products available, the ongoing logging of our native forests makes no sense. The Albanese government must not stand by and allow this to continue. There is a simple solution. Currently, state based regional forestry agreements are exempt from the national environmental law—what is known as the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, the EPBC Act. This means that the usual environmental laws that apply to other large projects do not apply to these forestry agreements. The effect of the exemption is that logging companies, some of which are state owned, do not have to seek approval or comply with the environmental protections set out in the EPBC Act. This exemption must end.

While I welcome the Albanese government's commitment to reforming the EPBC Act, we cannot wait until 2024 to act on native forest logging. Importantly, I am not calling for an end to the logging industry as a whole. I am calling only for an end to the logging of our native forests. My motion also calls on the government to fund the transition to a plantation based forestry industry, recognising the importance of forestry jobs in regional Australia and the need for sustainable wood products into the future. Ending native forest logging would align with the Glasgow Leaders' Declaration on Forests and Land Use, the Paris Agreement and Global Biodiversity Framework.

Photo of Rebekha SharkieRebekha Sharkie (Mayo, Centre Alliance) Share this | | Hansard source

Is the motion seconded?

Photo of Monique RyanMonique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | | Hansard source

I second the motion and reserve my right to speak.

7:15 pm

Photo of Brian MitchellBrian 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.

7:20 pm

Photo of Monique RyanMonique Ryan (Kooyong, Independent) Share this | | Hansard source

I thank the member for Mackellar and rise to speak in support of her motion on native forest logging. As we strive to meet our targets of reducing emissions by 43 per cent by 2030 and achieving zero extinctions, it's imperative that we put an end to the logging of native forests in Australia.

Native forest logging is harmful to our health. We're now in the burning season in Victoria. Clear-fell logging burns are a necessary component of the commercial extraction of pulp logs and saw logs. They clear the land of a huge vegetation biomass left behind after logging: the branches, bark and downed understorey vegetation. They do not reduce bushfire risk to life and property, but they do render our forests more vulnerable to high-severity crown-consuming bushfires, with their associated risks to communities.

There are days, and Melburnians know them well, when the harmful smoke emissions from clear-fell burns affect air quality over all of our state, posing serious health risks, especially to those with respiratory illnesses. We have to recognise this smoke for what it is: a form of industrial pollution with long-term impacts on health which benefits only private commercial interests. We are choking on the logging industry's slash and burn approach. Native forest logging is also harmful to rural communities. It impacts on their water supplies, their bushfire risk and their tourism opportunities.

Native forest logging is harmful to our economy. It's no longer profitable and it's rapidly losing jobs, yet it continues to receive government subsidies and protection. In 2020, the Parliamentary Budget Office estimated that immediately ending native forestry in Victoria could save as much as $190 million over a decade. That was before VicForests posted a loss of $54 million in 2022. In New South Wales, taxpayers paid $441 per hectare to subsidise logging of critical native forests in 2021.

Logging of native forests also undermines the potential of the much more sustainable and economically viable plantation sector. Ninety-three per cent of our plantation timber is shipped overseas. Rather than shipping plantation timber from western Victoria 6,000 kilometres to the Asia-Pacific region, we should be transporting it 250 kilometres up the road to the mills of central Victoria. We should be processing Australian timbers in Australia. We need to support the plantation sector and ensure that it thrives while rapidly phasing out the unsustainable native forest industry.

Native forest logging is harmful to our unique and precious wildlife species. Our koalas face a dire future because of the habitat loss caused by deforestation. Logging is creating food deserts as our forests are shifted towards junk-food tree species which koalas and greater gliders just can't eat. In Victoria our state's faunal emblem, the Leadbeater's possum, will be rendered extinct if logging continues. We have to take decisive action to protect biodiversity and ensure the survival of these species.

Finally, native forest logging is harmful to our climate. It's one of the leading causes of carbon emissions in Australia, as it reduces our carbon stores and releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This deforestation not only contributes to climate change; it also undermines our ability to meet our emissions targets. The regional forest agreements were originally intended to balance conservation and logging interests, but they are outdated and ineffective.

The forthcoming amendments to the EPBC Act present a real opportunity to make meaningful change. Firstly, we need the RFAs to be subsidiary to the EPBC Act rather than trumping it. The nature repair market bill that was recently proposed by this government seeks to hold participants accountable to the highest standards in order to ensure that environmental goals are achieved. The government has to lead by example. If it is genuine about repairing the environment, how can we, in any conscience, continue to log native forests? If we're serious about protecting our natural environment, we have to change the EPBC Act to stop native forest logging and prioritise sustainable land management practices. (Time expired)

Federation Chamber adjourned at 19:26