Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move amendment (3) on sheet 5143:

(3)    Schedule 1, page 33 (after line 29), after item 122, insert:

122A Division 4

Repeal the Division.

This amendment removes all references to the regional forest agreement in the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 and, in effect, brings forests back into Australia’s environment as if they mattered. The forests of Australia which are being logged have been removed from national environmental legislation. It is the greatest environmental travesty by parliamentary process, by government edict, that I know of anywhere in Australia. This amendment would mean that forestry operations around Australia would come under the same federal legislation, as do all other components of our national biosphere.

Question put.

Question negatived.

The Greens oppose item 189 in schedule 1 in the following terms:

(4)    Schedule 1, item 189, page 51 (lines 16 to 34), TO BE OPPOSED.

I note on the last amendment that there was silence except for the opposition of the government so I am hoping that means the opposition may have supported it. I will move onto this amendment. The Greens are opposing item 189. When you go to the explanatory memorandum at page 30 clause 82 it says that this is:

... to clarify that in making a controlled action decision—

the minister is making that decision, of course—

in relation to proposed developments, such as, a factory which will use timber from as RFA region, the Minister must not consider any adverse impacts of any RFA forestry operation ...

That is, in effect, a pulp mill exemption provision. This is a specific provision in the act to exempt Gunns’s pulp mill from proper environmental assessment. It is the Howard government’s Gunns’s pulp mill absolution clause. What it means is that the minister will effectively be prevented from looking at the impact of the proposed mega pulp mill on the Tamar River that Gunns has now effectively got state government approval for, insofar as the impact that pulp mill will have on Tasmania’s native forests and forests generally, high conservation value and old-growth forests, for decades to come.

This is an extraordinary provision. It would in future extend to other forms of wood processing, including forest furnaces—and there are proposals for three of those by the Labor government in Tasmania. These will enable forests, including high conservation value forests, to be fed into furnaces to be turned into electricity and fed through Basslink to the mainland to be sold as premium power.

So what we have there is the potential for conversion of high conservation value forests into so-called green power under federal legislation. It is a total travesty of the English language as well as of environmental probity and honesty. I ask the minister: is it a fact that this amendment will protect Gunns’s pulp mill from an assessment by him of the enormous impact—any impact at all—that there will be on Tasmania’s forests over the coming decade as they are fed into that pulp mill?