Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to draw the attention of the Australian Senate and the Australian people to criminal activity occurring in southern Tasmania. It is occurring as we speak. That criminal activity is being perpetrated by the Australian government, the Tasmanian government and Forestry Tasmania. I say it is criminal activity because it is criminal in several ways. We are suffering global warming. We are looking at a global emergency, not only because of global warming but also because of biodiversity loss. Australia is a signatory to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and a signatory to the World Heritage convention. The one thing Australia could do immediately to keep faith with both of those conventions would be to protect the carbon stores and the biodiversity in Australia’s native forests and stop the logging. But, instead of that, it is being encouraged. This is criminal activity, sanctioned by the Prime Minister, by the Premier of Tasmania, David Bartlett, and by Forestry Tasmania, and it must stop.

I read into the Hansard Australia’s responsibility under article 4 of the World Heritage convention:

Each State Party to this Convention recognizes that the duty of ensuring the identification, protection, conservation, presentation and transmission to future generations of the cultural and natural heritage referred to in Articles 1 and 2 and situated on its territory, belongs primarily to that State. It will do all it can to this end, to the utmost of its own resources …

Far from doing the utmost, the Australian government is subsidising the logging of these World Heritage value forests. I am talking about the forests in the Upper Florentine in Tasmania which are being flattened as we speak. They have World Heritage values, identified by an expert in the field, Peter Hitchcock, who, in assessing those forests in the Upper Florentine, said in his report last year:

The 1988 nomination—

of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area—

specifically cited tall eucalypt forests as an integral part of the case for World Heritage listing, but overall the global significance was probably seriously understated.

He went on to talk about the values of the forests:

They are:

• the superlative expression of the uniquely Australian genus Eucalyptus;
• the ‘front line forwards’ of the eucalypt world that have shadowed, harried, and occasionally overrun the ancient Gondwanan rainforests receding in the face of progressive warming and drying of the continent …

               …            …            …

• the superlative example of a fire-dependent tall forest in a climatic zone capable of supporting rainforest.

The case for greater recognition of the global heritage significance of the tall eucalypt forests of Australia and Tasmania is stronger now than it was in 1988. Consequently, there is now also a stronger case for their effective conservation.

But instead of that they are being smashed. At the same time that this criminal behaviour is going on, we know that deforestation is one of the major drivers of global warming and we know we are seeing species going to extinction. We are seeing governments perpetrating this destruction of native forests—and the people who are defending the World Heritage forests, the people who are defending biodiversity, the people who have the courage to do what is right for future generations, are the people being arrested. In the last week, 33 people have been arrested in the southern forests of Tasmania while standing up for the World Heritage value, the carbon stores, the biodiversity and the fantastic wildlife of those forests.

I want to pay tribute to the young people in Still Wild Still Threatened, who since 2006 have been in those forests trying to stop the roading and the destruction of those forests. They have been set upon and assaulted on numerous occasions and yet they have shown incredible courage. I think that, as history looks back on this period of destruction, history will reflect the criminal negligence of the people in power who had the capacity to stop the logging and will recognise as heroes and heroines those young people who are in there. I want to pay tribute to their courage as I stand here today.

I also want to take to task the Premier of Tasmania, David Bartlett, who came to power saying that he wanted to have a caring, kind and connected Tasmania. Well, he is not caring. He is not caring about biodiversity. In fact, today’s news shows that he is going to disband the whole Department of Environment, Parks, Heritage and the Arts—abolish the whole thing altogether.