Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

I rise to take note of the Joint Australian and Tasmanian government response to the review of the implementation of the Tasmanian Regional Forest Agreement for the period 2007-2012. What a sham the regional forestry agreements are in this country. For many, many years—in fact, decades—in this country, we have had RFAs that have propped up environmentally and economically unsustainable industries, such as the native forest logging industry, particularly in my home state of Tasmania—and, of course, it is the Tasmanian RFA that we are discussing tonight.

I want to be very clear about something: RFAs are designed to enshrine resource security for the logging industry. They are designed to avoid responsibilities to look after threatened species. They are designed to avoid responsibilities to allow forests to continue to embed carbon in the fight against climate change. They are designed with no other intent than to enshrine an environmentally and economically unviable native forest logging industry in this country. They are sham documents. They are camouflage for an unviable native forest industry, which in fact in Tasmania is a mendicant, make-work scheme that every year sucks tens of millions of dollars out of schools, hospitals and other essential public services in my state. They are camouflage for an environmentally destructive industry.

The view in this RFA response document from the Liberal governments here in Canberra and down in Hobart is basically, 'Everything is fine; nothing to see here.' It is like a Flat Earth Society document put out after Vasco da Gama circumnavigated the planet. That is how ridiculous it is and that is how little resemblance to reality it bears. We have now seen a rolling series of Tasmanian regional forest agreements that have failed our threatened species. They have failed all of the ecosystems services that our beautiful, magnificent, globally-significant forests provide in Tasmania; they have failed the massive amounts of carbon that are released every year after our unique forests are clear-felled and torched and most of the carbon in them and their soils released into the atmosphere; they have failed the Astacopsis gouldi—the giant freshwater crayfish that is endemic to Tasmania and, in fact, endemic to just a small number of river systems on the north coast and the north part of Tasmania; and they have failed the Swift parrot, that beautiful little bird that continues its slide towards extinction thanks in large part to the native forest logging industry in my home state of Tasmania.

I have fought native forest logging since I was arrested at Farmhouse Creek in the mid 1980s. I have fought it through my parliamentary career. I will continue to fight until we end the industrial strip mining of our forests that are protected and delivered through regional forest agreements; until we see our beautiful globally significant forests—much of which are quite rightly reserved on behalf of all of humanity inside our Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area—and the forests that need to be protected actually protected in formal reserves and inside the World Heritage Area; until we end this mendicant, make-work industry that is the native forest logging industry in Tasmania; and until we protect the carbon that is embedded in those forests so that, in Tasmania, we can move on to the 21st-century industries and away from an over-reliance on the dig-it-up, chop-it-down mentality of the last century.