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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

Can I thank the Senate and my colleagues in the Senate for their concurrence and their granting of leave. This document is a death warrant for some of the most spectacular, unique, carbon-rich, biodiverse forests in the world. We have seen Regional Forest Agreements which have delivered environmental disaster after environmental disaster in this country. But they haven't just been ecological disasters; they've been social disasters and economic disasters as well.

The changes to the Tasmanian RFA that have been tabled today are so extensive that, in fact, they amount to a rewrite of the entire RFA—not a variation of the RFA, as they have been described by the government. Let's make no mistake about what this document does. It effectively gives native forest logging in Tasmania a perpetual exemption from federal environment laws—a perpetual exemption to cause environmental harm—and prevents people from seeking remedy against that environmental harm through federal environmental laws such as the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. This document sanctions logging in thousands of hectares of regional and conservation reserves in Tasmania that are supposedly part of the CAR reserve system—the so-called comprehensive, adequate and representative reserve system in Tasmania.

But let's be clear about what this government does. It doesn't just give a leave pass in regards to Commonwealth environmental laws. It doesn't just lock in massive emissions of carbon. What it actually does is sign a death warrant for many threatened species in Tasmania. This will push critically endangered, threatened species closer to or over the brink of extinction—beautiful, iconic creatures like the Tasmanian devil, the swift parrot, the wedge-tailed eagle, the masked owl and the giant freshwater crayfish. Those creatures and many more are now firmly in the firing line of the loggers and of the Liberal governments in Tasmania and Canberra.

The failure of RFAs is there to see for anyone who cares to look. Mr Turnbull and Mr Hodgman are locking in those failures in Tasmania. They're failing our threatened species. They're failing our tourism sector, Tasmania's largest economic sector. They're failing all of the magnificent ecosystems contained within Tasmania's globally unique forests. They're failing our climate, because of course logging these forests will emit massive amounts of carbon, which will contribute to dangerous climate change. And they are destroying the capacity of these forests—the trees, the shrubs and the soils—to embed and sequester carbon.

Tasmania's recent history shows full well what happens when governments try to destroy forests and try to destroy the environment in my home state. What happens is that the Tasmanian people fight back. And the Tasmanian people will fight back against this regional forest agreement; mark my words. Liberal governments in Canberra and Hobart have decided to restart the forest wars. Well, we will accommodate them in Tasmania, because we are passionate about defending our globally significant, magnificent forests—rich in carbon, home to so many beautiful and threatened species. These governments—the Liberal governments in Canberra and Hobart—will be fought at every step by the Greens, by the conservation movement and by the millions of Australians who want to see these forests protected.