Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Recently I joined a koala habitat tree-planting day with the Koala Clancy Foundation. It was industrial-scale tree planting. As far as the eye could see, trees were going in the ground. There were about 50 volunteers on the day I was there, and over a period of a couple of weeks the Koala Clancy Foundation was planting out I think 50 or 100 hectares with thousands and thousands of trees.

It's a fantastic contribution to try to create habitat for koalas. However, the day I was there, as I was planting these trees in the ground, my mind kept going off to the fact that less than 100 kilometres away, in the Wombat State Forest—soon to be Wombat National Park—the Andrews government is logging koala habitat. They're calling it 'salvage logging', but I've seen the photos; it looks like clear-felling to me. The Victorian National Parks Association and the local environment groups knew this logging was going ahead, and it is going ahead. They did some surveys of the areas of the forest that were planned to be logged. They found in overnight surveys in these areas of forest that were being logged—areas that are about to be a national park—40 greater gliders, one powerful owl, four koalas, one boobook, one feathertail glider and seven ringtail possums. It is outrageous. I think of all the wonderful work that groups around the country like the Koala Clancy Foundation are doing, and meanwhile our precious native forest, home to koalas and such a diverse range of other species, is continuing to be destroyed by logging and by clearing.

It's not hard to understand what needs to happen to save the koala and our other precious wildlife. If there were kids in the gallery they would understand it. Koalas, greater gliders, Leadbeater's possums and other forest-dwelling animals need trees and they need forests. That's where they live. And if you destroy those forests they don't have homes to live in. Logging, just like clearing, destroys their habitats. Some species that don't need hollows in old trees might come back within 10 or 20 years, but other species like the greater glider, the Leadbeater's possum and the owl actually need the hollows in the old trees to live and to breed. That means that after a logging operation that bit of forest is not going to be of any use to them to live and to breed in for over a hundred years.

If we are going to save the koala, if we're going to save the greater glider and if we're going to save other species we need to be protecting their homes and we need to be protecting their forests. In Victoria, koalas have got it relatively easy because they don't need the hollows, and the cooler climate means there's more suitable forest. But in New South Wales and Queensland, where koalas are under threat from logging and land clearing for coalmines and urban development, it's predicted that if this continues koalas are going to be extinct within 50 years.

When we look at the impact of bushfires, as Senator Duniam was talking about, the Black Summer fires destroyed the habitat of so many of our species and so much forest. Yes, it was devastating. So what should your response be to that? You do not log and you do not clear the areas of forests that weren't burnt; they are even more precious for the animals that have survived the fires. You also make sure that you take action to reduce the risk of fire. What that means is reducing the amount of logging and stopping logging, because the science is very clear now that logging and clear-felling our forests makes them more prone to fire. It means fires will occur much more frequently and they'll be more intense when they occur. So it's pretty clear what we need to be doing. We need to be protecting habitat and we need to be stopping logging; we need to be stopping native forest logging.

In response to the lack of protection at state and federal government levels, citizens are taking it into their own hands. We've seen so many court actions in Victoria against VicForests. In fact, the latest court action was decided just yesterday, where the wonderful citizens of the Warburton Environment Group had taken action against VicForests because they were logging an endangered plant species—the tree geebung. They won, and in fact the Supreme Court judge, Justice Garde, stated in the judgement that no attempt was made by VicForests to show that it was not reasonably practicable to protect the significant number of tree geebungs which had been destroyed in harvested areas through the use of bulldozers and mechanical equipment, and that given the evidence as to the past harvesting and burning practices of VicForests it is highly likely that significant numbers of mature tree geebungs have been lost in the Central Highlands in the past through harvesting and regeneration burning. The precise extent of the loss will never be known, but on the basis of recent records it's likely to amount to many hundreds or even thousands of mature trees. This is the reality of logging in our native forests today. It should not be up to citizens to spend millions of dollars going to court to protect our heritage.

In response, we've got state governments that are in fact changing the laws to make it easier to log and changing the laws to stop people protesting, and to stop even citizen science like this. These are draconian laws that stop people from protesting and even doing citizen science. In Victoria we've got a state election in a month's time where the future of our forests is going to be a key issue. And it is only the Greens who are wanting to protect our forests, and it is only the Greens who want to end native forest destruction immediately, because that is what needs to happen if we are going to protect koalas, greater gliders, Leadbeater's possums, wollerts and all the other threatened species that call our forests home.

But of course it shouldn't be up to the states on their own to protect our forests and to have laws to protect our forests, because the Commonwealth has a responsibility. These are issues of national significance. This was found in the Samuel review into the EPBC Act, where Graeme Samuel found that our existing laws were not protecting our forests and that the regional forests agreements were not protecting threatened species. He also found that matters of national environmental significance in forests should be assessed in the same way as they would be if they were being impacted by other destructive activities.

This bill that we have before us today, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Amendment (Save the Koala) Bill 2021, is, in fact, a very modest bill. It's very reasonable. It's very moderate. It's actually not calling for an end to all native forest logging, which is what the Greens really do want to see. We do, and we're upfront that that's what we want to see. It is a modest, interim solution to protect some of the most significant and most loved species—the loved animals—of Australia. All this bill does is what the Australian public would think was already happening. All this bill does is prevent the minister from approving an action under the EPBC Act where that action involves the clearing of koala habitat. Surely that's what people would have thought already occurred—that our national environmental laws actually would protect koalas, which people love so much.

The bill also removes the exemption of regional forest agreements from the requirements of the EPBC Act where there is, may be or is likely to be a significant impact on koalas. Surely this is what the Australian community expects. People do not expect, people do not want, logging to be destroying the habitat of our precious wildlife. We don't need to be logging our forests. Plantations are already providing 90 per cent of the wood that's coming out of Australia, and in fact we are exporting 70 per cent of that plantation timber. There is so much potential to be doing more through our plantations, through farm forestry and through urban sawmilling. We don't need to be logging our forests for wood production.

We need to be ending logging immediately, for wildlife, for koalas, for all other species and for climate, because the best way—