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

Last week, on Threatened Species Day, the environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, announced that the government had on that day released a new recovery plan to boost the long-term survival of the critically endangered swift parrot. With only 750 of these endangered birds left, this should have been a moment to celebrate. It should have been an exciting step in the fight against extinction. However, it turns out that the swift parrot recovery plan announced last week was not actually finalised and had not been shared with the scientists who helped to develop it. Indeed, the last official draft they had seen was one from 2019. Once they saw the plan that was released on Thursday, the scientists said that it contained no meaningful action to address the key threat to survival of the species: the logging of native forests. One of the scientists, Dr Dejan Stojanovic, said it was a 'lost opportunity' to develop a plan to end decades of damage from forestry that was pushing the swift parrot to extinction and that there was 'mountains of evidence that logging in Tasmania is the key threat' to the survival of swift parrots.

Ending native forest logging is essential to the survival of swift parrots. The recovery plan was an opportunity for the government to take real action on extinction. Instead the government has decided to put the interests of the native forest logging industry over the survival of a critically endangered bird. Enough is enough. If Labor isn't going to act, we must. That's why today I will be reintroducing our Ending Native Forest Logging Bill, which would put an end to the destruction of Australia's native forests by repealing the regional forest agreements and closing the loopholes used by the logging industry to bypass our national environment laws. Labor, if you want to honour your zero-extinction pledge, I urge you to support this bill.