David Gillespie (Lyne, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Obviously I didn't join the Greens. I came to my senses! It was a brief microsecond. I had a cup of tea, a Bex and good lie down and I got over it. But I also was informed about the facts.

Historically, the deal with these trees was that one hectare in 50 was selectively harvested every year. The native seed burden in the soil led to regeneration. We have a series of regional forest agreements around the country so that there are areas set aside for forestry that are the best areas for forestry, not for houses and not for farming. The north-east of New South Wales has a $2 billion native forest industry that is entirely sustainable. It is $2 billion worth of economic activity. The trees that are harvested are replaced many times over by new trees that sprout. I have lived it. The same areas that I cycled through on my mountain bike when I first moved to Wauchope, known as timber town—back in the heyday, there were 22 timber mills in Hastings Valley. There are now a couple. It is sustainable now. About three years after the conversation with the Wauchope forestry office, it was exactly like they said: I was cycling through there and there were small trees; now there are large trees 25 years later. It all grows back. When these activists who have lived in concrete and tarmac cities and feel guilty see forestry, they see deforestation.

In some countries there is deforestation in forestry, there are underhanded deals, they aren't sustainably managed and they don't get certification, but—hey presto—some of it is in our building products in Australia. We now have to import $5.5 billion worth of timber from overseas, yet we are shutting down our timber industry. Guess what? The paper my notes are printed on is probably a remnant store from before Australia's last paper mill closed. We make cardboard in this country, but all of our paper is now imported—I kid you not. Dan Andrews closed the last paper mill in Victoria because they didn't have security of supply.

The other thing is that everyone says there is a disaster looming: that koalas are going to go extinct. I don't know if I can table a document—this is something that everyone can look up—but on Monday Dr Brad Law published an article on the broadscale acoustic monitoring of koala populations. Dr Law is a principal research scientist at the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries. He was supported by other scientists, Leroy Gonsalves, Traecey Brassil and Isobel Kerr; the Forestry Corporation; and the Port Macquarie Koala Hospital. They were all involved in this study going over seven or more years. They started in 2015, and it was just published. This monitoring indicates that there are no endangered koalas.

The biggest threat to koala populations was not logging, because logging in Australia is harvesting, like corn. You harvest corn and you harvest wheat. Being harvested doesn't mean that corn and wheat go extinct. Another crop grows. It's just that, with forestry, the crops only get harvested between 30 and 50 years in a native forest. They all grow back. The areas that I've cycled through have been cleared at least five times. Some of my constituents are 95-year-old timber cutters who know the forests. They say there's no shortage of koalas and that the places the koalas go to most are areas that have been managed and partially cleared. That's because—hey presto!—koalas aren't like chimpanzees; they can't swing from tree to tree. They have to go down, across the forest floor and then climb up another tree. In a locked-up national park that hasn't had a fire through it—which is another natural process that we keep suppressing—there can be tonnes of debris on the forest floor and koalas can't get through it, so they go into lightly forested areas. This study has confirmed that. The people who have worked in the timber industry for years have always said that, as have my local Indigenous people. They believe in firestick farming and regular burning, which they did for 60,000 years—because they didn't have Toyota HiLuxes and Land Cruisers to get out of the way of a fire. That was their habitat; that's where their food was. They managed the forests by regular burning, not by burning once in every 30 years so it turns into a megafire, like we let happen because we haven't done what the Indigenous people have done for generations.

This study, which is totally scientific—GPS tracking and monitoring of numbers using acoustic techniques and visually, it appears—suggests the megafires that we had in our area in 2019 were a risk but, two years later, koalas are back in there and the forests are returning. People were in tears. People died in our fires. The member for Cowper had equally big fires in his area. It was months before the ones on the south coast, but we had more areas burnt. Fortunately, we had fewer deaths. That's because there was more support available, as it was the only area burning. When it really kicked off in Eden-Monaro it was everywhere all at the same time, and forces were stretched. But, hey presto, the koalas are back.

In South Australia there's an island called Kangaroo Island, and everyone was really sad to see all those poor koalas burnt in the bushfires down there. But, hey presto, if you just google 'koala plague in Kangaroo Island' you'll find they were culling koalas, because their numbers were out of control, a year or 18 months before that.

It's reassuring that we have well-managed forestry. Logging is not a risk. The greatest risk from this study is—wait for it—infrastructure, which means housing and roads. It's not forested areas that are managed well, like they are in New South Wales and used to be in Victoria. Locking up more and more native forests and not having anything done to them is a recipe for 'woodification' of the forests. You lose all the floral diversity. A lot of the small flora need a bushfire, a low-intensity burn, regularly so all the seeds get a chance and you get a much richer forest. That's how Australian forests have evolved.

The only illegal logging I can see going on is the wanton destruction where people think they're going to save the world by building wind farms and solar farms. Solar farms work, on average, only 24 per cent of the time, and, depending on which wind area you're in, wind farms work none of the time or up to, at best, 45 per cent of the time. They give us unstable electricity grids, expensive electricity and environmental destruction on a scale not seen before— (Time expired)

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