Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to read a letter:

Dear Prime Minister and Australian parliament

We are the 160 children from a kindergarten called The University of Melbourne Early Learning Centre in Abbottsford, Victoria, and we are 'the voices in the forest'. We have been learning about the Toolangi Forest for more than 100 days. We know that Toolangi is a very special forest because it is the home of the Leadbeater's possum, sooty owl, orange-bellied parrot and many gliders and beautiful parrots. We know that some of the old Mountain Ash trees in the forest are more than 300 or even 500 years old. They know lots of secrets of the forest.

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We are worried that if you allow loggers to cut down many old trees, the shelters of the Leadbeaters Possums will get destroyed. They might get extinct as we grow up. And when we grow up and take our children to Toolangi they would feel like their hearts snapped in half.

We would like to ask you to help us and stop the logging of Toolangi. Maybe you could fence the forest with love and respect necklaces. We also ask you to use wise paper made out of specially grown forests.

Please look after Toolangi and respect all the forests and all the lands and all the trees in this world. Without them we wouldn't have any shade, or air, or rivers or love.

We, who are the 'Voices in the Forest', ask this with our whole hearts. Thank you for listening, The Voices in the Forest.

It was my privilege to have that letter read to me by the students who, as has been said, are at a kindergarten in Abbotsford in my electorate in Victoria. They know that we need a great forest national park to protect that area, to protect the Leadbeater's possum and so that we stop logging some of the world's oldest and tallest trees for paper.