Josh Wilson (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for the Environment) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There are few things better than being out in my community planting trees. It's good for the soul, good for native wildlife and good for the planet. In the Freo electorate there are numerous groups that take on the challenge of planting trees in places like the Beeliar Wetlands, Samson Park or Clontarf Hill. At a time when we have a failed national environment protection framework that's not preventing cumulative loss of habitat, we need to be increasing tree cover in addition to protecting our remnant forests better. That's particularly the case in the face of climate change impacts, including the catastrophic bushfires that scorched the east coast in 2019-20. It's momentous and welcome that the McGowan Labor government has announced that in 2024 there will be no logging of native forests in Western Australia. What's more, it's providing a $350 million package to support 33,000 hectares of new softwood plantations that will produce 50 million trees by 2031. That's a sensible and balanced approach to maintaining a supply of renewable timber and the jobs that are sustained by that industry. But we can't forget that Australia has already suffered deforestation on a large and seriously harmful scale.

The WA Wheatbelt is without question one of the great grain-producing regions on the planet, and it's about to achieve a record harvest this summer. But it's also one of the most starkly changed landscapes. Indeed, there's only seven per cent of the original vegetation left within the 150,000 square kilometre wheatbelt.

Australia wide, tree planting and landscape restoration is desperately needed. It's vital as a matter of protecting our biodiversity, it's vital as a matter of responding to climate change and, in the case of a sensibly managed plantation forest industry, it's important as a source of sustainable and renewable timber. On that front, it's worth reflecting on what the Morrison government has said in relation to growing trees in Australia. In 2018, it announced it would deliver one billion new trees over the course of the next decade. That was supposed to include 100 million trees in Western Australia. But, like so many announcements by this woeful government, absolutely nothing has happened since.

At a Committee on Regional Australia hearing in Collie the other week, I asked the president of the Forest Industries Federation of WA how many of those trees had been planted and I was told, 'The trend is actually going backwards.' It is with bitter irony, therefore—or perhaps with shamelessness—that the government has announced today new measures that apparently could unlock up to 100 million trees over the next decade, and it includes the hopeful note that this will contribute significantly towards the government's one billion trees plan. Well, that would be something, wouldn't it, considering the plan has so far delivered zero trees from 2018 to 2021—four years and no trees. But today we got another announcement, and what's the bet it will be like all the other promises from this government?