Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

This week the grandest trees now targeted by the loggers in Tasmania’s Upper Florentine Valley have been dynamited by the logging industry, and with them the habitat of a great range of wildlife in this World Heritage value forest. It is a forest that, instead of being celebrated by this nation, made a national park by the Labor government in Tasmania and nominated for its World Heritage value by the Howard coalition government, is being destroyed in what is nothing other than an environmental obscenity against Australians and their future.

Look at the Stern report and do the figures. Sir Nicholas Stern, in warning about climate change, said that the fastest thing we can do is to turn around the logging of forests in the world. That would have a better effect than stopping all the transport systems of the world in helping to save the world from the onrush of catastrophe from climate change. According to his figures, by stopping the destruction of the forests by Labor and the Liberals, Tasmania would get somewhere between $6,000 and $24,000 per hectare for keeping the forest standing in an age of carbon trading. As it is, we are getting much less than half the lower of that figure from destroying the trees and sending the woodchips, through Gunns, to the rubbish dumps of the Northern Hemisphere. So it is not only an environmental obscenity; it is an economic absurdity.

But there is not one Labor or coalition member of this parliament who speaks out against it—not one. That includes the Labor shadow minister for the environment and it includes my old friend Peter Garrett. I would have expected that Peter would be at the forefront in this parliament in bringing to book in the House of Representatives government policies that are so catastrophic for this nation’s future. After all, the Midnight Oil anthem says: ‘Oh, the power and the passion. Sometimes you’ve got to take the hardest line.’ That is, you have to stand up and be counted, even among your peers, when such a travesty of political judgement is being carried out against the interests of the nation. I raise this matter because of Peter’s intervention in the Victorian elections last week. I was there when he came, and went, to lobby for the Labor Party in the marginal seat of Melbourne. What Peter did—