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

Because you have made such good ruling, Mr Acting Deputy President, I will take notice of what you say and get back to where I was before the unfortunate senator broke standing orders. I was talking about the detriment that occurs when old-growth forests are destroyed as they are being destroyed in southern New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania, for example, at the moment. The same applies to native woodlands right across the country, I might add. Just this week we got the news that, under the authority of the Howard government and its regional forest agreement, which the Prime Minister personally signed, and the Lennon Labor government in Tasmania, giant trees in the World Heritage value Upper Florentine forests are being dynamited.

This is not Afghanistan under the Taliban, but it echoes the destruction of Bamiyan during that period. The difference between the great Buddha statues of Afghanistan, which are now lost to human heritage for all time, and the giant trees of the Upper Florentine forests, is that the latter are living entities full of wildlife. Under the authority of the Prime Minister, these great trees—amongst the greatest living things ever on the face of the planet—are being dynamited.

What happens in the wake of that is that Gunns Ltd will come in and take the majority of the forest that is taken out. In fact, it is very likely that a vast amount of the forest will remain there on the forest floor, including the dynamited trees. They will take other trees out as woodchips, which go to Japan, get recycled as paper and end up on the rubbish dumps of the northern hemisphere and emitted as greenhouse gases. Those that remain are, except for some clumps, destined to be burnt. When they are burnt, hundreds, thousands, millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases are emitted into the atmosphere, over a period.

So we go from a vast forest which is absorbing greenhouse gases and transmitting them into the ecosystem—and half or more of the greenhouse gases are actually underground in micro-organisms and the root systems—to a devastated environment in which there has been a massive greenhouse gas assault on the already polluted environment. That is under the authority of our Prime Minister, John Winston Howard, and the Labor premiers of Tasmania, Victoria and New South Wales. Very recently we have seen the reiteration of the determination of Premier Bracks in Victoria to keep logging the water catchments of that state. In a statement he said he would not protect future old-growth forests but that they would go to logging. This is reprehensible.

We have just heard Senator Crossin and others before her speak about the fear now that the massive Ross ice sheet in Antarctica is dangerously capable of being let loose and melting into the oceans, creating a sea level rise of between five and 17 metres. Is the government really thinking about what that means for this nation, let alone the whole world? Senator Parry, opposite, thinks that that is amusing. I do not. I think it is an appalling prospect and it must be taken seriously. I would have thought a new and younger member of the Senate would be working very hard to wake up the old warhorses of the government about that matter.

I will be supporting the motion to end old-growth logging. I will be supporting the much more comprehensive and strategically effective legislation that Senator Milne introduced to this place earlier in the day. Of course the Greens will be continuing to argue for the much better alternatives like renewable energy, which has effectively been defunded and put 10 years back by the failed policies of the Howard government in the last 10 years.