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

This morning our time, the President of the United States, Barak Obama, gave an impassioned speech to the nation about what is described as the greatest environmental tragedy to overcome the American nation, the shocking oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. He then went on to talk about the transformation of the economy that is needed if it is not to engage in more and more desperate efforts to tap fewer and fewer oil and gas reserves, leading to greater risk to the environment and indeed to the economy. Let me quote from President Obama’s speech:

As we recover from this recession, the transition to clean energy has the potential to grow our economy and create millions of good, middle-class jobs—but only if we accelerate that transition. Only if we seize the moment. And only if we rally together and act as one nation—workers and entrepreneurs; scientists and citizens; the public and private sectors.

This is a very fitting speech for a leader of the Australian nation to deliver in our country also. President Obama went on:

... there are costs associated with this transition. And some believe we can’t afford those costs right now. I say we can’t afford not to change how we produce and use energy—because the long-term costs to our economy, our national security, and our environment are far greater.

So I am happy to look at other ideas and approaches from either party–as long as they seriously tackle our addiction to fossil fuels. Some have suggested raising efficiency standards in our buildings like we did in our cars and trucks. Some believe we should set standards to ensure that more of our electricity comes from wind and solar power. Others wonder why the energy industry only spends a fraction of what the high-tech industry does on research and development—and want to rapidly boost our investments in such research and development.

All of these approaches have merit, and deserve a fair hearing in the months ahead. But the one approach I will not accept is inaction. The one answer I will not settle for is the idea that this challenge is too big and too difficult to meet. You see, the same thing was said about our ability to produce enough planes and tanks in World War II. The same thing was said about our ability to harness the science and technology to land a man safely on the surface of the moon. And yet, time and again, we have refused to settle for the paltry limits of conventional wisdom. Instead, what has defined us as a nation since our founding is our capacity to shape our destiny—our determination to fight for the America we want for our children. Even if we’re unsure exactly what that looks like. Even if we don’t yet know precisely how to get there. We know we’ll get there.

It’s a faith in the future that sustains us as a people.

Those same words ought to be, and are fit to be, heard in this parliament regarding the need for a transition in and reconfiguring of our own economy in an age that we desperately need to leave behind, the age of fossil fuels. Where the President was talking about oil we can substitute the word ‘coal’.

The need for action in transforming our economy to clean energy—no less than the American economy needs to transfer and no less than China’s is being transferred, as the President cited in his speech this morning—is urgent. It cannot afford to wait for a government that says, ‘Let’s put this on the shelf for another three years.’ The Greens would appeal to the government to reopen negotiations on the Garnaut style carbon tax, which is needed to give certainty to business on carbon price, to help reconfigure our economy and to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions in this nation. That is a live proposal before this parliament and this community in the run-up to the election.

But there is another factor which could very well and very rapidly bring down greenhouse gas emissions in this country, and that is transforming the wood based industry by immediately getting the logging industry—the biggest natural carbon banks in terrestrial Australia—out of native forests. The logging industry is confronted by the so-called wall of wood. There is a huge glut of wood, which has been predicted for years by experts looking at the configuration of the forest industry. There are massive plantations around the world—two million hectares—mostly of Australian eucalypts in China alone. That is equivalent to the whole of the plantation estate in Australia. There are other massive plantations in Spain, Argentina, Chile, Vietnam and in South Africa, just to name a few.

We have seen in all the states in which native forest logging is continuing—under the aegis of the Howard government and now the Rudd government and the state governments involved—that the price that is being returned to the people for the destruction of those forests has dropped. I cite, for example, the contentious $16 a tonne royalty paid to Forestry Tasmania at the time of the controversy over the Wesley Vale pulp mill proposed by North Broken Hill in Tasmania in the late 1980s. A campaign against that was headed by my colleague Christine Milne—now Senator Christine Milne. The price then being paid by that corporation was $16 a tonne for the native forests being converted into woodchips and potentially into pulp. That price has fallen. If you do not take into account inflation, the price is now $12 or less a tonne—and we have Forestry Tasmania, for one, running at a loss. It is highly subsidised. Since 1987 the logging industry in Tasmania has had more than $1 billion of taxpayers’ money fed into it by federal and state governments. That is $1 billion that it ought not to have received had the free market been left to take its course. But it is a drip-feed which continues.

A fortnight ago the Minister for Energy and Resources in Tasmania, Mr Green, handed another $3.6 million to this industry to help it pay loans. But the industry itself is in extremis. It does not have the markets that it needs for its products. Not only is the native forest industry highly subsidised by taxpayers, due to serial federal and state governments making such arrangements, but its main competitor, the plantation industry in Australia, with the two million hectares of alternative wood supply, is also being subsidised by taxpayers through managed investment schemes. So we have two competing schemes for a falling market, increasingly subsidised by taxpayers, due to the advocacy of politicians such as Senator Abetz in this place, and the previous Howard government, to the loss of all players. The time is now ripe for a historic transition from the native forest destruction by the logging industry to that plantation base which, if the wit, wisdom and government leadership are made available, can provide all the wood needs of this nation, including paper, building materials and furnishings.

A Galaxy poll which the Greens did a fortnight ago showed that 77 per cent of Australians want the Rudd government to stop the logging of native forests. Only 11 per cent disagreed. That is a seven to one majority in favour of ending the logging of forests, and it would be behind the Rudd government if it took this course of action. Seventy-two per cent want to see workers helped by government and, no doubt, companies to make the transfer from native forests across to the plantation bases. Ninety per cent of Australians want the high-conservation-value forests of Tasmania, Victoria and New South Wales protected in national parks. Nine out of 10 Australians want the high-conservation-value forests and their wildlife protected in national parks. This is a place where political leadership is way behind not only public sentiment but also market reality. The time has now come—and there is an inevitability about this—to end the logging of native forests. Of course there will always be a place for high-value-added pursuits such as craft woods to take produce from native forests on a sustainable basis. I would permit that in my own back paddock if I thought it would keep such industries going.

But we are talking here about the end of industrial logging, big-scale forest logging and destruction in Tasmania, Victoria, New South Wales and indeed Western Australia, where the Gallop government had the good wit and wisdom to end the destruction of the then described high-conservation-value forests back in 2006 with a package that bought out the industry which was creating the majority of the carnage in the forests and, at the same time, helped workers into other pursuits. That has been a massive success in Western Australia. It is a success upon which we can build the end of similar destruction in south-east Australia, including in Tasmania.

At the moment there is a debate about this. There was a meeting of environmentalists from around Australia in Melbourne last Thursday where it was agreed that the end of native forest logging had come, that the industry should be translocated to existing plantations and that assistance should be given to help the industry to end its previous practices, particularly the export driven woodchip industry which has sent native forests—wildlife habitat, including the irreplaceable habitat of rare and endangered species—to Japan and elsewhere as woodchips, and this is continuing as I speak. 

Part of the drive here has been the work of the Wilderness Society and others to have the Japanese recognise that that is unsustainable and that, in this age of modern information and communications, no company wants to live with the reputation of destroying what is left of biodiversity on this planet. I might interpolate here that a forthcoming report in this International Year of Biodiversity from the United Nations, according to the Guardian Weekly, points to the loss of biodiversity of plants and animals, including fish, that will cost the global economy, if measured in dollar terms, $3 trillion to $4 trillion per annum by the end of this century. In other words, the stupidity, the irresponsibility, of the destruction of the variety of nature upon which we human beings depend for many more things than food and pharmacology is going to deprive us and our economy of a massive component of that enrichment as we destroy the biodiversity. It is not cost free. Nor is climate change. As Sir Nicholas Stern pointed out, if we do not act on that—and currently we have a government which is not acting on it—the cost to the economy by mid or late century will be six to 20 per cent of gross national and gross global income by the end of this century. Here we have a collision of economic and environmental goals. The destruction of forests is absolutely costing the future economy of this nation billions of dollars in lost biodiversity and lost carbon because we are destroying the biggest on-land carbon banks in the Southern Hemisphere in this process, yet that is not put onto the cost side of the industry which for so long has been diminishing that very resource.

A transformation is going on within the industry itself, and no doubt when such transformations occur there is a lot of contention. I flag the real potential there is for a win-win in politics. It is a challenge to the coalition as well as to Labor to get behind the industry as it transforms itself from its native forest base to plantations in the future. This is a win for the environment, a win for climate change, a win for biodiversity, a win for the economy and a win for the long-term job security of those people who are involved.