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

What a shambles the opposition is. This legislation has been on the slate for a very long time indeed. The opposition have just argued that that they cannot and should not be dealing with a welcome to country proposal that has effectively been there for three years. This legislation has not been there that long, but everybody knew it was coming for a long, long time. The opposition want us to wait while they circulate last-minute amendments, presumably generated by some logging industry factotums who, of course, always determine what the opposition’s policy on such matters is going to be. Well, let the debate continue. If the opposition cannot get themselves into order that is their problem, not the chamber’s problem.

The minister said she is in the middle: between the destruction of forests and the protection of forests. I do not actually know what that means. What we have in front of us is a proposal from Minister Wong to burn native forests in forest furnaces and beguile the community by selling that into the electricity grid as green power. Let us be direct about this. It means putting into furnaces, largely placed at current big industrial native forest logging sites, the habitat of many native species, including rare and endangered species, in potentially every state and territory of Australia, maybe the ACT excluded. She says that this is not going to affect Tasmania, and she is not aware of the situation down there, but that is largely because she has not engaged with the communities who are terribly alarmed about this proposal in Tasmania. Let me point to the biomass fact sheet, for which I am grateful to Senator Milne, from Forestry Tasmania itself. It wants a 25-megawatt biomass plant at Southwood, south of Hobart in the Judbury region near the Huon River and the Weld River. It has got a whole range of things on why this would be a marvellous environmental breakthrough, but when we get to the heart of the matter the minister was saying would not occur, here it is in black and white. Forestry Tasmania says that this plant, burning native forest, would generate about 160,000 renewable energy certificates per year. That is under the legislation Senator Wong has before the parliament.

Senator Wong is a prodigious supporter of the destruction of Australia’s native forests and woodlands, as is every member of the Labor Party here. Prime Minister Rudd in the run to the 2007 election said, ‘I am 100 per cent behind John Howard’s policy of logging forests in Tasmania.’ A day later he followed that up with support for the then proposed Gunns woodchip mill, since repudiated by every thinking person around the country who cares about the environment. Nevertheless, the government’s support for that woodchip mill as proposed continues, and that mill—Gunns’s proposal—is to produce 180 megawatts of electricity per annum, which is as much as the Franklin Dam would have produced had it been built. That is as originally conceived, although Gunns meritoriously is changing direction from the destruction of native forest now that the old leadership of John Gay and Robin Gray is not there. We look forward with interest to see where that it goes. Nevertheless, the concept for that pulp mill which Senator Wong and Prime Minister Rudd and the opposition support still—no change there—is to generate power through the burning of native forest largely in the north-east highlands of Tasmania. Yes, these are real proposals and this is actually subsidising that destruction.

I ask Senator Wong a couple of direct questions because it is germane to this argument. She says it is not but I say it is. Can she guarantee that under this proposal the putative World Heritage area forests of Tasmania as outlined by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature—and I refer there to the Great Western Tiers, to areas of the Tarkine, the Styx Valley, the Weld Valley, the Upper Florentine, which Prime Minister Howard promised to protect but is now being logged, and the Picton and Huon valleys—will not be fed into any of the proposed furnaces, including this one by Forestry Tasmania, under its biomass fact sheet awaiting this very legislation? Can the minister give us a clear statement that none of those putative World Heritage areas and high conservation value forests will be in any way a resource for this proposed 25-megawatt biomass plant at Southwood by Forestry Tasmania? If so, she has misled the Senate, and I do not want that to occur. This is a serious matter. We are talking about real on-the-ground proposals. We are talking about real national heritage forests in the wake of an opinion poll showing that 78 per cent or so of people in this country want these native forests protected. By the way, we are talking about a resource—native forests and woodlands across this country from Tasmania to Tiwi—which if it had been protected by the government would reduce greenhouse gas emissions in this country of ours by 20 per cent. The government CPRS is five per cent and that measure is 20 per cent.

I have got a second question. I do not want to delay the house but I ask the government and the minister, in relation to the proposed forest furnace at Eden that we have heard the opposition springing to the defence of: can the minister give a guarantee that that will not involve the removal of part or whole of old trees, primary habitat for rare and endangered swift parrots in Mumbulla or other components of the south-east forest, or of any real or potential koala habitat in those same south-east forests? Or is this legislation opening the way for those forests to be fed into a biomass plant that proposes to use 50 per cent native forests and then sell it to an unsuspecting public as green energy when in fact it is black and disgusting destruction of the natural realm in a world which is losing its biodiversity at the greatest rate in history in this International Year of Biodiversity under the United Nations?