Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I have heard a lot of drivel in a decade in the Senate, and often it is just drivel to fill in time, and that is precisely what is going on here tonight. Anyone listening to this debate needs to understand that what the government has now set up is a filibuster. We had Senator Seselja a little while ago vote against an inquiry into this bill to spell out the provisions of the bill and now he seeks to have the minister explain something that has already been explained. I will tell you why: out in the back rooms, the crossbenchers are trying to stitch up an even worse deal with the government. The government now has its tail up because it has got the Labor Party to cave in to 33,000 gigawatt hours and to cave in on forest logging, because the Labor Party did not make it a condition of accepting this to get rid of the native forest logging component. Now we have the anti-wind, anti-science, anti-the future, pro-logging on the crossbenches out there negotiating with the government to see what other disasters they can incorporate into the RET. That is exactly what is going on now.

I call it 'drivel' for this reason: nobody who has actually stood up and spoken on this can have been out into a coupe in Tasmania's native forest. If they had, they would know that 90 per cent of what comes off that coupe has gone to the woodchippers in the past. Talk about logs for high value purpose! Not on your life! The only reason they go ahead with the logging is the money they got from the woodchippers. That is what made it economically viable for Gunns to make a fortune over all those years and then ultimately go broke when the bottom dropped out of the native forest market. There is no market for the logging of native forests and say this is an attempt to create a market—to make logging native forests viable. Why is that? When the loggers themselves recognised there was no future in native forest logging, they approached the conservation movement to try to work out how they could get out of native forests. They did then get out of native forests with a deal where the Commonwealth spent hundreds of millions of dollars, paying them to get out of native forests

Exit packagers for the loggers were paid to get them out of native forests.

Then in came Prime Minister Abbott. He said he would overturn that previous agreement on the forest in Tasmania. He said he would get the loggers back to work. Only he did not know enough about it to know that they were never going to get back to work because there is no market for native forest woodchips—and so now the government are trying to create one. They stand here and say, 'This will be logged in accordance with regional forest agreements.' Exactly. That is what has gone on for the last 10 years.

RFAs are exempt from the EPBC Act. There are no provisions to protect habitats and threatened species. We are seeing logging on Bruny Island, as I stand here today, killing the habitat of the swift parrot, a threatened species. I wrote to the minister and asked, 'What are you doing about that?' I got a letter back from the Threatened Species Commissioner who has just been set up saying, 'Nothing. We are not doing anything about it and we will not be doing anything about it. It is not our jurisdiction.'

Right across Australia, regional forest agreements have overseen disastrous native forest operations removing habitats for our threatened and critically endangered species. Forestry Tasmania are such a basket case. Even today in the legislative council Sue Smith down there was saying it should be sold off and disbanded. That is absolutely where it has got to because they are in debt up to their necks. They have had to transfer $30 million from the electricity network in Tasmania to prop them up. They even had to get a letter of comfort from the Tasmanian government or they would have been trading insolvent.

Now we have a government running around trying to put some value into native forest logging by giving out credit certificates for renewable energy. But it is not renewable energy. It can never be renewable to log native forest and put them into a forest furnace to burn for electricity. That is never going to work. What is more, it is going to lead to a massive consumer campaign against any retailer that tries to sell this electricity, as it did a decade ago when we last campaigned against this—and we will again. They were then known as burnt koala certificates. They will now be not only burnt koala but burnt swift parrot and burnt everything else certificates because that is exactly what is going on here.

I hate to think what is being stitched up out in the back room as we stand here and speak. No doubt it will be an attempt to undermine wind technology. This deal of 33,000 gigawatt hours was designed to try to save wind. These people hate wind, so they will be out there trying to stitch up some deal that restricts wind. The Clean Energy Council has facilitated it. Labor have gone down, down and down to 33,000 when Bill Shorten, the Leader of the Opposition, stood with me in Barton at a public meeting saying, 'Labor is not for turning.' The government is wearing everyone down, except the Greens. I can say that standing proudly. And Senator Lazarus stood with us on the second reading vote. We are the only ones in this place who stood up and said, 'We like 41,000 gigawatt hours.' There was no rationale whatsoever for wheedling this down to where they have got it to except that the government did not like the fact that there is too much electricity in the system. They needed to take out 9,000 megawatt hours. They could have done that by shutting down coal fired power stations, but they did not want to because their objective was to prop up coal fired power and destroy renewable energy. If they can get destroyed forests into it, that is exactly what they will do.

We heard the minister over there telling us about how marvellous these logging operations are and how sustainable they are. There was an open letter to the Senate today from 40 scientists across Australia. What they obviously do not understand is that this is an anti-science government. This is an anti-science crossbench. They do not want to have the science put in their faces because they are not interested in science. That is exactly the case. These 40 scientists have written today saying the acceptance of a perverse definition of wood waste in renewables is being questioned by them. They are alarmed that once the door opens on burning Australia's native forests in tower furnaces it could see our forest heritage drawn into supplying an export demand to satisfy the expanding number of biomass burners overseas. Peter Gell, professor of environmental science at Federation University, said, 'The wood fuel market has potential to impact even more destructively on our forests, ecosystems, wildlife and water catchments than has the export woodchip industry. If it can be burnt, it will not be safe. The ironbark forests and woodlands, the forest types that the chippers rejected, would all be targets for the resource mix if the RET bill passes parliament as it stands.' That is from Australia's leading scientists writing to this Senate. Yet we have a situation where people are sitting here thinking that this would be a good idea.

It is hard to believe that in this country we have got to the point where we are rejecting the latest science, where we still have a situation where the logging industry is exempted from the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act and where we have this perverse idea that we will give a financial incentive to give viability to native forest logging when it clearly has no viability. Native forests would not be harvested anyway, as Senator Birmingham tried to suggest, because Forestry Tasmania are in debt up to their necks. They are putting back into it a financial incentive to destroy native forests. It is absolutely despicable. As the scientists said, it is a falsehood to claim this type of electricity production as renewable. 'You cannot renew or replace the burnt carbon stored in a 100- to 600-year-old forest in the turnaround time needed to address climate change,' said Professor Gell. If all Australian native forest logged production in 2009 had instead been burned for electricity it would have substituted as little as 2.8 per cent of our coal based power generation. We risk unleashing an industry with a potential appetite to decimate our native forests and all the services they provide to gain very limited emission benefits. This is very poor environmental policy and poorer energy policy. That is the fact of the matter. When I go back to what they have said about the export demand to satisfy the expanding number of biomass burners overseas, I know that this is a horror show.

There are also the free trade agreements the government have stitched up. Let's talk about South Korea. We have also signed up to one with China today. In those free trade agreements—you wait—there will be agreements to send shiploads of whole logs and pellets to South Korea to burn in forest furnaces. It will not be long before we are doing the same with Japan. This is where the world is going. Tragically, there are countries like Australia prepared to raze the last of their forests and sell them to other countries to burn—not to use even in the production of paper, as they suggested previously. The poor quality woodchips that went from here did not even make it into the paper mix; they went straight into the furnaces to run the place to generate the electricity. This is what they did in the Stone Age! That is where you want to take us back to—and it is completely wrong.

The renewable energy target should be increased. The rest of the world recognises, as we go into Paris at the end of the year, that we need to get out of fossil fuel energy production as fast as possible. The energy race of this century has already been won by the renewables. The jobs, the technology, the brains base—everything—depends on moving fast into the low-carbon economy, not frustrating it and locking us in to more dig it up, cut it down, ship it away, and now burn it as well. This is utterly appalling policy!

It is really sickening, Minister, to hear you regurgitate all of the lines that the loggers have used for years about sustainability and regional forest agreements and ecologically-sound logging. Go out onto the coupes! Go out and see the mess that they have left! Look at the stats on the number of species now on the threatened and critically endangered lists! Do not stand here and tell the Senate that native forest logging in Australia has been anything other than extremely destructive at the industrial scale that it has operated on. Go and have a look out at those forests where the Bentley blockade was, for example. Here you have more threatened species being able to be cleared for expanded coalmines. How obscene is that! Offsets that enabled those primary forests to be cleared for coalmines. This is a disgrace!

We are so much of a pariah at a global level. Step out of this country for five minutes and hear the conversation that is being had around the world. This is such an opportunity cost to this nation. Every other country is getting ahead of us in terms of technology, in terms of jobs. Our brains base is going to leave this country. Young people are going to take their skills overseas because they want to be part of the solution; they do not want to stay here and be locked into the problem. I would ask every senator to read this open letter from 40 leading scientists. Think about biodiversity. Think about the climate. Think about the value of forests—and do not support this absolutely backward step.

You just have to look at the Prime Minister's words. He said that the reason the RET is 33,000 gigawatt hours is not that he wants to give certainty to the renewable energy industry. No! It is 33,000 gigawatt hours because he could not get it any lower. That is as low as he could go in this Senate. But he will go lower if he can. In terms of whether it means more wind turbines, what did the Prime Minister say? He can't stand them. There are too many of them. He does not want to see any more of them. But he spoke to the loggers at their dinner and said he thinks they are marvellous; they do a great job. That is exactly where this is going! This is not about certainty. This is about the far Right in Australian politics getting what they can out of the Labor Party, getting what they can out of the crossbench and dragging it lower and lower and lower. They will put it in their back pockets and they will go lower still. They do not compromise. They have no intention of providing certainty.

It has been the biggest con job with the Clean Energy Council thinking this gives anyone certainty. It does not. The only certainty it gives is that the Liberals will pocket what they can get now and will go after the rest later. None of this is safe under this government, because it does not believe in renewable energy. You, the government, do not believe in renewable energy. You do not believe in reining in fossil fuels. You do believe in expanding coalmines, opening up the Galilee Basin, more coal seam gas and logging as many native forests as you can put the trucks and the bulldozers through. That is exactly what is going on. It is a disgrace in Australia at this time in our history. When people look back, they will see you as Neanderthals—and they are right to do so.

Senator Singh interjecting—