Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

This motion is a litany of untruths that ignores all the evidence that native forest logging is unsustainable, is uneconomic and has not got the support of the community. It contains the wild claim that there are 4,700 workers who will be affected, whereas the evidence shows that there are less than 1,000 jobs in native forest logging in Victoria, and hundreds of these are actually government jobs. This is compared to the thousands and thousands of people who have jobs in the plantation industry, reflecting the fact that almost 90 per cent of wood that comes from Australia comes from plantations. This motion misrepresents the IPCC report from 2007 and ignores their groundbreaking land report this year that says logging of high-carbon ecosystems, such as primary forests, would have large initial carbon losses and long payback times, and thus protection of stocks would be more optimal. But most importantly this motion ignores the reality that our forests are special and the community want to see them protected.