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

This bill, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Amendment (Regional Forest Agreements) Bill 2020, is shameless. It is an unbridled, completely huge onslaught on our precious native forests. Not only is it shameless; sadly, as Senator Ciccone has just told us in his contribution, it is irrelevant. Sadly, the court cases that have been completed over the last couple of years have shown that our native forest logging laws—the regional forest agreements—are totally broken. They do not protect wildlife. We have species going to the brink. We have Leadbeater's possums, now critically endangered. We have greater gliders, which have just in the last few months been declared endangered because of the impact of native forest logging. Yet our logging laws are not protecting them.

This bill came about because of the number of legal cases being brought by the community, by scientists and wildlife ecologists, people concerned about our native forests and about illegal logging—logging of threatened species—that was occurring in Victoria. The initial findings in the Supreme Court were that, yes, this logging was threatening precious native wildlife. It was threatening species that are listed under our federal environment laws as matters of national significance. The original judgement found that logging in the 66 areas subject to the case was in breach of Victorian environment laws and that, in 17 of the areas investigated, up to 600 greater gliders may have been impacted and killed by the state's logging appeals. However, what we found in the appeal was that the finding that said our logging laws had been broken was dismissed, but not because the environmental impact was dismissed. No, in the appeal, all of the grounds of the initial finding—that the logging that was occurring was illegal—were upheld. Yes, the logging that was occurring was having a massive impact on our native forests and our wildlife. The reason why the appeal was upheld was that it basically said that our regional forest agreements allowed this to occur. They are broken, totally broken, and our forests are suffering.

Now we have legislation that seeks to consolidate this and seeks to say, 'That's exactly how we want it; we want ongoing native forest logging that's going to continue to destroy our wildlife and continue to send our forest-dependent wildlife to the brink of extinction.' Rather than acknowledging we've got a problem here and, if we're concerned about our native forest wildlife, we maybe need to actually protect them, the former government—the Liberal and National parties—are now debating legislation and continuing to debate legislation that actually says: 'We support this status quo. We want this industry to continue to decimate our native forest wildlife.' It is absolutely shameless.

I want to talk us through what the state of play actually currently is, because if you listened to Senator Duniam and you listened to Senator Ciccone just now, they would have had you believe that everything is fine, that we've got best-practice logging activities and that we don't need to worry one jot. However, anyone that knows anything about what's going on in our forests—anybody who sees what's going on in our forests—realises it is totally unacceptable. Every wildlife ecologist who is working in the area of forest ecology says that what is currently happening is totally unacceptable. And of course it's not just wildlife that native forest logging is impacting. It is water. It is carbon. It is our forests as places of beauty and inspiration. And it is our forests as sovereign lands of our First Nations peoples—sovereign lands that contain totem species of our First Nations peoples. All of this is under attack by native forest logging.

Let's just start with water. In Melbourne we are lucky to have some of the highest-quality drinking water in the world, and a key reason for that is our forests. It's through the trees, the roots, the branches, the soil, the surrounding of our mountain ash and forest ecosystems that Melbourne's largest water supply catchment filters water naturally. Any disturbance to these forests, any logging of these forests, has detrimental impacts on the quality and the quantity of our water supply. Without this forest, our water would require intensive man-made filtering, and it just would not be as good quality water.

When it comes to carbon, we know that the ability of our forests to be soaking up carbon, to be storing carbon, is absolutely unmatched anywhere in the world. The forests of Australia contain some of the most carbon-dense ecosystems in the world. Yet logging them is massively impacting on them. There was a recent report on Tasmania's forest carbon showing that the native forest logging industry was in fact the highest-emitting industry in Tasmania, with 4.65 million tonnes of carbon being emitted each year because of logging activities. The contrast is what would occur if we allowed those forests to just keep growing old and to be protected rather than being logged. That report found that 75 million tonnes of carbon would be absorbed by these forests—these so-called production forests—by 2050 if they were protected rather than logged, and it would allow $2.6 billion in benefit in climate mitigation.

And then let's talk about the value of our forests for our wildlife. We've got case after case where the impact of logging on our wildlife has been exposed in court and where the logging that's occurring is illegal. There was a report by the ABC last December that exposed the widespread illegal logging of hundreds of hectares of mountain ash forest by the Victorian government's own logging agency, VicForests. Documents that showed that the Office of the Conservation Regulator, which is the body tasked with enforcing our state logging laws and monitoring VicForests, was alerted to the agency's illegal activity, but it failed to properly investigate. Even after admission by VicForests in 2019 that they were illegally logging protected areas, the regulator found that allegations of widespread illegal logging could not be substantiated.

So much for Senator Duniam's case that we have the best-regulated forest logging regime in the world. We have widespread illegal logging going on in our forests that is being permitted by our state logging agencies. The case I was just talking about, of VicForests and its lawless logging of our mountain ash forests—which was shown to be impacting on threatened species: the critically endangered Leadbeater's possum—goes on unregulated by our federal agencies, and in doing so is endangering our water supply, endangering the habitat of countless other species and destroying the country of First Nations peoples.

After the case, the appeal was dismissed in the Federal Court last year. There was an article by an ecologist and professor of conservation biology, Brendan Wintle, which explains why we are debating this outrageous bill today. He said:

Australia's forest-dwelling wildlife is in greater peril after last week's court ruling that logging—even if it breaches state requirements—is exempt from the federal law that protects threatened species.

The Federal Court upheld an appeal by VicForests, Victoria's state timber corporation, after a previous ruling in May 2020 found it razed critical habitat without taking the precautionary measures required by law.

The ruling means logging is set to resume, despite the threats it poses to wildlife. At particular risk are the Leadbeater's possum and greater glider—mammals highly vulnerable to extinction that call the forests home.

So there are catastrophic consequences. Since the commencement of the regional forest agreements over 20 years ago, we have seen more than a quarter of the federally listed forest-dependent species move closer to extinction. In these decades we have seen 15 forest vertebrate species listed as threatened for the first time. This is the impact that native forest logging is having on our wildlife. Our laws are broken. Our environment laws are broken. We are in an environmental crisis. We cannot afford to push more species closer to extinction. Our laws need to be strengthened urgently, not weakened, which is what this bill would seek to do.

If this bill were passed, it would basically consolidate the position that would make forestry activities within regional forest agreements totally exempt from any scrutiny under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, regardless of whether they are being undertaken in compliance with the regulations that are set out in the regional forest agreement. It's apparent if you look at the history—if you look at the devastation that native forest logging has caused to Australia's forests over the decades and particularly during the last 20 years under the regional forest agreements—that VicForests and other logging agencies don't need any more exemptions. They are already able to recklessly destroy forests critical to the survival of wildlife, to water and to carbon.

Going to some of the other illegal logging activities that our state logging agencies are not managing is the whole claim that the industry like to make that, for every tree that they log, more regrow. You might recall the revelations that were covered by the ABC last year, showing that VicForests actually fails to regenerate sections of harvested forest, despite those claims. The Victorian government claim that, 85 to 95 per cent of the time, logged areas were successfully regenerated within three years, yet documents obtained under freedom of information reveal that at least 30 per cent of harvested areas weren't regenerated in this time frame, which means, with regard to this claim that we are regenerating our forests after logging—you cannot regenerate a 100-year-old forest anyway, since you cannot regenerate the habitat for those critical species, but even with regard to the claim that we regrow the trees that are logged—that 30 per cent of those logging operations failed to regenerate.

So we have got to a situation where we need to change. We need to strengthen our environment laws. We need to protect our forests. We need to get logging out of our native forests. We need to protect them for their water, their wildlife, their carbon and their places of beauty and inspiration. Yet what are we doing? We still have bills like this being proposed; we still have Senator Ciccone, a member of the new government, saying that he is absolutely in favour of ongoing native forest logging; and we have state legislation that is not only continuing not to protect our forests but, in fact, persecuting people who are trying to protect them.

The Victorian government is attempting to pass draft legislation that would mean people defending Victoria's forests could be imprisoned for up to a year or receive up to $21,000 in fines, for trying to protect our precious forests. This draft legislation would also introduce powers to search vehicles, to confiscate personal belongings and to ban people from being in public forests based on suspicion of an offence. This is where we're at. The majority of the Australian population want to protect our wildlife. They know that it's important. They know that it's critical to who we are as a people that our wildlife be protected. Yet people who are trying to protect our wildlife are now being threatened with up to a year in jail or $21,000 in fines, totally unnecessary and disproportionate provisions for non-violent protesters who want to protect forests. Similar antiprotest laws have been introduced in the Tasmanian and New South Wales parliaments.

The freedom to protest is absolutely fundamental to a functioning democracy. It allows people to voice their disquiet and bring change into effect. These laws would prevent and penalise legitimate protests by community groups and forest defenders who are seeking to hold these logging companies, like VicForests, accountable for potentially illegal activities. These antiprotest laws would also prevent traditional owners from protecting country and their totems, which rely on the forest to survive. Additionally, with these draconian measures they will restrict the work of wildlife carers and citizen scientists who are absolutely critical to understanding and caring for our native flora and fauna.

We need to be protected in the freedom to protest, and to allow that we need to make sure those draconian antiprotest laws are stopped. We urgently need stronger laws to be protecting our magnificent forests. We need to be strengthening our environment laws. We need to be getting rid of the regional forest agreements. We need to be getting native forest logging out of our forests, and yet here we have a private senator's bill which basically represents a final attempt by the native forest logging industry to lobby for additional exemptions from basic environmental protections. Enough is enough. Right now we are facing a climate crisis and we are facing an environment crisis. We have to protect our forests, and we need to act now to do that.