Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Budgets are about choices, and the choices that governments make reflect what is in budgets and also what is not in budgets. I want to talk today about some of the things that are in the budget that was presented last night and some of the things that aren't.

Firstly, there is an epidemic of men's violence against women in this country. Many thousands of people recently joined marches and rallies across Australia calling for an end to gendered violence and for the declaration of a national emergency in the face of an unacceptably escalating death toll of women. This is a long overdue conversation, and it's something that we need to talk about.

Australia has a massive problem with men being violent to women. We've got a problem with sexist jokes. We've got a problem with the 'boys will be boys' rhetoric. We've got a problem with toxic masculinity. We've got a problem with media coverage which is far too often harmful and biased. We've got a problem with coercive control. We've got a problem with emotional violence. We've got a problem with financial abuse. We've got a problem with sexual harassment and gendered violence. We've got a problem with sexual assault and rape. We've got a problem with women being murdered by men. We've got a problem with boys and men not understanding or respecting consent. I say to all the blokes out there in Australia, if someone is not enthusiastically expressing affirmative consent to you or if someone is not capable of expressing such consent, don't try to have sex with them! This is not difficult. It's just common basic decency, but far too many blokes don't seem to get it. They need this explained to them: don't try to have sex with someone unless they are enthusiastically expressing affirmative consent and are capable of expressing such consent.

Violence against women is overwhelmingly perpetrated by men. Yet, historically, men have been happy to leave the heavy lifting in this space to women, as we collectively leave the heavy lifting in so many other areas to women. It has been left to women to organise. It has been left to women to rally and to work to end men's violence against women. Can you see the problem there? It is men's violence against women. That's why men in this country—Australian blokes—need to man up. This is a problem with men. It's a problem with masculinity. So men need to man up and do the work because it is men who need to change. We men need to have conversations with our family and our mates. We need to organise and rally. We need to find ways to be part of creating safe places for women in our workplaces, in our sports clubs, in our homes and in public. We need to make this country a safe place for women. We need to work to change the culture that has allowed us, as men, for far too long to behave in a way that puts women's safety at risk. We need to call out poor behaviour when we see it and we need to be ready to feel uncomfortable while we're doing it. Of course we're going to feel uncomfortable calling out sexist or misogynistic behaviour in a group of our male mates. But I'll tell you what: calling out that behaviour is not going to result in the physical harm or death that is faced far too regularly by far too many women in this country. So I say to Australian men: man up and do everything you can to help women feel safe and be safe in Australia.

The budget was also a massive missed opportunity to invest in protecting nature. Particularly in my home state of Tasmania and also in New South Wales, we are still seeing the industrial-scale logging of our beautiful, biodiverse, carbon-rich native forests. The planet's climate is breaking down around us, yet we have an industry, in industrial native forest logging, that is a loss-making mendicant industry, that relies on public subsidies to survive, that destroys biodiversity, that indiscriminately slaughters millions of creatures every year and that emits massive amounts of carbon into our atmosphere. While our climate is breaking down around us and while ecological systems are crumbling at a global scale, there is no excuse to engage in the industrial native forest logging of carbon-rich, biodiverse, beautiful, magnificent forests. They are home to precious creatures, beautiful and unique creatures, like the Leadbeater's possum and the swift parrot. Both are endangered species.

The swift parrot in Tasmania is being logged into extinction by the political duopoly of the Labor and Liberal parties. It's getting harder and harder to tell those two parties apart with their enthusiastic support for new coal and gas mines, their enthusiastic support for public subsidies to burn fossil fuels and their enthusiastic support for the destruction of our beautiful, precious native forests. The Greens are here to fight. We're here to fight for the Leadbeater's possum. We're here to fight for the swift parrot and the masked owl. We are here to fight for our forests, the cultural heritage that they contain, the carbon that they contain and the beautiful creatures that they are home to and that are slaughtered in their millions through the clear-felling and burning of our native forests.

In Tasmania right now it's logging-burn season. They choke our skies, they choke the lungs of far too many Tasmanians and they choke the economies of regional towns and communities that rely on tourism for jobs and prosperity. And why do they do it? Because the Labor and Liberal parties publicly subsidise this behaviour. If you pulled all the public subsidies out of the native forest logging industry, it would end overnight. It cannot survive without its public subsidies. It employs next to no people in this country, and we can and should transition regional economies out of destroying forests and into rewilding places, establishing forests and helping us to repair some of the terrible scars that we've left behind on our landscape.

We know that ending native forest logging would be of benefit to our emissions profile. We know that because in my home state of Tasmania, when we significantly reduced the amount of native forest logging under a Labor-Greens government between 2010 and 2014, we saw Tasmania transform on an economy-wide basis from being a major emitter of carbon to being a major sequesterer of carbon—all because we stopped destroying so much forest.

We need to take action. The time to end native forest logging is now. Let's do it for our climate. Let's do it for our biodiversity. Let's do it for those beautiful, precious forests that sustain and nurture our spirit.