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

I'm also going to ask that those are put separately, because the Greens intend to vote differently on them, and I move the following amendment:

At the end of the motion, add:

"and, in respect of the provisions of the Nature Positive (Environment Information Australia) Bill 2024, the Nature Positive (Environment Protection Australia) Bill 2024, and the Nature Positive (Environment Law Amendments and Transitional Provisions) Bill 2024, the Environment and Communications Legislation Committee report by 3 September 2024".

And I want to speak to that briefly. I just want to be clear about how broken our environment laws are in Australia. Our environment laws are misnamed; they are actually development laws, laws that enable the destruction of our environment. They do not do what most people think they should in this country, which is protect our environment from destruction. There are so many flaws in Australia's environment laws. But one, if not the biggest, flaw is that logging is exempt from our environment laws if it is conducted under a regional forest agreement. It's time to end native forest logging in Australia. It's also time to end the carve-out from the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act that the mendicant native forest logging industry in this country enjoys.

To that end I want to tell the Senate about a recent trip I had, hosted by the legends at the Bob Brown Foundation, and the brave Australians who are defending this most beautiful, spectacular piece of forest right in the heart of Takayna, the Tarkine, at the junction of the Arthur and the Frankland rivers, where right now the loggers are logging into the night under floodlights to try and get that coupe completely destroyed before the end of the month when they will have to stop logging it because it is wedge-tailed eagle habitat and they're not allowed to log it into July. That's why they're logging into the night right now under floodlights and that is why heroic forest defenders supported by the legends at the Bob Brown Foundation are now into their 38th day of direct action.

They are brave Australians, who stand on the right side of history and who stand to protect nature, the carbon in those forests, the beautiful myriad creatures that call those forests home, the significant Aboriginal cultural heritage of that area, the carbon in the soils, the carbon in the trees, the carbon in the deadwood and the senescent trees that provide habitat for so many beautiful creatures, including the endangered masked owl. Those brave forest defenders are there on the ground right now, and I want to give a massive shout-out to them. I want to give a massive shout-out to the heroes and legends at the Bob Brown Foundation.

Coupe FR002A is being logged by the Tasmanian Liberal government with the support of a federal Labor government using public subsidies handed out to a mendicant native forest logging industry that would be finished overnight if you just pulled the public subsidies out of it. That would be the end of the native forest logging industry because it can't even turn a profit without tens of millions of dollars a year in Tasmania alone going into public subsidies in that industry.

We need an adequate inquiry into the so-called nature positive cognate package of bills, which I remind folks constitutes a huge and horrendous breach of trust from the environment minister, Ms Plibersek, and in fact every single Labor member in this place and the other place, who committed to the Australian people before the last election that we would get the significant overhaul of our environment laws that so many millions of Australians want to see. It's a broken promise. Here we find ourselves with a massive broken promise. Why did they break that promise? Because this is the Labor Party and they don't care about nature. They just care about their political donors in the fossil fuel industries. They just care about developers turning a profit. And once again it is nature who loses out. Well, the Greens won't let nature lose out. We'll always fight for it.