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

I will come to a couple of observations on Senator Duniam's contribution shortly, but I commence by pointing out that this bill, the Illegal Logging Prohibition Amendment (Strengthening Measures to Prevent Illegal Timber Trade) Bill 2024, amends the Illegal Logging Prohibition Act 2012. I reflect that the Australian Greens supported the passage of that act through this parliament but said at the time that it didn't go far enough. In a nutshell, that is our response to the current bill: we will support this legislation but it doesn't go far enough. That's why we've got some amendments that I will speak to a little bit later in my contribution that would go some way towards rectifying the more egregious failures in this bill.

Basically, this bill will enable testing of timber products at the Australian border and beyond to ensure that non-compliant, illegally logged timber is not imported—or, at least, that's ostensibly what the bill would do—and there are a range of other matters this bill will cover. The Greens agree that the consideration of this bill would ideally be deferred until the finalisation of the accompanying new rules—which I note was a recommendation that the opposition made in the Senate inquiry into this legislation. However, here we find ourselves today thanks to this bill being placed on the agenda by the government.

This bill purports to take steps to ensure that noncompliant, illegally logged timber is not imported into Australia. But surely, colleagues, a greater priority for us in this place should be the illegal logging that is going on in Australia, that we have seen over many decades in this country, under a regime that has just been described by Senator Duniam as world's best practice. Let's look at VicForests, for example—when it was still around, I might add. It was a rogue government agency. It conducted repeated illegal logging, repeatedly breached environmental protections, ran covert surveillance of scientists and environmentalists and faced multiple dozens of successful court challenges that demonstrated it was illegally logging. It was forced by the courts to pay compensation because it was so incompetent.

Let's make no mistake: VicForests was an illegal logging agency. Its modus operandi was to trash Victoria's forests, home to beautiful species like the Leadbeater's possum, massively carbon rich forests, home to massive tall trees, and ancient majestic forests that were stolen from their original inhabitants by the colonisers in this country. Its modus operandi was to trash those forests illegally, and that was shown repeatedly and found repeatedly by the courts.

Is that illegal behaviour endemic to Victoria? No, it's not. Let's have a look at New South Wales. The New South Wales EPA has successfully prosecuted the Forestry Corporation of New South Wales on multiple occasions for breaching forestry laws. In a recent case, Justice Pepper of the Land and Environment Court of New South Wales found that the Forestry Corporation of New South Wales 'has a significant history of unlawfully carrying out forestry operations'. That's not me making that claim; that's Justice Pepper of the Land and Environment Court of New South Wales, putting their view on the record that the Forestry Corporation of New South Wales 'has a significant history of unlawfully carrying out forestry operations'.

Then, of course, we get to my home state of Tasmania. I could stand in this Senate for hours and give you chapter and verse about Forestry Tasmania, the state government owned logging corporation. Just like the Forestry Corporation of New South Wales and VicForests, it has a modus operandi of illegally logging our forests.

I'll give you one case that's become prominent recently, where forest defenders—and I absolutely want to shout out people right around this country who defend our forests from destruction—including former senator Dr Bob Brown, pointed out on site, in real time, to Forestry Tasmania officers that swift parrots were in a coop that was being logged. The relevant forest practices plan said that, if there was a credible sighting of swift parrots in a coop, the logging had to stop immediately. Did the logging stop immediately? No, it didn't, and that was illegal and unlawful by Forestry Tasmania. Of course what happens then is Dr Brown and his courageous fellow forest defenders get arrested and hauled up in front of the court system in Tasmania and found guilty, while the actual criminals who conducted that logging went free, and there's been no sanction applied to them. The forest defenders are being criminalised, whilst the illegal logging is given a great big green flag and allowed to continue.

Let's not forget the swift parrot in Tasmania is being logged into extinction. This beautiful little bird, this amazing little creature, the fastest parrot in the world and one of the very, very few migratory species of parrots in the world, is being logged into extinction by a mendicant, illegal logging industry, an industry that is massively contributing to the ecological collapse that we are living through and to the breakdown of the planet's climate that we are living through. It could do neither of those things if it wasn't massively subsidised by the long-suffering Australian taxpayers. If you pull the subsidies out of the native forest logging industry, it is finished overnight. It cannot stand on its own two feet. It is a political make-work scheme that is supported by the establishment parties in this place, despite the damage it's doing to nature, despite the fact it is driving multiple species into extinction and despite the fact that logging practices are a mass emitter of carbon. They are contributing to the breakdown of our planet's climate, which, according to the United Nations, is rendering this planet incapable of sustaining human life.

Courageous forest defenders are being thrown into prison for protesting against that abomination, while the people that are conducting the abomination are making off like bandits, pocketing obscene salaries and conducting illegal logging operations right around this country. So I won't hear a bar of arguments from forest industry sycophants like Senator Duniam, who is going to try to claim that we somehow have world's best practice forestry in this country. What we have is a mendicant industry with a business model of breaking the law. That's what our forest industry is in this country.

One thing I can agree with Senator Duniam on is that our forests are great carbon sinks, and I'm pleased to hear Senator Duniam finally accept the obvious, which is of course that our forests are great carbon sinks. Where we in the Greens differ from Senator Duniam and his ilk is that as soon as those forests are logged the carbon in them—in their trees, in their shrubs, in the woody mass that is on their ground, and in the very soils that have been created over countless millennia by those forests—is released into the atmosphere. They are great climate sinks until Senator Duniam and his ilk get their hands on them, and those forests turn into gross carbon emitters.

Now, as I said, we have some amendments to move to this bill, and I now move the second reading amendment that stands in my name:

At the end of the motion, add ", but the Senate notes that:

(a) each year around 300,000 hectares of Australia's native forests and woodlands are lost to logging and land clearing;

(b) Australia's native forests are among the most carbon-dense in the world;

(c) if Australia ceased all logging of native forests, the avoided emissions alone would be close to what is needed annually (15.5 Mt CO2) to achieve our national target of a 43% reduction on 2005 levels of emissions by 2030; and

(d) the Ending Native Forest Logging Bill 2023, which will repeal the Regional Forest Agreements Act 2002 and amend the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 to remove any and all exemptions they provide for native forest logging, should be brought on and passed".

I don't have any certainty that this bill won't be subject to a guillotine at some stage in the future, given what we've witnessed over the last couple of weeks, so I want to quickly refer to some of our amendments so folks know how we are trying to make this bill fit for purpose and lacking in some of the flaws that it currently has. The Greens have an amendment to section 18B of this bill to require that import notices include at a minimum information on the species and country of harvest of imported timber that replicate the act's due diligence requirements in the Illegal Logging Prohibition Regulation 2012.

I also want to say, in relation to our amendments on sheet 2626, that several witnesses to the Senate inquiry, particularly the Jubilee Australia Research Centre, Uniting Church Australia's Synod of Victoria and Tasmania, the Center for International Environmental Law and the Environmental Investigation Agency, are very concerned that the definition of 'illegal logging' provided by the bill could be too narrowly interpreted. We understand the definition in the bill is intended to capture any and all contravened laws in Australia's timber supply chains, both foreign and domestic, but we believe the bill needs to clearly articulate the breadth of laws that would engage the provisions of the bill. We believe the bill needs to make clear that it is in line with relevant legislation in other comparable countries combating importation of illegal timbers. We are concerned that a failure to do this would see Australia becoming a dumping ground for illegally logged timber. So we have an amendment on sheet 2626 to ensure that supply chain actors know that the laws cover not only the environment and human rights but also corruption-related offences such as bribery, money laundering, tax evasion, fraud and other financial crimes. I will make the obvious observation that offences like bribery, money laundering, tax evasion and fraud are rife in a number of logging jurisdictions around the world. Our amendment to give effect to that will do so while also maintaining the bill's definition for it to broadly apply to any law contravened in a supply chain.

There are other amendments that time will preclude me from going into. But, just quickly, we are concerned that under its due diligence provisions the bill appears to use industry certification standards as a proxy for the lawful harvesting of timber. The Senate inquiry heard from Ms Margaret Blakers, an absolute icon of the Australian conservation movement. Ms Blakers submitted that the listing of industry certification standards as timber legality frameworks wrongfully suggests that meeting one of those standards equates to legal compliance. So we have an amendment to address that. We also have other amendments that I hope I will be able to detail when this bill enters into the committee stages.

In the less than a minute that I have left to me in this contribution, I just want to go back to where I began. This bill, an amendment to the Illegal Logging Prohibition Act 2012, will get the support of the Greens, but it doesn't go far enough. Just as we said that in regard to the Illegal Logging Prohibition Act in 2012, we say it today. I confidently predict that, at some stage in the future, another amendment bill will be brought forward which acknowledges some of the concerns that the Greens have raised today and hopefully will plug some of the gaps that the Greens amendments that I have foreshadowed are intended to plug—even though I expect them to go down in a screaming heap because the establishment parties always vote together on logging matters in this country.