Steph Hodgins-May (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the Illegal Logging Prohibition Amendment (Strengthening Measures to Prevent Illegal Timber Trade) Bill 2024. This bill modernises the existing compliance and enforcement framework around illegal logging to help prevent illegally logged timber from being imported to Australia.

Since the beginning of the Greens, we have fought alongside forest activists for a ban on the logging of native forests and for an end to all forms of illegal logging. While we believe this bill is a move in the right direction, it simply does not go far enough to protect forests from these destructive practices. As my colleague, and the Australian Greens spokesperson for forests, Senator McKim outlined in his second reading speech, more can and must be done to strengthen our illegal logging framework and ensure Australia's timber is from sustainable sources. Thank you, Senator McKim, for your work on this bill and for fighting to protect our forests for current and future generations.

As mentioned, the Greens support the intent of this bill and welcome any measures taken to prevent illegally logged timber from entering Australia, but this must go hand in hand with protecting our own precious native forests—forests that the Labor government are allowing to be recklessly bulldozed, destroyed and logged as we speak. Australia's native forests are unique and beautiful. They are home to some of the most iconic wildlife, are unceded country for traditional owners and store enormous amounts of carbon. Yet our environmental laws are failing to protect Australia's native forests.

Under our current logging laws, the regional forest agreements, the logging industry is given a special exemption from complying with Australia's national environmental laws. The regional forest agreements have allowed for decades of reckless destruction of native forests across Australia. They've pushed native wildlife to the brink of extinction, endangered our water supplies, heightened bushfire risks and made the climate crisis worse. The government has a responsibility to stop this destruction and fix our broken environmental laws, yet Labor has failed to act on both a state and a federal level.

In my home state of Victoria, native forest logging supposedly ended in January of this year, and so did the operations of the state government owned logging agency VicForests. This seemed like a step towards genuine progress in the fight to protect Australia's forests. The announcement to end native forest logging was a hard fought victory for the many dedicated forest activists, traditional owners, academics, community members and environmental organisations that had been campaigning for the end of native forest logging in the state for decades. It was a huge achievement and win for First Nations heritage and culture, for the threatened species and wildlife that call Victoria's forests home and for the climate. The death of VicForests and their years of dodgy, money-bleeding operations was an exciting opportunity and a step forward for Victoria. Yet, shamefully, what was meant to be the end of native forest logging has continued in a rebranded form.

Recent ABC reports seem to show that VicForests is simply rebadging rather than completely shutting down. The ABC reported in early August that the CEO of VicForests has set up a brand-new organisation, the Healthy Forests Foundation, which would hire loggers and powerful logging lobbyists from the corporation and elsewhere. These revelations are incredibly concerning and undermine the end of native forest logging in Victoria. They also come as an almighty blow to the decades of work done by Victorian forest activists. Logging operators are notorious for rising from the ashes and resuming their destructive operations under new names or in a new state. We cannot allow rebadged industrial logging companies to just rebrand to skirt the law and continue their destructive practices. This poses a serious threat to the progress we've made in Victoria and across the country in protecting forests. It also undermines those decades of advocacy.

The ABC has also revealed that part of the purpose of the so-called Healthy Forests Foundation was to promote First Nations forest management, which will also supply timber. The Greens support First Nations led environmental management and want to work with First Nations people to protect and restore country. But we are concerned about the approach the industry is taking and the destruction of First Nations country, including native forests. As my colleague and Greens spokesperson for First Nations issues Senator Cox has said:

We need to ensure that when we use terms like 'First-Nations led' and 'Indigenous knowledges' to describe practices, that they are in fact grounded in our ancient ways of knowing and being with the land as our mother and protecting her indigeneity through our leadership and stewardship.

The Greens will continue to watch this development and speak with traditional owners from the area about the approach taken, to ensure that agreements made actually offer and assert the sovereign rights of First Peoples.

Of course, a rebadged VicForests is not the only threat to Victoria's native forest logging ban. The Greens are also deeply concerned about the ongoing destruction of Victoria's wombat forest by salvage logging. Commercial-scale native forest logging in Victoria officially ended in January, and the closure of smaller scale community forests was brought forward. However, VicForests are still currently removing large logs from the Wombat State Forest. Although this timber has been taken under the guise of debris clean-up, aka salvage logging, it has been allegedly sold on under the banner of forest fire management in Victoria. Let's be clear. This is logging by stealth and only serves to destroy key habitats for our threatened species.

Many Victorians have raised their concerns with me about salvage logging. They are devastated and angry that the Victorian Labor government has not honoured its 2021 commitment to create a new national park including the wombat forest. Victorian Labor should be ashamed—ashamed of its broken promises, ashamed of its dodgy practices and ashamed that it's failing in its duty to protect our forests.

The Albanese government are also guilty. They have the power to end regional forest agreements, to strengthen our national environmental laws and to end native forest logging once and for all. Yet they continue to keep their heads in the sand and prioritise corporate profits and industry lobbies over people and their environment.

Unlike Labor, the Greens are fighting to protect native forests at all levels of government. In Victoria, the Greens are calling on the government to fast-track the declaration of the proposed new national park. Here in the Australian parliament, we have introduced a private senator's bill to repeal the regional forest agreements and to finally end native forest logging. In conjunction with this bill, the Greens are calling on the federal government to fund ecological restoration and restore forests destroyed by decades of environmental vandalism, to support a just transition for workers and communities, to create new and sustainable green jobs in areas where native forest logging is ending, and to ensure the carbon value of ending logging helps the climate rather than being traded away to benefit coal, oil and gas corporations. By protecting Australia's native forests, we act on the climate emergency, we preserve the places we love for future generations, we protect our water supplies, we lessen bushfire risks and we save threatened species from extinction. Ending native forest logging just makes sense.

Today, Labor and the coalition have a chance to protect Australia's forests by supporting the Greens' second reading amendment to bring our private senator's bill forward. Shamefully, the major parties will likely vote this down and continue their campaign to prop up the dying logging industry. But know this: the Greens will not stop fighting. We won't stop fighting until all native forest logging is stopped, our wildlife is protected and our environmental laws are strengthened.