Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I seek leave to take note of the response of the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry to the Senate resolution concerning mountain ash forests that has just been tabled.

Leave granted.

I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

This is a response to a Senate resolution regarding mountain ash, or Eucalyptus regnans, forests in Australia. It is a response from the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Mr Burke. I had sought the government’s response to the report by Professor Brendan Mackey at the Australian National University and his colleagues Dr Heather Keith, Dr Sandra Berry and Professor David Lindenmayer on the greenhouse gas release from the destruction of Australia’s tallest forests, which are indeed the mountain ash forests of Victoria and Tasmania. What we have in this response from the minister is a complete lack of information and, indeed, a revelation of extraordinary ignorance in the department and of the minister himself. You will note, Mr Acting Deputy President, that after the question of whether the report from the Australian National University has validity comes this conclusion from the government:

Neither report—

because they include a further report from the Australian National University on proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in Australia—

provides sufficient detail to allow a review of the validity of the findings.

In other words, the government has no idea. Minister Burke does not have a clue about the greenhouse gas emissions from the destruction of Australia’s tall forests, primarily by the export woodchip industry. The Senate asked:

(ii)          What government measures are being taken or considered to protect Eucalyptus regnans forests in Australia that are currently targeted for logging …

The minister resorted to an answer which was basically ‘none’. There are forests that are protected, but for those that are targeted for logging under the regional forest agreements—which, by the way, were established by the Howard government back in the 1990s—no change is planned. This is despite the Australian National University report showing extraordinary volumes of greenhouse gases being emitted through the destruction of these forests. In fact, it is the biggest release of greenhouse gases through terrestrial logging anywhere on the planet. Quite remarkable. Acre for acre it is much greater than, for example, the destruction of rainforests in Brazil, Indonesia or Central Africa. The minister says:

The sustainability indicators report prepared for the ten-year review of the Tasmanian Regional Forests Agreement indicates there is 68 000 hectares of predominantly E. regnans forest in the state, of which 18 000 hectares is reserved.

In other words, 50,000 hectares is targeted for logging. Then comes the minister’s anaemic excuse for that outrage in terms of greenhouse gas emissions:

The 50 000 hectares available for timber production—

read ‘available for woodchip export to the Japanese and Chinese markets’—

is predominately regrowth. Of this, 45 000 hectares is on public land.

These regrowth forests—and we are talking about forests seeded as far back as 1898 due to wildfires over a century ago—should be allowed to grow to their full potential, taking out of the atmosphere enormous volumes of greenhouse gases, in particular carbon dioxide. There is nothing like them for achieving the greenhouse gas emissions reductions that this nation needs, in this week in which we are discussing the government’s recipe for failure in tackling climate change. The minister says that, of the 50,000 hectares in Tasmania of Eucalyptus regnans, 45,000 hectares is on public land—that is, within reach of his say-so. He goes on to say that VicForests, the Victorian authority:

… report that current approved timber release plans—

that is, forest destruction plans—

exist for 2771 hectares of predominantly E. regnans forest in Victoria. This area is estimated to contain 363 621 cubic metres of sawlog and—

Opposition Senator:

Opposition senator interjecting—

to the interjector on my right—

796 772 cubic metres of pulpwood—

that is, woodchip.

What we have here is a complete studied ignorance by this Rudd government. In an age of climate change, we are looking, if you accept Sir Nicholas Stern’s asseveration, at a potential price of more than $100 a tonne for the carbon stored by these forests if they are kept standing upright being released at something like $12, $14 or $16 a tonne by the Tasmanian Labor and Victorian Labor governments through the destruction of these forests. That is the royalty that will be gained from selling them into the export woodchip market. It is economically outrageous, it is environmentally outrageous, because we are talking about the destruction of prime habitat of species of Australian plants and wildlife, including rare and endangered plants and wildlife, and it is outrageous from the point of view of greenhouse gas emissions.

But then in the last paragraph comes the clincher from Minister Burke, who after two years should be on top of this portfolio but obviously does not understand it. The Senate asked:

(iv)          Whether ending native forest and woodlands removal in Australia would reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions by 10 to 20 per cent.

He said, in effect, ‘I have no idea.’ You will see in the document that he said that logging of native forests and woodlands, where it is measured by the government—that is, to create agricultural uses on that land—puts 77 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent into the atmosphere each year. Shame on the Bligh government in particular, because it is the greatest creator of destruction of these woodlands, but shame also on the Northern Territory, Victorian, Tasmanian, South Australian, Western Australian and New South Wales governments. The minister went on to say:

According to the National Inventory Report 2007, the area of native forest available for harvest activities—

that is, for logging destruction—

sequestered and stored 36.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2007.

That is, in one year the area of forest now targeted for destruction under the indirect authority of the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Mr Burke, sequestered—that is, took out of the atmosphere—37 million tonnes of carbon dioxide two years ago. That is now stored in these forests. He—along with the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts, Peter Garrett, the Minister for Climate Change and Water, Penny Wong, and above all the Prime Minister of this country—is prepared to have these forests, which are targeted for destruction, release not only all the carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases stored over decades or centuries in the past but the 36.8 million tonnes absorbed in 2007 and end their career as a massive absorber of greenhouse gases. That is what is afoot here.

This government has legislation before the parliament that it says meets its obligations to reduce greenhouse gases. That legislation in no way deals with this outrageous dereliction of duty by the minister for forestry and the Prime Minister of this country in sending to destruction the biggest carbon banks—that is, hedges against climate change—that we have in terrestrial Australia. This document is an affront to the Senate. It is a record of studied ignorance by the Rudd government in 2009. These forests should be protected by law to prevent the greenhouse gas damage to all our futures that will come from their studied destruction by this government and the several Labor governments at state level which are involved.

Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I, too, would like to make a contribution on the minister’s response to the question by the Greens. It gives me a good opportunity to briefly discuss this. I suppose I agree with Senator Brown in the context that I am not sure that the minister really is across what is going on in this portfolio with respect to sequestration of carbon in forests and timber products. I also note that Senator Brown is only prepared to tell half of the story when it comes to this issue. I have been very interested over the last few months in the conduct of the inquiry into climate change and in discussions that I have had on the measurement of carbon in forests and sequestration of carbon in solid timber products. Senator Brown, when he talks about the release of carbon dioxide from the harvesting of native forest, talks about it in the context of the current Kyoto accounting rules, where the assumption is that when you harvest a tree all of the carbon contained in that tree is emitted immediately, including the carbon in the roots. So, if you harvest a tree, the assumption for the current Kyoto accounting purposes is—

Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Who says it’s for Kyoto accounting purposes? Please show me.

Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Ask your colleague, Senator Brown. Senator Milne was with me on the inquiry. There is no dispute about it, Senator Brown. If you are so far behind you do not know, that is your problem, not mine. That is the accounting process that is acknowledged internationally. But there is no acknowledgement in the current accounting processes for carbon stored in timber products. So managed forests, forests of the type Senator Brown is talking of—in fact, regrowth forests—are not accounted for. It is very good to hear Senator Brown acknowledge that you will find old-growth qualities in regrowth forests. It is a very important point that Senator Brown acknowledges. In fact, I have had it put to me by a member of the Wilderness Society in Tasmania that a 40-year-old regrowth forest is regarded as an old-growth forest, recognising the values that are being created in the regeneration of forests in Tasmania and in other jurisdictions around the country by the quality forestry practices that operate in this country.

The Greens talk about the deconstruction. They do not talk about the high-quality regeneration forests that are occurring in Australia. They are quite happy to claim the forests after they are regenerated, down the track, as old-growth, even though they do not specifically fit the definition; but they do not recognise the carbon stored in timber products, and they are quite happy for that process to continue. There is a recognition of carbon stored in timber products over the long-term cycle. Senator Brown talks about the here and now and the harvesting of forests but does not talk about the long-term cycle, where you can, by recognising the carbon stored in solid timber products, actually store more carbon through actively managing a forest over a long term. The CSIRO told us that. There is research out of North America that tells us that. And it has been recognised in conversations that I have had in Europe over the last few weeks. You will sequester more carbon by managing forests sustainably over a long period of time when you recognise the carbon stored in solid timber products, whether they be paper, which has a shorter life, or solid timber products, which have a long-term life. Senator Brown, you are so far behind with your thinking in respect of this. This religious fervour that you do not cut down a tree is doing nothing for the timber industry. It is doing nothing to stop illegal logging in Third World countries.

If we can apply common sense to this, in my view there is a real opportunity for us to use the recognition of carbon stored in solid timber products to start directing funding back to Third World countries to get regeneration programs—which would be an absolutely positive thing—in forests that are being challenged, like tropical forests in South America. We can get funding directed back into regeneration programs and then get very genuine certification processes into our forests, which recognise and measure these factors so that there is a long-term future for forestry. Also, you can have sustainable forestry into the longer term. There is a huge opportunity for the forest industry to work with this. We know that timber sequesters carbon. We ought to be looking at making sure we are using sustainable products like timber in our construction industry. We can move away from using those products with heavy carbon footprints that use a lot of energy in their generation, and we can store that. We can look at the longer-term recycling of timber products as well so that we can maintain that carbon stock in the timber that is being stored but return some of the revenue generated to regenerating forests in Third World countries.

We talk about certification of timber out of some of these countries through what is regarded as legal logging. Very little of it has a regeneration process attached to it. So we are still seeing deafforestation, which is, in the context of long-term carbon storage, not a good thing. In places like Tasmania and other Australian states we are actually planting new native forests. Using the genus that comes out of those forest coupes, there is a real opportunity for us to demonstrate that what we are doing is right and to export that technology to other places so that we can have a sustainable timber industry.

There will continue to be enormous demand for timber. We currently have a $2 billion trade deficit on timber products coming into Australia. We should be valuing the work that is being done by our forest industries and making sure that we have those long-term rotations of our native forests so that we can continue to sequester carbon over time and make sure that not only do we maintain the value that comes out of our forest industries as well as having some replacement for the products that are currently being imported—about 10 per cent of which are illegally logged—but also we have a sustainable timber industry in the long term and at the same time achieve the climate change objective of locking up more carbon. That is what the science says. It is not like in the old religious days of not cutting down a tree. If you have a long-term rotation of native forests, allowing them to reach a level of maturity where they have peaked in their carbon sequestration before you reharvest, you will find old-growth forest characteristics in those regrowth forests.

Those are the sorts of things that we have got to get to, and it was great to see Forestry Tasmania release a strategy last week for maintaining access to specialist Tasmanian timbers. They are doing a lot of great work—world-leading work in a lot of cases—and yet are continuously being denigrated by those who are so far behind in the science, who have no idea what is going on in this process and who are in fact actively trying to frustrate the process by not wanting to recognise the carbon stored in solid timber products, which provides a huge opportunity both to totally change the way that the forest industries work internationally and provide some solutions to what are significant problems at the moment.

Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to make some comments in relation to Minister Burke’s response to the issue of the carbon stored in Australia’s forests, and in particular mountain ash forests. It is very interesting because all kinds of distortions are possible in a debate like this, but what is not being recognised—and I have to say that Senator Colbeck failed to recognise it right then—is that the world has realised that global greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2015 and then come down.

When people start talking about putting in a forest now and allowing it to go to maturity in 80 or a hundred years, they are not engaging with the fact that right now we have to stop the logging of forests, stop native vegetation clearance and bring down fossil fuel emissions at the same time. It is why the world is now engaged in a vigorous discussion about reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation. It is why we are going to Copenhagen in December with a vigorous debate about what to do. The whole world is moving to try to put pressure on developing countries in particular—because the tropical forests happen to be predominantly in developing countries—to stop the logging of those forests because they emit not only the stores from the trees that are cut down but also the massive store in the soil carbon in those forests. That is our biggest problem here.

The ANU has now shown that the carbon in Tasmania’s old-growth forests and in Victoria’s mountain ash forests as well have larger amounts of carbon stored than those that exist in tropical forests. That this has occurred is a new awareness in science, and people are now recognising that the fastest way for Australia to get its greenhouse gas emissions down would be to stop the logging of native forests and the clearing of native vegetation. That would make a major difference. In the round table that we had, all the scientists were saying about biodiversity impacts and carbon that the first thing you should do is protect your existing forest stores and protect your existing carbon stores.

Not only is this letter adding insult to injury but it fails to point out that the federal government, together with the Tasmanian government, is currently allowing the logging of these native stores to go to woodchips. It is recognised that they are for pulp wood—the minister himself recognises that a large volume is for pulp wood. At the moment, you cannot sell that pulp wood to the Japanese. The woodchip mills are closed in Tasmania two or three days a week because the bottom has dropped out of the market. We are logging precious stores to stockpile woodchips, so now we have hit upon the great scheme of burning those forests in furnaces and selling that energy as renewable energy. The federal government’s renewable energy target is going to allow biomass as an energy source to go into the renewable energy target.

Gunns pulp mill in northern Tasmania—contrary to the view that they have imported machinery to start the pulp mill—have imported machinery for the forest furnace, so that, regardless of whether the pulp mill goes ahead or not, their furnace is there and they will keep logging and chipping those forests, putting them through the furnace and selling them as green energy. In other parts of the country this is known as ‘dead koala credits’. In Tasmania we do not have koalas, but we are nevertheless going to see those woodchips burnt and sold under the renewable energy target. That is something that the Prime Minister, Minister Wong and Minister Garrett—the whole lot of them—endorse. I am going to be moving, in the renewable energy target debate, to delete the biomass from the renewable energy target because it will lead to the burning of Tasmania’s forests to go into so-called green energy.

But let me get back to Kyoto accounting—this is where Senator Colbeck did not represent it as it currently is. The fact of the matter is that, under the Kyoto protocol, the logging of a native forest—providing it is replanted or resown in some way, whether by plantation or regeneration techniques—is deemed to be carbon neutral. That is on the basis that over a rotation, whatever that might be, it is deemed to be carbon neutral. That is wrong. That is based on a European perception of plantations and not on an assessment of the carbon in an Australian forest. That is why we have got such a distortion in the carbon accounting.

The worst aspect of this, with the CPRS, is that, if the government allows opt-in of plantations, we will get those plantations planted under MIS schemes being opted in to try and get some value returned from them. That will drive the logging deeper into our native forests, which is the worst-case outcome for climate change and the worst-case outcome for wood production, because those plantations were planted for wood production and that is why people got tax breaks in order to do it.

What Minister Burke has shown is that he is not across the science. Recently we have had in Australia Dr Rachel Warren from the Tyndall Centre, who is absolutely shocked that Australia would be allowing the logging and burning of native forest to generate energy under a renewable energy target. She is certainly conveying that idea through academia in Australia. For the Australian government to go to Copenhagen bragging about an arrangement with Indonesia—saying that we are going to put $200 million into stopping logging in Indonesia—while we are subsidising the logging of even-more-carbon-rich forests in Australia, will send the rest of the world into shock, because they will not be able to believe the level of hypocrisy from Australia, especially when they find out that it was the Australian government who pressured the Indonesians to overturn Forestry Law 41.

Indonesia actually stopped mining in protected forest areas, and along came BHP Billiton and a whole lot of other mining companies who had got their permits under previous corrupt regimes. They put pressure on the Indonesian government through the Australian embassy in Jakarta and forced them—threatened to take them to international arbitration to get compensation for these permits granted under previous corrupt regimes—to overturn the law so that those areas could be logged, clear-felled, so that the miners could move into those areas in Indonesia. So for Australia to now turn around and say, ‘We’ll give you $200 million to stop logging,’ after we forced the Indonesians to log vast areas on behalf of the mining industry, which had those permits, just makes the developing world sit there and wonder at the hypocrisy of Australia. And this is on top of what I mentioned earlier this afternoon, where Australia blocked the Pacific island countries from including a stronger target than Australia was prepared to have in the communique from the Pacific Islands Forum.

So this is Australia bullying—bullying the rest of the world. And now we are going to get it on reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation. And the one thing the environment movement and the Greens will be doing in Copenhagen is pointing out to the rest of the world this hypocrisy in Australia: lecturing the rest of the developing world about not logging tropical forests while subsidising the logging of temperate forests—the most carbon-rich forests in the world. There will be peer reviewed papers coming out in all kinds of scientific media before Copenhagen and they will show that very clearly. It is no use trying to pretend that wood products out of an old-growth forest store a more significant part or a large part of the carbon. That is nonsense. Less than 10 per cent of the stored carbon ends up in anything durable. The rest is going to the atmosphere and is lost as a carbon store.

But I come back to the carbon budget that we have. What this parliament does not seem to realise is that we have run out of time. If we are going to constrain global warming to less than two degrees we cannot log carbon-rich forests in Australia or anywhere else anymore. And we need to stop doing that at the same time as we bring down our fossil fuel emissions. The idea of trade-offs is no longer feasible. We need to do both at the same time. If you are intent on logging forests you will absolutely have to stop fossil fuel emissions immediately and much more deeply than you are prepared to do. To continue to do both is to guarantee catastrophic climate change, and that is precisely what both sides of this parliament are intent on doing at the moment—no more so than Minister Burke.

Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There is not a lot of time left, as I understand it, for my contribution. I just wanted again to point out the hypocrisy of the Greens political party in dealing with this and any issues relating to forestry. The number of trees that were burnt in the Victorian bushfires because people like the Greens refused to allow fuel to be removed from the forest is just unbelievable. I do have a little more time to develop this issue.

Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It was measured in the Green carbon report.

Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Indeed, Senator Colbeck! We have a magnificent resource in Australia—the most renewable and sustainable form of building material—and yet 30 years ago the Greens embarked upon a campaign to destroy the jobs of Australian workers and the Australian timber industry. And for all their pious comments, as they wring their hands during debates like the one we are having today, they do not understand that in the time when these forests were actually harvested sustainably there were people there managing those native forests and removing the fuel loads. People—that is, the forestry workers—were there and able to deal with bushfires when they broke out, but the Greens succeeded in shutting down most of the native timber forest industry in Australia and that has meant that these forests remain unprotected. For all the hand-wringing there were more trees destroyed in the Australian bushfires of earlier this year than all of the logging that has gone on in Australia since Australia was started. And do you hear the Greens complain about that? Do you hear the Greens asking for removal of fuel loads? You do not. It just shows the hypocrisy of the Greens political party on these issues.

Question agreed to.