Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Just on the outskirts of my home town of Melbourne, you can find the tallest flowering plants in the world, the majestic mountain ash of the central highlands. These spectacular forests form the catchments that provide clean drinking water to over three million Victorians. They supply our city with fresh air and are home to some of Australia's iconic animals, including Victoria's animal emblem, Leadbeater's possum. This same story is repeated throughout Australia. In the west, Tourism Western Australia proudly proclaims that its 100 native forests make up one of the world's biodiversity hotspots, with over 12,000 species of wildflowers. But right now, all that is under threat. Hectare by hectare, our forests are being destroyed by logging. And it is all completely unnecessary. There is no strong case to continue logging and woodchipping our native forests—economically, socially or scientifically.

This Saturday is United Nations' International Day of Forests. It is a day to recognise the value of forests, which are home to more than 80 per cent of land animals, plants and insects, and provide shelter, jobs and security for around 1.6 billion people. It is the perfect moment to learn about the benefits we all rely upon from our native forests, to acknowledge that the way that we have been managing them has failed both local industries and local communities and to re-evaluate our practices, based on the most up-to-date scientific evidence.

The big business agenda we have come to expect from Tony Abbott and coalition governments around the country is killing—

Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! Senator Rice, I would ask you to refer to the Prime Minister by his appropriate title.

Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yes. The big business agenda we have come to expect from Prime Minister Tony Abbott and other coalition governments around the country is killing our native forests. Science tells us that forests are crucial to our way of life. For instance, logging can cut an area's water yield in half. In Melbourne this is having a devastating impact, with 40 per cent of the city's supply of water coming from the Central Highlands catchments that are open to clear-fell logging. Young regrowth trees need more water to grow, and it can take 150 years for water yields to regain their original levels.

Just 25 kilometres from Margaret River in Western Australia is the beautiful Mowen Forest. Proposed logging of the forest's jarrah and marri trees will affect threatened animals like the forest red-tailed black cockatoo, Baudin's cockatoo, the brush-tailed phascogale, the orange-bellied frog and the quokka. Logging will also increase the forest's risk of salinity, threatening the Blackwood River and other parts of this delicate ecosystem.

This destruction makes no economic sense, either. According to the Western Australian Forest Alliance, none of the logged trees will be milled or processed in the Augusta-Margaret River community, and the logging is destroying the value of the forest for tourism, which is the basis of the local economy. In New South Wales logging in state forests has cost taxpayers more than $43 million over the past three years. That money would be much better spent supporting revegetation, land care, tackling pest plants and animals and promoting tourism in these regions. Yet the logging continues. In communities like the scenic town of Toolangi in Victoria, residents report log truck after log truck driving by on their way to the mill, each groaning with just-logged trees that have taken up to a century to grow. It is not uncommon to see 200 trees go by each day. Residents of Toolangi are regularly told to expect planned burns. To most people a planned burn means reducing the fuel for bushfires, but then we are told that most of them are not for fuel reduction, but for the burning of logging coupes—completing the destruction of industrial-scale logging.

Many of the small communities that are set within these native forest regions are in trouble. They suffer from high unemployment and sub-standard public services. Massive corporations, with the blessing of Prime Minister Abbott and his coalition mates, split communities by telling them that the answer to their problems is more logging. The reality is the reverse. Regional forest agreements signed between the federal governments and the states in the early nineties were meant to be the solution. They were meant to protect the forest and the forest industries. But on both counts they have failed. Regional forest agreements have systematically facilitated the destruction of our largest assets to store carbon, something that is essential for reducing the impacts of climate change. They have allowed a dramatic increase in weeds and pests within our native forests and they are driving the precious animals that live in these forests towards extinction. And they have done this via an unsustainable business model that costs taxpayers for every tree that is felled. Take Victoria as a prime example, where the state's five regional forest agreements are managed by the state-owned logging business, VicForests. In the past 10 years VicForests has received taxpayer subsidies of around $2 million every year to destroy native forests.

But perhaps the clearest reason regional forest agreements have failed is that they are based on science that is two decades old. There is no reference to climate change or carbon stores, and negligible mention of water health. They have failed to take account of recent science such as that which shows that threatened animals like Leadbeater's possums are now on the brink of being reclassified as critically endangered. The scientific and economic realities are that there is absolutely no need for this destruction of environment and community. The time for native forest logging has ended. We must acknowledge the wealth of new science and evidence that highlights the challenges we face from climate change and the massive benefits we get from native forests. We can choose to manage the wind-down of the tail end of the native forest logging industry, or we can let the resources run out and watch the decimation. We have the opportunity to work towards a solution that benefits local communities, the plants and animals of our native forests and everyone who lives in our towns and cities. This must be done in consultation with local communities, recreational users of forests and tourism operators—not just those industries that continue to log. I know these communities well. They are dedicated and innovative. We can protect these communities by giving them the opportunities they need. No-one will be left out, because this forest belongs to all of us.

The vast majority of the timber industry now relies on plantations, so the industry can cope without native forest logging. An economic study of Melbourne's largest water catchment, the Thomson Dam, compared the value of water versus that of native forest logging. It found that getting out of logging would have a financial benefit—a benefit—of $147 million to the Victorian community. Other research shows that keeping old growth forests reduces bushfire risk to forest communities because young regrowth forest is much more prone to fire.

Today I met with some of the leading forest conservation advocates and researchers from around Australia. These dedicated people were from the Knitting Nannas of Toolangi, the Wilderness Society, the Western Australian Forest Alliance, Environment Tasmania, Save the Tarkine, North East Forest Alliance and the Australian Conservation Foundation, amongst others. We met to discuss the future of Australian native forests. We talked about the urgent need to protect threatened species, about climate change and the increased ferocity of fires and bushfires in our forests, about the economic sustainability of regional and rural communities, of opening up our native forests to tourism and recreation. We talked about regional forest agreements, ending logging in our native forests and the crucial importance of our forests in ensuring that we have clean water to drink and fresh air to breathe. But what is very, very clear from all of our discussions is that we must act now. For the benefit of all, we must put an end to the destruction of our native forests.

When throwing his support behind the Great Forest National Park in Victoria, Sir David Attenborough said:

The maintenance of an intact ecological system is the only way to ensure the continued existence of biodiversity, safeguard water supplies and provide spiritual nourishment for ourselves and future generations …

I look forward to the day when we can truly celebrate the International Day of Forests, the day when we as a nation have ceased to mindlessly log our native forests—they have done it in New Zealand; we can do it here—the day when we can truly say that we have preserved the natural beauty and diverse ecosystems of Australia's forests for future generations. (Time expired)