Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The definition of ecocide: severe harm to nature and mass damage and destruction of ecosystems committed repeatedly over decades. Senators, this is a photograph of what ecocide looks like. This distressing, shocking and bloody infuriating photograph is of an endangered Tasmanian devil burnt to a cinder by a forestry regeneration burn. Over decades, hundreds and thousands of hectares of habitat and precious forests, with their wild animals, has been wantonly destroyed by the Tasmanian government and the so-called Sustainable Timber Tasmania. This photograph was taken by a bushwalker after a burn, ironically, on the International Day of Forests. If you support native forest logging in this country, you are supporting ecocide.

For those people out there who have fought for decades to try and protect the Tasmanian devil so it doesn't go the way of the Tasmanian tiger, you have a right to be bloody angry today at the Tasmanian government, the federal government and all senators in here that continue to support native forest logging in this country. We can end it. These forests, these trees, are our first line of defence in our climate emergency, yet we are still clear-felling them and burning them, their habitat and their precious animals every day. When is it going to end? When are we going to wake up to the fact that we are in a species extinction crisis and that these poor Tasmanian devils need our help? They don't need to be burnt to a cinder after a helicopter has thrown napalm out onto a forest. It has got to stop.