Ms BADGER (Lyons) – Honourable Speaker, I am pleased to hear from all sides except the Liberals that this is intergenerational debt and deficit. We are continually going to see it get worse with the increase in cost blowouts of projects like the stadium. Yes, it started just over $700 million. Now, it is up to a $1 billion, just as the Greens said it was going to be all along, and that is still without the facilitating infrastructure.
The Tyndall Range – still $40 million since 2021. Somehow, it is magically immune to any kind of inflation despite the project changes. Release the new business case. Where is it? Where is the new business case for the Cradle Mountain cableway that went from $60 million to $225 million? All these projects are non-essential. Why are we pursuing intergenerational debt and deficit for future Tasmanians over them?
This is economic debt and deficit, but we also have an environmental and nature deficit: the climate, biodiversity and extinction crisis. There are over 600 flora and fauna species in Tasmania that are listed as threatened, which is due to habitat destruction, climate change, disease and invasive species’ impact. This is in part being driven by the wrong investment priorities.
We have ranger positions in Parks that are not being filled, yet we are going to spend over $265 million on a cableway and the Tyndall Range, which are not going to protect nature in the same way that our rangers, field officers, scientists or well‑funded proper programs could. What about $10 million into the west coast – the destructive four‑wheel drive plan through a living cultural heritage site of outstanding universal values? That $10 million could have gone into the state’s first Aboriginal‑managed national park in Kooparoona Niara to protect nature and the incredible culture of the Palawa people, the oldest living culture in the world.
We could have had appropriate alternative regenerative tourism opportunities like birding and dark skies. A paper from Carson and Taylor in 2010 on four‑wheel drive tourists in the Northern Territory showed that they spent the same as your average tourist did. In that market segment, there was not a huge increase to be had. Birding, which has no impact on the environment and is not impacting cultural heritage sites, had a $2.6 billion spend in Australia for the year in 2023‑2024, and Tasmania is yet to fully capitalise on that.
It is the same with dark skies. In the key US sites in Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico, just to name a few, the US dollar spend of tourists per year is averaged at $5.8 billion. Those dark skies are so important, not just for tourist spend, but also because of the cultural importance that they have. That is why it is so important to protect them.
Destruction is also driving the nature debt and deficit, so it is absurd that there is ongoing government subsidisation of the native forest logging industry in this state. It was not on my parliamentary bingo card to be driving to work yesterday and see an enormous primeval tree on the back of a truck going to the chip mill.
On average, 90 per cent of our coupes are going to low grade paper pulp through the chip industry. It is 2025 and we know that that tree should still be standing. It should be critical habitat for so many different species. It should have still been there; it should have been sequestering carbon for us. But no. Instead we are cheaply selling it off.
Yesterday, in Ellendale, out the back of where I call home, there was a coupe that had its work stopped, and rightfully so. There are four wedge‑tailed eagle nests around those coupes and it is coming up to breeding season. I can tell you first hand the number of devils that are in those coupes, not to mention the endemic Tasmanian white goshawk.
Our forests right across this island are home to the endemic masked owl, the sublime forty‑spotted pardalote and the swift parrots who have just left this island for migration. When they return later this year they will have less habitat for breeding, because it will have been destroyed.
We have an intergenerational economic debt and deficit, but we also have an intergenerational nature debt and deficit. If we do not properly address the nature debt, our economic debt will absolutely get worse as well, because we are going to see climate‑induced emergencies continually get worse, and they are going to require more investment. We simply cannot continue to ignore and choose the wrong priorities for our investments. It is time to get serious. It is time to admit and properly address the climate and biodiversity crisis so that we can address the nature and environment debt and deficit, not just in this state but for people right around the world.
Time expired.
