Dr WOODRUFF (Franklin – Leader of the Greens) – Honourable Speaker, I move –
That the House –
(1) Recognises the global significance of the 50.4% of Tasmania’s land area protected in publicly owned reserves, including their importance for carbon sequestration.
(2) Notes with concern the Government’s intention to convert 39,000 hectares of high conservation value forest reserves into land available for logging.
(3) Further recognises the findings of the ‘Independent Verification Report for the Tasmanian Forests Intergovernmental Agreement’ that noted the conservation values of the Future Potential Production Forests, including significant habitat for threatened, listed, and priority plant and animal species, ecosystem services of carbon storage, connectivity for key species, and adaptation to climate change.
(4) Further notes with concern the likely negative impact that increased native forest logging of this scale would have on Tasmania’s net-zero emissions status.
(5) Understands the Minister for Resources has begun the process under the Forestry (Rebuilding the Forest Industry) Act 2014 to convert 27 parcels of land from Future Potential Production Forest to Permanent Timber Production Zone.
(6) Further recognises the community’s concern at the Liberal Government’s move to convert reserved forests for logging, and the need for transparency about which forests and what values would be impacted.
(7) Orders the Minister for Resources to provide, before the adjournment of the House on 8 August 2024, all available information regarding the 27 parcels of land that are to be converted to Permanent Timber Production Zone, including maps, lot numbers, locality descriptions, and other known details.
Honourable Speaker, lutruwita/Tasmania’s Reserve Estate is the most iconic value that this beautiful state possesses. Few other places on the world can boast having over 50 per cent of their land area in reserves, and we deservedly have that status. We have a biodiversity beacon in Tasmania that draws tourists from around Australia and across the planet.
Tasmania’s wild places and functioning, healthy ecosystems support plants and animals unique in the world. It is a carbon store that naturally traps and holds warming gases. The government’s plan to convert 39,000 hectares of high conservation reserve forest to permanent timber production zone directly threatens these values.
It was a shock during the election campaign for people to hear that the Liberal government would actually go in to these beautiful places, because they are part of the 356,000 hectares that were legislated to be protected as future reserves in 2012. It was the Liberals who ripped up that legislation and renamed them as future potential production forests (FPPF).
Let us not be deluded. The minister likes to call them a wood bank, but they were originally designated to be future protected reserves. The Liberals plan to lock those 39,000 hectares would leave, if they are successful, just 49 per cent of Tasmania’s land protected in reserves. If all the 356,000 hectares of FPPF was converted to permanent timber production zone, which the Liberals have opened the door to doing by ripping up the Tasmanian Forest Agreement (TFA), then this number would fall further to just 45 per cent in Tasmanian reserve forests.
These 39,000 hectares are publicly owned lands and they are globally significant forest reserves. They deserve to be protected in perpetuity, not just because they contain extraordinary, rare and endemic biodiversity and not just because they protect the critically important and healthy ecosystems within them but, critically, they draw down carbon from the atmosphere and hold on to it.
Tasmania is one of the only places on the planet to become net carbon negative. We hold and store here more carbon than we release. The single reason we can make this claim is because of the Tasmanian Forestry Agreement when over 500,000 hectares of forests were protected from logging and rates of native forest logging more than halved. This drastically cut the volume of native forests being logged and burned and has prevented thousands of tonnes of carbon emissions. It reserved hundreds of thousands of hectares of land for their conservation value. It is these very forests that the Liberal government now wants to destroy that would directly threaten the survival of the many species within them and put our state’s net carbon‑negative status at risk.
In question time last week on 1 August, minister Eric Abetz said:
To say that this area was to be locked away for all time is simply untrue. It was set aside for the possibility of this eventuality that it may well be used for harvesting.
The more than 572,000 hectares of land that were originally recommended for protection under the Tasmanian Forest Agreement in 2011 were identified specifically because of their conservation values, so the minister can claim otherwise, but that is misleading Tasmanians and rewriting history.
The forest negotiation process between the environment and the forestry groups went on for nearly three years and Tasmanians watched on after decades of forestry wars with a great deal of concern at seeing a result and an end to the conflict we had had. The conservation value of those forests was documented in great detail by the people who worked through that process and it included experts from the Australian Conservation Foundation, Environment Tasmania and the Wilderness Society, who did a massive assessment of the land parcels. Their findings were then corroborated by scientific experts in evolutionary biology, paleoecology, botany, zoology, dendrology, conservation and reserve management, and ultimately by the members of the independent verification group for the Tasmanian Forests Intergovernmental Agreement.
These reports found that the land that has gone on to be known by the Liberals as FPPF land substantially contributes to conserving a huge range of important values, including habitat for threatened, listed and priority plant and animal species that live within these forest communities. They are a refuge for the plant and animal and invertebrate species that have survived in some of these forests and nowhere else on the planet since ancient paleological times. They are a stronghold for Tasmania’s many endemic eucalypts. They hold critical fire‑sensitive flora that are uniquely Tasmanian and nowhere else on the planet. They have diminishing habitat across the state for the Tasmanian devil, the spotted-tail quoll, the eastern quoll and the swift parrot, which is critically endangered and has only hundreds of birds left. They contain hollow-bearing trees that so many of these animals and mammals and more need to survive.
When the Hodgman Liberal government was elected in 2014, one of its first acts was to undo years of that collaborative effort. They tore up the Tasmanian Forest Agreement. They took the forests, the scientific community, conservationists and the forestry industry and the work that had been done to protect, and they junked all that work and reclassified these identified high‑conservation-value forests as future potential production forests. As FPPF, the government would like to have its cake and eat it too. On the one hand, they claim happily – as was done just last week – that 50 per cent of Tasmania’s land is safe and protected in reserves, while also trying to help Forestry Tasmania get Forest Stewardship Council certification status. Forestry Tasmania has twice failed in its attempts to do that.
At the same time as they are doing that, they have promised their forestry mates that the wood supply will never dry up and they can have these forests that ought to be protected for their values as an additional body of supply for them to get on and clear-fell and log. They want to convert this forest into active forest industry wood supply and ramp up the destruction of these high-conservation and mature forests.
Where are the conservation values? What are the conservation values? Where are these lots that are on the chopping block? The government stated that the 27 parcels of land they are going to clear-fell are regrowth forests predominantly from the north‑east and north‑west of the state. I have checked the work that was done by the independent scientific body and there is detailed information about the threatened flora, the threatened fauna, the tourist attractions, the adjoining reserves, the forest types, the names and the area for each of the 295 lots that comprise what is known as the 356,000 hectares of high-conservation forests that were reserved as future forests, now called FPPF by the government.
Some of the values in some of the lots include lot 14 in the Tarkine/takayna, which borders the Savage River National Park and a number of regional reserves. That place has important habitat for the rare narrow‑leaf geebung and the rapid river freshwater snail. Both of these are endemic Tasmanian species with restricted habitat ranges. That area also has the endangered Tasmanian devil and the captivating and extraordinary giant freshwater crayfish, which is already vulnerable from the extensive forestry logging that has occurred in river catchments that has silted the waters of the rivers it lives in.
Lot 35 of the 356,000 hectares of high-conservation forest is in Beaconsfield and is known as the Dazzler Range. It borders the Briggs Regional Reserve, the Andersons Creek Regional Reserve and the Dans Hill Conservation Area. It is a short distance from the Beaconsfield Mine and Heritage Centre, one of the major tourist attractions in the area. It has beautiful, tall, open forest with habitat for the endangered masked owl. The federal Department of Environment tells us that habitat clearing and fragmentation from forestry and land use change is a key threat to this beautiful owl’s survival.
Lot 69 is in the Blue Tiers and adjoins the Blue Tier Regional Reserve and the Frome Regional Reserve. This area holds many communities of rainforests and tall eucalypts. It is a critical land connection that links the Blue Tier Regional Reserve all the way east to the Bay of Fires and it is where the endemic velvet worm lives. This is a beautiful creature that lives nowhere else on Earth and also lives nowhere else on this island, Lutruwita.
Lot 191 is on the west coast and borders the Mount Dundas Regional Reserve and the Teepookana Forest Reserve. The West Coast Wilderness Railway, which is a major tourist attraction on the west coast and also a major employer on the west coast, runs right through this lot. Visitors to Tasmania who enjoy views of spectacular rainforests from the windows of the train might be treated instead to views of scorched earth and the charred remains of Tasmanian devils, which is what we have seen occurs after –
Dr Broad – In a rainforest?
Dr WOODRUFF – Yes, it has occurred in rainforests and elsewhere when the hot burns that Forestry does after a clear-felled logging coupe dry out rainforests. Unfortunately, that is what happens, Dr Broad.
Dr Broad – Dead devils in a rainforest?
Dr WOODRUFF – Dead devils can occur after incendiary burns.
Dr Broad – In a rainforest?
Dr WOODRUFF – We have seen them in other places around the state.
Mr Abetz – In other places, not rainforests.
Dr WOODRUFF – Not in that rainforest. I was just saying that these things occur the way forestry is done in Tasmania, from the way clear-fell logging and burning is done everywhere.
According to the Tasmanian Forest Carbon Study, most of Tasmania’s forest biomass is exported as woodchips to make paper products. These decompose and release their carbon back into the atmosphere after two years. The rest of that forest is left, after it is clear‑felled, on the forest coupe floor to be burnt in so‑called regeneration burns. These burns release millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year – in fact 1.4 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, calculated by Tasmania’s forest carbon estimate, per annum. That is just under half the total emissions from the whole of our transport sector, I calculate by the latest emissions data.
It is true that younger trees draw down carbon at a greater speed than old‑growth trees, but our mature old‑growth trees have been in the ground for hundreds of years, some of them for over a thousand years. In their lifetime, they draw and store, they sequester far more carbon than a regrowth tree that Forestry Tasmania cuts down after 50 years.
Where does the carbon go in the Tasmanian forests logged at the moment? We know that about 60 per cent of the biomass is left on site and burnt, 30 per cent from slash-burning and 30 per cent from woody debris left on the site. When that biomass is burnt, the emissions disappear into the atmosphere immediately. We have some 29 per cent mill waste and paper products that is pulp; that pulp is turned into paper products and mill waste and they biodegrade very fast. Seven per cent is peeler logs. Four per cent is sawlogs and they go into the sort of solid sawn timber; approximately 1 per cent goes to sawn timber and approximately 5 per cent to engineered timber.
That does not stack up with what the minister is trying to pretend to Tasmanians – that it is a simple exchange from a living, breathing, biodiverse forest to being locked up in tables and chairs. That is not what is happening in Tasmania. That is a myth that has been perpetuated in Tasmania for decades. It is misleading and untrue. It is designed to sow a false story so that people do not understand what is happening in our forests.
Another thing that happens when a regrowth forest is logged is that the trees will never grow large enough to have hollows for birds and other animals to nest in, and the age structure of the forest will never gain the complexity it needs to sustain diverse life. The 100‑year-old trees, and the 1000‑year-old trees that exist in Tasmania, will not fall and stay on the forest floor to become nursery carbon habitat. I have walked around the Grove of Giants in the Huon Valley. They are the largest, most glorious trees I have ever seen. I have never seen a bigger stand of trees anywhere in Tasmania, or on the planet. I do not think it exists anywhere else on the planet. When US ambassador Caroline Kennedy came to Tasmania and went up to the top of those trees, she asked the question: ‘So, tell me, why do these forests get logged?’ There is no response to that that makes any sense. You cannot possibly take a mature forest like the Grove of Giants, or any of the other forests in the 39,000 hectares, and see them as something that can be exchanged on a piece of paper to try and keep an unsustainable industry continuing into the future in the current climate and biodiversity crisis.
That land will be clear‑felled and burnt, the animals that survive the clear‑felling will die and the forest will dry out. It will change from a wet state to a dry state and become an increased fire risk to these are the sorts of animals that get killed in hot burns. They cannot run. Not all animals get killed in the clear-felling process, but they get scorched and burnt to death in the incendiary burns that Forestry Tasmania does afterwards, the so‑called ‘regeneration’ burns.
Community members from the Dial Range, Quamby Bluff, Derby, Maydena, Waratah and hundreds of other locations around Tasmania have experienced seeing their loved natural areas placed on Forestry Tasmania’s chopping block. They have rallied, held public meetings, written letters, contacted ministers, written articles in the newspaper, held forest walks, lodged complaints, done education campaigns in the local community and, when they have had no other choice, they have put their bodies on the line between loggers and the forests they love. That is what you do when you see senseless destruction occurring to precious, irreplaceable forests.
We know we have climate heating coming down the line. It is already here with us. We see the evidence of that in Tasmania, as we do around the world. We know we do not have time to regrow these mature forests to capture the carbon they will release when they have been logged and burned. Across Tasmania, many communities are waiting to see what will happen to the wild places they love; that they spend time in and use for exercise and pleasure, places that are used for tourism, places they thought were protected under the long and intense process of the Tasmanian Forestry Agreement and the legislation that went through in 2012, under which these forests should have been protected as future reserve forests. They want to know whether these forests will be converted to give Forestry Tasmania an extra 39,000 hectares in its cache of forests to clear-fell and burn.
I will now talk about the importance of carbon stores in our forests. It is popular forestry industry spin, perpetuated by the minister, to tout regrowth forests as being good for carbon sequestration. It is convenient to ignore the fact that carbon dioxide is only drawn out of the atmosphere and safely stored if the tree stays in the ground. Functionally, that is true. The real story of forests in Tasmania and the reality of how poor our non-Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) operations work in practice is that forests are chopped down, burnt and regrown for a short period, between 50 and 80 years. Some have also pointed to rotation cycles that are less than that. At that point they are harvested again.
Only 6 per cent of Tasmania’s forests will ever go on to be sequestered in long‑term wood products such as benches and lecterns. The study done by the Tree Projects and the Wilderness Society provides an update on the original research done by the Tasmanian Forest Carbon Study, published in 2012. That study found that over the 40 years from 2012 to 2050, only 10 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from Tasmania’s forests would ever be held in domestic wood products long‑term. That figure was calculated from a pre-Tasmanian Forest Agreement baseline, so the figure now would likely be even less. For comparison, Tasmania’s forestry sector currently emits that amount about every two years.
Why is the amount of a carbon supposedly locked up in wood products so low? In question time last week, I saw the minister slapping the top of the lectern and saying, ‘It is okay, everybody, what happens in Tasmanian forests is all the wood just gets transferred from one state in a tree to another state here in a lectern’, as though there is no loss. It would be amazing if that were true. If we could manage that carbon loss issue, the planet would be a different place and we probably would not be in the climate emergency we are in at the moment. The fact is there so much carbon loss from the way forestry is done in Tasmania, from the way clear-fell logging and burning is done everywhere.
According to the Tasmanian Forest Carbon Study, most of Tasmania’s forest biomass is exported as woodchips to make paper products. These decompose and release their carbon back into the atmosphere after two years. The rest of that forest is left, after it is clear‑felled, on the forest coupe floor to be burnt in so‑called regeneration burns. These burns release millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year – in fact 1.4 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, calculated by Tasmania’s forest carbon estimate, per annum. That is just under half the total emissions from the whole of our transport sector, I calculate by the latest emissions data.
It is true that younger trees draw down carbon at a greater speed than old‑growth trees, but our mature old‑growth trees have been in the ground for hundreds of years, some of them for over a thousand years. In their lifetime, they draw and store, they sequester far more carbon than a regrowth tree that Forestry Tasmania cuts down after 50 years.
Where does the carbon go in the Tasmanian forests logged at the moment? We know that about 60 per cent of the biomass is left on site and burnt, 30 per cent from slash-burning and 30 per cent from woody debris left on the site. When that biomass is burnt, the emissions disappear into the atmosphere immediately. We have some 29 per cent mill waste and paper products that is pulp; that pulp is turned into paper products and mill waste and they biodegrade very fast. Seven per cent is peeler logs. Four per cent is sawlogs and they go into the sort of solid sawn timber; approximately 1 per cent goes to sawn timber and approximately 5 per cent to engineered timber.
That does not stack up with what the minister is trying to pretend to Tasmanians – that it is a simple exchange from a living, breathing, biodiverse forest to being locked up in tables and chairs. That is not what is happening in Tasmania. That is a myth that has been perpetuated in Tasmania for decades. It is misleading and untrue. It is designed to sow a false story so that people do not understand what is happening in our forests.
Another thing that happens when a regrowth forest is logged is that the trees will never grow large enough to have hollows for birds and other animals to nest in, and the age structure of the forest will never gain the complexity it needs to sustain diverse life. The 100‑year-old trees, and the 1000‑year-old trees that exist in Tasmania, will not fall and stay on the forest floor to become nursery carbon habitat. I have walked around the Grove of Giants in the Huon Valley. They are the largest, most glorious trees I have ever seen. I have never seen a bigger stand of trees anywhere in Tasmania, or on the planet. I do not think it exists anywhere else on the planet. When US ambassador Caroline Kennedy came to Tasmania and went up to the top of those trees, she asked the question: ‘So, tell me, why do these forests get logged?’ There is no response to that that makes any sense. You cannot possibly take a mature forest like the Grove of Giants, or any of the other forests in the 39,000 hectares, and see them as something that can be exchanged on a piece of paper to try and keep an unsustainable industry continuing into the future in the current climate and biodiversity crisis.
That land will be clear‑felled and burnt, the animals that survive the clear‑felling will die and the forest will dry out. It will change from a wet state to a dry state and become an increased fire risk to other forests and to local communities living nearby.
That is what happened around the community of Geeveston in the fires in 2019. That is exactly what happened. The highest risk areas were found afterwards to have been ones that were regrowth forestry coupes – they were plantation areas. It was the areas of wetter, intact native forests that burnt less than the others. That is a scientific fact, and that is information which has been repeated from studies in other parts of Australia. It is not just in Tasmania, but also in Victoria and other places, that there is a clear risk that intact, moist forests – they do not have to be wet rainforests, but moist forests – dry out and never recover. On a landscape scale that leads to overall drying in large regions, which is what we have already seen in Tasmania.
By 2050, if things continue like they are today, Tasmania’s forestry sector will emit a total of 186,000 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent. That is not what we need in a climate crisis when the planet is tipping into dangerous levels of heat. They are figures from Tasmania’s Forest Carbon Study.
The science is clear. Immediately stopping native forest logging is the forest management response that we need to draw and store the most carbon from the atmosphere. I would have thought that the minister would understand the importance of this if he understands, as I hope he do, that human‑induced climate change is speeding up at a dangerous rate, and that there are things we can do to avoid tipping the planet into a dangerous place. Everyone, everywhere across the planet, should be doing everything they can to bring down our carbon emissions.
In 2012, the state government, under a Greens climate change minister, commissioned the Tasmanian Forest Carbon Study report, which modelled the impact of different forest management scenarios on our state’s carbon sequestration. It found that stopping all native forest logging immediately would have the most positive impact. According to that report, if we stop native forest logging on private and public land, then by 2050 we could draw down and hold onto just under 200 million tonnes of climate‑heating gases. Would we not want to do that as real climate action? Is that not what climate action looks like – to make the changes that we can today?
We are talking about the government continuing forest management as we are today. If that were to happen, at best just 93 million tonnes of carbon would be held by our forests over the same period to 2050. That is 100 million tonnes of carbon extra that we are contributing to our overheated atmosphere over the next 25 years. That is something we can avoid. We can decide to avoid doing that. We can choose not to release those gases. We can do everything we can to strengthen the conservation of the forests, to help them maintain their moistness, which is their best protection against bushfires, and to look after the incredible plants and animals that they hold.
We need to end native forest logging and to shift to plantations only. We need to increase the rotation length and the growth rates of plantations. That is a strategy that a minister and a government who took climate action seriously would implement.
We are here today talking about this because people want to know exactly what the government intends to do and where those 27 parcels of land that collectively represent 39,000 hectares of Tasmania’s reserve estate are. Where exactly are they? We know that the minister has been dishonest with us and is playing with Tasmanians, because we saw the media release from 29 February.
Mr ABETZ – Point of order, Deputy Speaker, reflections on people about being dishonest is clearly imputing an improper motive. I ask it to be withdrawn. I put up with enough of it.
DEPUTY SPEAKER – Did you take personal –
Mr ABETZ – I did.
Dr WOODRUFF – Deputy Speaker, I did not say the minister was lying. I said the minister had been dishonest with Tasmanians. I was about to point to the press release. It is my right to provide the evidence to Tasmania about how the minister is not being honest.
DEPUTY SPEAKER – The minister has taken personal offence and I ask that it be withdrawn –
Dr WOODRUFF – What are the words that the minister takes particular offence to?
Mr Abetz – Dishonest.
Dr WOODRUFF – I withdraw that you are dishonest.
Mr Abetz – Thank you.
Dr WOODRUFF – The misleading information that the government provided in a media release and the minister has continued to present the same position in the response to questions when I asked him last week is that the government has already identified which parcels of land they were going to make available for logging. That is what the media release said on the 29th: that the government has already identified them. Minister Felix Ellis was Resources minister then and he said:
The parcels have been identified on the basis that the state’s comprehensive, adequate and representative CAR reserve system is not compromised, that there is no negative impact on STT’s current and future certification and that maximise carbon carrying capacity, fire protection and recreational opportunities.
How is it possible, if all of that had already been identified, for the minister of Resources not to have had that information last week? I hope the minister has got it with him now. I expect that he probably would have decided that that is the right thing to do, because it is pretty clear that the government’s known for more than six months exactly what parcels of land they are talking about. We had a number of community members outside demanding that the government be more transparent about this, so we are calling on the minister to release that information.
