Ms O’CONNOR (Hobart) – Mr President, I move –
That the Legislative Council –
(1) Notes the long-delayed State of the Environment Report 2024 prepared by the Tasmanian Planning Commission and tabled in the Council on 17 September 2024.
(2) Further notes the findings in the Report that of the 29 indicators:
(a) 16 (55%) are deteriorating, including: Sea surface temperature, kelp, threatened marine fish, beach change, saltmarshes, migratory shorebirds, pests, soil diversity and condition, land use intensification, native vegetation extent and fragmentation, native vegetation, threatened flora, threatened fauna;
(b) six (21%) are stable, including: fisheries, the extent of marram grass, Macquarie Island Albatrosses, Gulls, resident shorebirds, and greenhouse gas emissions;
(c) five (17%) are unknown, including: Soil stability, wetlands, water quality, liquid waste, and solid waste; and
(d) only two (7%) are improving, including the extent of rice grass, and particulate matter in the air.
(3) Recognises the Report paints a dismal and challenging picture of decline that must be arrested.
(4) Further notes the 16 Report recommendations including:
(a) Development of a long-term vision and strategy for Tasmania’s environment;
(b) Exploring opportunities for the government to collaborate with the Aboriginal community in ways that continue to incorporate Aboriginal knowledge and values into better care of the environment;
(c) Development of an environmental data strategy;
(d) Contemporising the Resource Management and Planning System objectives and legislation;
(e) Establishing more marine protected areas;
(f) Undertaking a review of Tasmania’s coastal policy;
(g) Supporting the collection and analysis of fisheries-independent data;
(h) Improving native vegetation mapping and information; (i) Implementing measures to end illegal vegetation clearance;
(j) Continued investment in Tasmania’s terrestrial reserve system in order to maintain the integrity of the current reserve estate;
(k) Implementation of a state-wide soil monitoring program;
(l) Strengthening fire management activities;
(m) Regular review of programs dealing with biosecurity matters and invasive species to ensure these programs are properly resourced, strengthened and prioritised;
(n) Development of a broader water policy, monitoring and reporting approach;
(o) Air quality monitoring and emissions reduction across all sectors and
(p) Implementation of the Waste and Resource Recovery Strategy.
(5) Calls on the Government to implement all of the recommendations in the report for the health of our environment, the health of our people, the health of our economy and the future of lutruwita / Tasmania.
Mr President, we talk about many important and meaningful subjects in here each day. I do not think we talk about the environment quite enough. If we, as a parliament, and the government do not respond to the findings and recommendations of the State of the Environment report, we are wilfully consigning Tasmanian children, our kids, generations not yet born to a more depleted island.
We have some choices to make here. Before I begin, I want to acknowledge that for tens of thousands of years, we do not know how many thousands of years, but fair to say, for countless millennia Tasmanian Aboriginal people looked after this island. They understood its seasons and its cycles. They had patterns of landscape management, of coal burning, of hunting, that after 50 to 60 thousand years of human habitation of this island, left the island in an extraordinary, not that any of us were there at the time, but environmentally sound and healthy state – 50,000 or 60,000 years. So, in the last 221 years, the damage that we have done to this beautiful island is profound and it is detailed in a State of the Environment report that is 10 years overdue, where we had a government that missed two statutory deadlines.
What this report tells us is that the state of the environment across multiple indicators is in decline. This is not due to natural causes, it is due to us. It has happened since European colonisation of Lutruwita, Tasmania. Now, there is a feeling – I think a lot of Tasmanians have and it is not something that is all that easy to articulate – but it is a sense of being blessed, which we are. We live in one of the most beautiful, peaceful, safe places in the world and it is that feeling as a Tasmanian, as you look around you and you realise. You know, and for many of us, I think it happens in subtle ways everyday. What an extraordinary place this is. So we have a duty and a solemn responsibility to look after it. We have a solemn duty to respond to the State of the Environment Report 2024 and in doing so today, in bringing this motion forward today, I want to honour the great Tasmanians who have, or who did dedicate their lives to protecting this island’s natural environment or dedicated their lives to being part of a civil society movement that stood up and continues to stand up to defend this place’s environment.
One of my favourite quotes about Tasmania came from Olegas Truchanas. Where, he said:
Is there any reason why Tasmania should not be more beautiful on the day we leave it than on the day we came? If we can revise our attitudes towards the land under our feet, if we can accept the role of steward and depart from the role of the conqueror, if we can accept that man and nature are inseparable parts of the unified whole, then Tasmania can be a shining beacon in a dull uniform and largely artificial world.
It was a legacy’s images of the south-west wilderness that brought that extraordinary place to the world’s attention. I do not know how many honourable members know this, but the 1967 bushfires burned a lot of his original photography. So it just made him more determined to go back into the wilderness to again capture this place because he understood in order for it to be protected, in order for it to be saved, people needed to see it. People who could not walk into it needed to understand what it was.
Then of course, Peter Dombrovskis, who idolised Truchanas, said: ‘We now we have a chance now to save these places, to stop them from being destroyed. Once they are gone, they will be gone forever’. This is the same Peter Dombrovskis whose iconic image of Rock Island Bend changed the national conversation about the then Grey government’s plans to damn the Franklin. He said: ‘When you go out there, you do not get away from it all. You get back to it all. You come home to what is important. You come home to yourself’.
He said – I know there are other honourable members who share this feeling. I certainly do – ‘Whether distant and strange or close and familiar, I need contact with wild nature. It is as necessary to my soul as breathing and eating out of my body. It gives meaning to my life and reaffirms my kinship with all life.'(tbc quotes)
Mr President, both Olegas Truchanas and Peter Dombrovski died in the wilderness, thank you, and it sounds cliche to say it, but they definitely died in a place they love dearly, doing something that they loved very much and knew was important. This place, its environment
This place, its environment, has inspired photographers, artists, writers, poets, the intrepid, the lonely and the in‑love‑with‑nature. It certainly inspired the late and mighty Professor Jamie Kirkpatrick, who died recently. I do want to pass on my sincere condolences to Jamie’s family, to the many, many people who loved him, who he helped over the journey, who he taught. Just one of the greatest Tasmanians who ever lived.
Just briefly, on Jamie Kirkpatrick, before I get to the report itself – Jamie has been working for Tasmania’s environment since the 1970s. He led the scientific and academic charge for the recognition and protection of our unique biodiversity, ecosystems and geoheritage. He published hundreds of scientific papers and articles underpinning community campaigns and collectively contributing to the understanding and incremental protection of some of the world’s most precious places. As a member of the former Save Ralphs Bay Incorporated Group, I know that for the ‘Ralphies’, being able to tap into Professor Kirkpatrick’s great knowledge, to be able to ask him questions, to be able to reference his work, was really important to us in protecting Ralph’s Bay, and all the life that it sustains, from a Gold Coast‑style canal estate.
He said when he arrived here in 1972:
I came to Tasmania, saw this amazing place, knew learning about the socioeconomic impediments, it was worth fighting for and decided to dedicate the rest of my life to doing just that.
What a remarkable Tasmanian. I am certainly very thankful for his life. I wonder, as I was thinking today, what would Jamie Kirkpatrick have made of the State of the Environment Report 2024? I think he would have found it unsurprising and quite dispiriting reading. Certainly, what it tells us is that of the 29 indicators that were measured in the report, 16 – more than half – are deteriorating. Six are stable, probably, but we do not have enough data to be absolutely sure of that. Two are improving, and five of the indicators are unknown. Again, it is because there has been a failure of government to invest in proper monitoring, research and data gathering that there is some inability to understand the state of the environment in key areas.
If you want to have a look at what is in decline and has declined significantly over the last 10 years, sea surface temperatures are rising on the east coast of Tasmania. We have some of the fastest‑warming waters in the world. That has impacts on people who live along the east coast, people who rely on that natural environment to earn a living. It has potential future impacts on the tourism industry for the east coast. Our kelp, our incredible kelp, is in decline. We have species hurtling towards extinction. We have threatened marine fish, the Maugean skate. We know that the red handfish and the spotted handfish are also in trouble. We have seen sea level rise and storm surge damage our beaches. Our salt marshes, those incredible vital ecosystems – the lungs, in many ways, of the coast – are also in decline. Migratory shorebird numbers are plummeting. We have more pests here than we did before, bigger biosecurity challenges. Our soils are in trouble, overused, under‑protected. We have certainly intensified the way we use, misuse and abuse land. Native vegetation is being illegally cleared. Forestry is listed as a pressure on eight of the 29 indicators. I note that the State of the Environment report does not recommend an end to native forest logging, but it certainly points to native forest logging as a very significant contributor to the state of environmental decline in Tasmania.
We have fragmentation of habitats, a massive loss of native vegetation, increasingly threatened flora, threatened fauna. We have the war on wildlife, which is going extremely well, as is the war on women, which we heard today. In budget Estimates, we got back the details of the crop protection or property protection permits. There are still permits being issued to kill thousands and thousands of native Tasmanian animals. In some ways, that is just a lazy policy response, where instead of working with farmers on ways that you might minimise the impact on wildlife, which was there first, we just hand out permits to shoot them. We shoot black swans here. I cannot work out why, as a farmer, you would want to pop off black swans, but we do. Our rivers are in trouble, as well.
There are a number of recommendations – 16 recommendations – made by the Tasmanian Planning Commission and the team that worked on this report. I say a big thank‑you on behalf of the Greens – certainly in this place – to the authors of this report and the team that worked on it in the Tasmanian Planning Commission. It is meticulous. It is clear and easy to understand, and within its quite cautious language there is a strong sense of urgency. The word ‘essential’ is used in the State of the Environment report multiple times in multiple chapters and recommendations. ‘It is essential’, say the authors of this report, ‘that we develop a long‑term vision and strategy for the environment.’
How is it that we could not have one in Tasmania? How is it that we can have an Environment Protection Authority (EPA); we can have the Environmental Management and Pollution Control Act 1994 (EMPCA); we can have the Land Use Planning and Approvals Act 1993 (LUPA). We have all this legislative framework, which is ostensibly part of a protective framework, but the State of the Environment report makes it clear it is not working, because it is in decline.
Where are the worst pressures? In the coast and marine area, sea surface temperatures: the condition is poor and getting worse. From October 1944 to May 2023, monthly mean sea surface temperatures for June‑October inclusive have increased by approximately 2.5 degrees Celsius, and between, in the summer months, November and May have increased between 3.1 degrees Celsius and 3.8 degrees Celsius. That is the waters around Tasmania. It is caused by a rapid warming of the Tasman Sea and the increased strength and persistence of the East Australian Current.
Our threatened marine fish: poor and getting worse. The report notes conservation efforts have helped some fish, but many are declining, including the skate, the red and spotted handfish, which are vulnerable to the impacts of habitat degradation, pollution and invasive species. In some good news, the great white shark and the bluefin tuna are improving from historic lows. I might just say, on the bluefin tuna, there are fishers who catch that down on the Tasman Peninsula. It is a critically endangered fish and it is still being fished. Sometimes, because of the limits on that fishing, you will see that there is excess bluefin fish dumped near wharves. Why is it that we would allow fishing of bluefin tuna if we fished them to the point that they are critically endangered?
There is some good news in terms of our fisheries but, again, there are data issues. We have ocean warming. According to the State of the Environment report, about 57 per cent of fish stocks are sustainable and a quarter of them are depleted. We need stronger management strategies. Fisheries management needs to be a real priority of government.
There has been a long-term decline of salt marsh extent and condition, ongoing effects from land clearing and climate change causing erosion and dieback. Our salt marshes are not unlike mangroves. Where I grew up in south-east Queensland, all the fisher folk understood that mangroves were fish nurseries, and we intuitively understood their value to a healthy coastline. In Tasmania, we are not taking care of our salt marshes. There has been research out, I believe since 1997 by Robert Costanza et al, which talks about estuaries and salt marshes as being the most important ecosystem for human survival in terms of the environmental, economic and social values that they bring.
Some good news: the Macquarie Island albatross is apparently in a fair state and the trend is stable. Macquarie Island is a long way from here. Would it not be terrific if we had a government that prioritised, for example, the survival of the fastest parrot on earth, the swift parrot? We do not have that because what we have, and you can see it in the State of the Environment report, is a blithe and arrogant belief that business as usual will be okay because governments have short attention spans; they are about four years long. Within the space of a term, you do not get many governments, even really good ones, planning for the future and that is part of the problem. The other part of the problem is major parties, who have been running this island since Federation, who have been very easy pickings for corporations.
We have seen it with the salmon industry, Mr President. We have an ancient species on the verge of extinction in Macquarie Harbour and a Premier who has $4000 ticket dinners with corporate salmon and has made a promise to JBS and Huon, for example, that the industry will expand. And his words, quoted, which he never denied were: ‘It won’t be popular, but we’re going to do it’, which he said to JBS, one of the Batista brothers. It is just one example of taking this island for granted and thinking that we can just take and take and keep taking from it. The war on nature involves, usually, men in suits in boardrooms. Men are having a pretty bad rap in here today and I am sorry to all the men –
Ms Forrest – There are some women who certainly participate in this space. Make no mistake.
Ms O’CONNOR – I know. Absolutely, I know. It has long been corporate players in their suits and, yes, mostly men historically, but certainly there would be plenty of people of other genders who are making these decisions for corporate profit that lead to poisoning, draining, bulldozing and burning of natural systems, and it is all lawful. As Olegas Truchanas said, ‘This island could be a beacon to the world,’ and yet we are not seizing the opportunity to make it so. We seem to think that we can keep taking from Tasmania and everything will be fine. We seem to think – the government seems to think – that business as usual is the answer, and we just go to the recommendations of the State of the Environment report. These are not in any way radical. I have read the report and I have even been a tiny bit disappointed in it because there could have been stronger calls made. Some of the calls, for example, are for increased monitoring of data. That is nice, but we do not want to be monitoring species to extinction. We want to be taking the kind of action that saves the species and saves their future. The State of the Environment report makes these recommendations not just to government, but to the parliament, and all of them, if you look at them, are reasonable and achievable.
There could be a political consensus built around these recommendations and it is surely a responsibility of government to try to do that. Nobody, surely, wants their legacy to be a natural environment that is in a worse state when they leave this earth than when they arrived. We know from the World Wildlife Fund’s analysis that over the past 50 years, within the space of many of our lifetimes, 73 per cent of the world’s species have disappeared, 73 per cent of the world’s wild animals have disappeared, three-quarters, in our lifetime. That is why you do not see any more those great flocks of swift parrots that used to fly through Hobart seasonally. When I first arrived here, one flew into the window of my car. I was probably in some ways part of the beginning of its extinction. We do not see, for example, those great swarms of insects. People remember driving up and down the midlands and there were thousands of bugs which hit your car.
Ms Forrest – Bugs on your windscreen, that is what it was.
Ms O’CONNOR – Yes, hit your windscreen.
Ms Rattray – They are still there.
Ms O’CONNOR – Not like they were.
Ms Rattray – They are still on mine. Perhaps they like my car better than yours.
Ms O’CONNOR – Perhaps they have all gone to the lovely east coast. Anyway, it is a state of decline that needs addressing. The commission recommends that the Tasmanian government develops a long-term vision for the Tasmanian environment and a strategy to implement that vision, acknowledging that it is a whole-of-society response which is needed to care for the environment. That is true, but it is unfair to place responsibility for this degradation and decline on individual Tasmanians. It is unfair and unreasonable in the same way it is unreasonable to place the responsibility for climate change on the shoulders of an individual person because these decisions, where the power lies, is with governments and with corporations, and they are failing. They are failing to protect the environment.
There needs to be reports to parliament on progress towards the goals and targets of the strategy every two years or so, says the commission. Recommendation 2, something we have never done enough of, and I know there has been some positive move in this direction, but the commission recommends that the Tasmanian Government explores opportunities to collaborate with the Aboriginal community in ways that continue to incorporate Aboriginal knowledge and values into better care of the environment. This is a critical aspect of maintaining and restoring healthy cultural and ecological landscapes. This is how we succeed and prosper as an island community looking after our environment, walking with the palawa to learn more about respecting country and how to look after it, to deeply understand and acknowledge that we are part of the natural world, not over and above it, and it is that attitude of thinking we are somehow separate from it that is hurtling us towards very difficult times.
Recommendation 3: develop an environmental data strategy. The Commission recommends the government leads the development of an environmental data management strategy that promotes data standardisation, sharing and accessibility to ensure the best information is readily available to inform environmental decision making. Again, what we have seen in recent years is a decline in investment in the state service.
When I first got here as a journalist, the Parks and Wildlife Service, through the then Lands Department, had specialists in every ecological field – the Nigel brothers, the Nick Mooneys, and the Mark Holdsworths of this world – who were paid to deeply study species, their habitats, the threats to them and how we can protect that species and the science and the data that was being gathered then was extremely rich. Over the years, those functions have not been completely taken away, but the focus on research has diminished because for governments, research takes a long time and it is not something you can get an obvious productive outcome from, but is essential that we invest in science and we invest in sound data because if we do not know what is going on, we will have no idea how to tackle it and make it better if we can.
We have a resource management and planning system which has done a fair job. Its first principle is one of sustainable development, sustainable management and use, but it needs upgrading. The commission recommends the government reviews the existing legislated sustainable development objectives within the RMPS to ensure they are contemporary and effective by aligning them with the United Nations Agenda for Sustainable Development and the coming Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
Recommendation 5. This is an area of public policy which has been completely abandoned for the best part of 12 years. Tasmania used to be part of a National Marine Protected Areas Strategy that was agreed to by the federal government and states and territories. We made commitments to set aside representative bioregional ecosystems for protection. We made commitments to establish marine protected areas, not lines on maps, but genuine no-take marine protected areas in places where we know there is real pressure. If we are serious about fish for the future, then we need to understand that you have to protect our certain ecosystems so that they have resilience within them and are generating life for the future. In New Zealand ‑ I think I have told this story in here before, but it is worth repeating ‑ where fisher folk were initially fiercely resistant to no take marine protected areas, they ultimately became their strongest advocates because the fishing industry was ultimately an economic beneficiary of having some areas where you could not fish which could become a healthy fish nurseries.
It is time. We cannot have this antagonism towards protection. If we are going to look after this island and the complexity of the ecosystems that are part of it, we have to do some brave things and take people with us. Government should not be scared of setting up marine protected areas. It is almost like there has been a political reaction to the rise of the conservation movement and the green movement, so that there is a feeling in government that we will just push back against anything that is green. We have to get over this. It is childish and ultimately self‑defeating on a grand scale. Let us get back to working out a marine protected areas strategy, work with coastal communities, scientists, recreational and professional fishers and come up with a plan that we can get behind because before it was called the Tasmanian Planning Commission, the Resource, Planning and Development Commission was doing fantastic work on a bioregional level, understanding the nine marine bioregions around this island, getting into the science and the complexity of them and making sure that we had a policy response so that they are well managed. Let us get back to establishing more MPAs.
Recommendation 6, and this is something that will probably come up a bit tomorrow and the next day and in the weeks ahead, but the Commission calls for a comprehensive review of the Tasmanian Coastal Policy in response to pressures and threats to natural and built coastal environments, including consideration of the impacts of climate change, development, recreational activity and other activities on important coastal environments and habitats, as well as matters of habitat protection. What we are being presented with in terms of a State Coastal Policy review which follows the validation bill is something which is not about strengthening the State Coastal Policies’ protective capacity, but it is about making it easier for developers to build on and access the coast. That is what the planned review of the State Coastal Policy is founded on, because it has come up after the Robbins Island situation and a clear problem that government and some developers have with provision 1.4.1 and 1.4.2 of the State Coastal Policy. It is sad that we are discussing changing the State Coastal Policy but it is not about protecting ecosystems. That is not the conversation that we have been having to date. It is more about providing certainty for industry and developers.
Recommendation 8: Improve native vegetation mapping and information; a recommendation that the government continues to improve native vegetation mapping and information by building on existing TASVEG data sets to enable more timely assessment of native vegetation clearance. Again, another neglected data set where you can look at that data set and understand that the relationship between the data set and what is happening on the ground is almost zero because it is not a data set that is being invested in and maintained to the level that it needs to be.
The ninth recommendation is that the Tasmanian Government acts on illegal native vegetation clearance, and this is not a problem that is unique to Tasmania. In Queensland, where I grew up, they flatten thousands of hectares in a day to put cattle in and cotton with very little constraint. Native vegetation clearing is happening here too. There are arguments, people will say ‘this is private land and farmers should be able to do largely as they please on private land’, but in the end, none of us really own anything except our own skin and the notion that a piece of land ‑ an area of land that has been in our family, on our little place at Nubeena, I never really feel like I own the land because we are just passing through, and it is a feeling of wanting to be a custodian for it and love it properly.
I understand why farmers should feel that they should have maximum flexibility about how they manage their land. Overwhelmingly, land management in the agricultural sector is very good, but there is a custodianship issue here. We should be encouraging land owners and primary producers through legislation and regulation, if necessary, to prevent unnecessary native vegetation land clearing on their properties. The report found that the state of our soil stability is in unknown condition, but our soil diversity and condition are deteriorating. It is recommended that the government considers the need for a state-wide soil monitoring program to build on the existing soil and land resource information surveys undertaken in Tasmania and facilitate the reporting of soil condition and trends.
We all know that this island has very old soils. They are not, as I understand, particularly rich, for example, in iodine or some of those sorts of minerals. That said, we also have a very a robust primary production sector and a clean, green and natural brand which is in part based on our agricultural sector and the health of our soils. If we do not look after our soils, honestly, we are stuffed. I might just say on that point, the most important animal to the health of soils on this island is the echidna. It is arguably one of the most important animals on the island because echidnas, in their special little way, aerate the soil which helps to keep it healthy. They are arguably doing a better job of looking after the soil than any government in Tasmania to date.
Recommendation 12 is one of the most significant recommendations in this report. It is that the Tasmanian Government continue to strengthen and support fire management activities, including prevention, preparedness, response and recovery activities which are essential to the care of Tasmania’s environment. This is an area of public policy which we are nowhere near close to being on top of. Any member in this place who has heard Dr David Bowman speak about fire risk to communities will be very cognisant of the risk to our communities as the planet heats. We need to have a very robust fire prevention and fire management and firefighting system in place that is properly resourced so that our TFS, SES, Parks and Wildlife Service, and Forestry Tasmania firefighters know that the government and the parliament are there to support them to do what will become an increasingly demanding and difficult job in the years ahead. It should be an absolute priority of any decent government to invest in fire management.
We have Recommendation 13, which is about biosecurity and invasive species. It was really great to see the State of the Environment report name the fallow deer in the room and call for the removal of protections by regulation of wild fallow deer from regulatory frameworks, including under the Nature Conservation of Wildlife Regulations. It is perverse and stupid politics to think that we can continue to let a feral deer breed up here and not be eradicated from the island. They are already costing farmers tens of thousands of dollars a year in fencing and lost crops. They are in the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area, anyone who drives up over the central plateau at dusk will see a deer. They are everywhere. Part of the reason they are everywhere and causing so much damage is because no government in the history of this place since colonisation or since deer were introduced has done anything meaningful to control deer numbers. The consequences of that are really significant. That animal does not belong in this landscape and we should remove the protections from it, engage the shooting community and just have an eradication program that deals with these species over a sustained period of time, with the resources in it and doing it humanely.
The water issue, Recommendation 14 – we need a broader water policy monitoring and reporting approach. Again, this is one of those areas where I think the Commission could have been a bit stronger in its language. It does cite former premier Mr Gutwein’s PESRAC report, which states that:
To meet future demand for water and ensure that water quality is sufficient for our agricultural and environmental needs, we need a broader water resource policy approach that addresses resource allocation, water security and water quality, setting specific targets and binding the State Government to monitoring and reporting, as well as more transparency. This should be an immediate priority.
We obtained, and I have talked to members about this before, through the caretaker period, in the 2021 state election, we obtained the Temporal and Spatial Patterns in River Health across Tasmania report, which found that more than half of all the major river systems on the island are in decline. This was a report where the science was so robust and so damning that government tried to hide it. We asked for it, then we tried to get it through Right to Information, could not get it, then it was provided to us in the caretaker period. You cannot expect to be taken seriously as a government on the environment if you are trying to hide basic data about river health. It is very poor form.
The Commission recommends the government addresses these issues. It does not mention, however, the unfairness and inequity over water metering, for example, where you have some primary producers who have water meters and some who do not. It is a historical issue that no government has taken on. Some primary producers are paying whatever rate for the water that they can count that they use and other primary producers who are on unmetered allocations – who knows what they are using? It is an unfair, inequitable system.
We also need to be quite thoughtful about how we roll out irrigation on the island too, because if you do irrigation badly you can have issues with salinity in the soil, it can have a degrading and scouring effect on our soils and we need to address that.
One area of the State of the Environment report which showed some improving in particulate matters is in air‑quality monitoring and emissions reduction, and the recommendation is that the government continues to support monitoring efforts in Tasmania and the expansion of this to meet requirements of strengthened Australian air‑quality standards. I will say at this point, because I cannot resist, every autumn the air quality here is appalling because Forestry Tasmania is napalming clear felled forests, pumping tens and hundreds of thousands of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Recommendation 16, the final recommendation, is for the implementation of the waste and resource recovery strategy. I remember when the Hodgman government first came to office, they talked about establishing a circular economy. That was 10 years ago. We enacted a container deposit scheme, this is what the member for McIntyre was talking about the other day, and still, nothing. We still have very little emphasis going into reducing household waste. Could we please have a waste‑management strategy for this island?
There is a word I found the other day when I was doing some reading that explains how some of us feel when we read the State of the Environment report or when we think about the state of the world. It is ‘nostalgia’, and it comes from two Greek words put together: ‘gnosis’, which is knowledge, and ‘algos’, which is pain. Nostalgia is something that climate scientists, for example, suffer from. It is the pain of knowing.
What the State of the Environment report does, first of all, if you read it: you will feel sad. There is just no way around that. I feel sad. But, it gives us an opportunity to understand the challenges. Not all of them, it is a solid report, but it does not and it could not capture everything, and there are data gaps that prevented a deeper understanding of some impacts on some systems. We have this real opportunity here to understand that there is a moment here. The world is in trouble. The climate is heating, biodiversity is in decline, but here we are on this tiny island, this little heart‑shaped island, cooled by the Southern Ocean: most beautiful. It is even more – this is a big call – but for anyone who has been to New Zealand, it is a stunningly beautiful country, but it is very environmentally degraded in parts. We are not there yet. We should not allow ourselves to get there. This is a parliament with 50 intelligent people of goodwill. Even though we all come from different backgrounds and have different stories, fundamentally, on about 80 per cent of issues, we share the same values. All of us, I am sure, love this island.
We have an opportunity here. Not to just say, ‘Oh yeah, that was the State of the Environment report, a couple of statutory deadlines late. It’s done now. We don’t have to think about it anymore’ – and, if you are in government, ‘Oh, thank God that’s out of the way’. We cannot do that. We cannot do that to our kids. We cannot do that to our grandchildren. There are things in this report that everyone should be able to agree on. We should all agree – I am sure we all agree. Tasmania needs a long‑term vision and strategy for the environment. That is not a big ask.
Through the PESRAC consultation, it came back that that is what Tasmanians want. Twenty years ago, when Jim Bacon was the premier, through the Tasmania Together process it became really clear through an extensive, statewide consultation process that Tasmanians wanted the environment looked after. Something like 70 per cent of people who were surveyed through Tasmania Together said they wanted old‑growth – and that was the terminology used at the time – logging to end by 2010. We are still logging old forests, at a massive loss.
I am sorry this has been a sort of sad telling. There is nothing cheery in the State of the Environment report, and we cannot confine ourselves to only looking at the positives. Today has been, in this place, a very moving and profound day of debate. We have talked about weighty, significant and, in some instances, utterly tragic matters. The state of our environment is weighty and significant, and we have an opportunity here to avoid tragedy. We can look after our rivers, can we not? We can look after our soils. We can have good regulation and legislation in place to respond to a report that has come out of an independent planning body that is very measured. It is a very reasoned body of work.
I have not heard, and I note the Minister for Parks and formerly Environment has come into the chamber and I hope it is to respond on this matter, even though I know that the State of the Environment report is a responsibility for the Minister for Planning, but I have not heard a meaningful statement from Government about the State of the Environment report. We ask questions about it in the House of Assembly and in Estimates and in here and all we get is this glib, ‘Oh well, we’ll consider its recommendations and maybe get back to you sometime’. That is how it feels. It is not good enough. It is not good enough to have a body of work like this done and everyone just move on. The Greens certainly will not be letting parliament move on from the State of the Environment report.
We pressured the Government into doing this. We cajoled them over years as they missed statutory deadlines and finally shamed the Planning minister before the most recent Planning minister, Mr Ferguson, into making sure it was done. Now the work has been done by the Planning Commission. It is on government and all of us to deal with this. Why are we standing here, nearly six weeks after this report came out and we have not had a meaningful response from government? It is a core responsibility of any government to look after the environment. It is honestly absolutely a core responsibility and to do anything less is negligent and reckless.
Mr President, I am sorry if any member is annoyed because I have talked at length about depressing and distressing things, but the state of our environment is distressing.
Mr Gaffney – I like the bit about the echidna
Ms O’CONNOR – Did you, more than the swift parrot slaughter?
Mr Gaffney – Yes, echidnas are good.
Ms O’CONNOR – Okay, thanks. I will get some more echidna stories in there in future. What was that?
Ms Forrest – You were talking about how they mate? That is interesting.
Ms O’CONNOR – I hope it is face to face.
Ms Forrest – You did not know? That is an interesting story – there is a little dance that goes on.
Mr PRESIDENT – Maybe for another day.
Ms Forrest – There is a little dance that goes on, a big dance, actually.
Ms O’CONNOR – I do thank members for their time in listening to this. If you have not read the State of the Environment report, even read the summary report. We have a responsibility to do that and the Greens are in this place to keep this on the table and to make sure that we are talking about these issues and pushing government to take them seriously because we are here to work constructively. We are here to seek consensus. We will not agree on everything, but we will do everything we can to make it better. I hope that the government understands that there is a willingness in the community; there is a yearning for things to be better. Politically, if the right conversations were had, I think there is a willingness to do things differently. We can do it. We can make this island beacon of hope to the world.
I note the motion. I hope other members take the opportunity to think about this matter and hope that the Government understands we are not going to let the pressure off on this and we think we represent overwhelmingly everyday Tasmanians who want our beautiful environment looked after.
