Dr WOODRUFF (Franklin – Leader of the Greens) – Honourable Speaker, I want to start by recognising that this parliament sits on Muwinina land. The Tasmanian Aboriginal people and the Muwanina who were here before us were dispossessed with violence and those people did not survive colonisation. The Palawa/Pakana today are custodians of this country, as they have been for thousands of years. I pay my respects to them and acknowledge today’s proud and strong elders of community. Their practices, hopes and wisdoms are grounded in Country and we have so much to learn.
The Greens stand with Tasmanian Aboriginal people in demanding justice from the colonising government that never enacted the treaty it promised. We stand with them in demanding laws to properly protect this country and the living landscape shaped by hundreds of generations.
For Tasmanian Aboriginal people, 2026 is particularly critical. It’s many shameful years now since a Liberal minister confirmed the woeful and ineffectual Aboriginal Heritage Act laws in this state. They don’t protect globally significant first nations heritage and the government needs to make good its commitment to provide legislation this year that properly protects country and fully consults with the Aboriginal community in so doing.
We also call on the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, Ms Archer, to be the one who finally returns lands after decades of inaction by governments, who creates the Aboriginal managed and owned Nupawala national park and who finally establishes the treaty that was promised, as Victoria has shown can be done, and who starts the truth-telling commission that was promised. We don’t want to see this Liberal government continuing the inaction and promises unfulfilled that Aboriginal people have suffered with for so long.
As we return to parliament, the Greens are acutely aware of the impact of recent global and national events on Tasmanians. Since we rose in December, we’ve seen the rapid pace of change in the environment, big threats to global security and challenges to our social fabric. People in our communities are aware of these changes and they are concerned about the present and future impacts. In the conversations I’ve had, and I’m sure people in the Chamber have had, This is a source of anxiety for so many in Tasmania.
Donald Trump’s actions right now and in the last months have left many Tasmanians feeling insecure. The president of a long standing Australian ally is pursuing a systematic effort to dismantle and destroy democratic institutions in the US and globally.
He’s erratic, authoritarian, petty, selfish and punitive, and is not just a threat to democracy in his own country. His influence emboldens populists, extremists and haters in other western democracies, including Australia. We are not immune in Tasmania either. Since the terrible violence of Bondi, there’s been an acceleration in Tasmania and elsewhere of hateful rhetoric and acts of racism towards Jewish, Muslim and LGBTIQA+ people.
The evidence shows that strong democracies are critical in uniting diverse communities. They provide peaceful and nonviolent ways to resolve disputes. Key to this is people having trust in our institutions. When trust is broken, people get alienated and that breeds polarisation and division.
Satisfaction with democracy, sadly in Tasmania is at an all time low. There’re strong reasons for that. After 12 years in government, the Liberals have a deserved reputation now for being unresponsive and unaccountable. Their consultation processes are corrupted. They are obsessively secretive. They’re focused, it seems, to all intents and purposes, on the bidding of big corporations and Liberal mates over the needs of everyday Australians. The Snell and McCormack right to information report that was completed in December was unvarnished in its condemnation. It’s easier to get blood out of a stone than information out of the Liberals, they found. The authors found –
A prevailing culture of non‑disclosure in a public service where transparency is seen as risky and people close ranks when the politics get sensitive.
We call on the government to adopt all 43 recommendations in the RTI report and implement them this year. For example, we should join other Westminster systems where Cabinet policy information is routinely released 30 days after a decision. Cabinet documents should be automatically released after 10 years. These are minimum standards for transparency and we can see the problems when people feel distrust in their government and their political representatives.
It’s been a long-standing position of the Tasmanian Greens to bring more truth and transparency to reform our electoral system. I strongly welcome the announcement by the Leader for the Opposition, Mr Willie, about the strong and essential move to introduce firearm limits in Tasmania. We will be extremely supportive of that. The Greens have been calling for this at the federal level. We do it because that is what Tasmanians want. We’ve seen time and again. Tasmanians want stronger gun laws because they know it leads to a safer society. That is a fact. We have shown it in this state. We need to act strongly and not forget the motivation, the reason for this, which was the Bondi attack and the decision nationally about how we should respond to that. This is an appropriate move and we look forward to having more conversations about the details.
We are committed as a party and have introduced electoral reforms in the past that this parliament at that time did not have the appetite to fully support. The Greens remain committed to stronger electoral reforms. We have had a long-standing commitment to put caps on expenditure and elections. We will continue to further that this year. We look forward to working with all members in the Chamber. I know we’ve had conversations with Labor about having stronger caps on expenditure and also with other members of the crossbench. This is part of a package of strengthening our integrity and electoral reform measures that we will be pursuing this year.
That’s why I’m announcing today that in this term of parliament, as well as pursuing caps on expenditure, the Greens will be pursuing a total ban on political donations. This idea might once have sounded a bit radical for some, but things have changed. We’ve seen the South Australian Labor government lead the nation by introducing this reform. I think if we look around this parliament, it’s clear that there’s no reason why Tasmania can’t follow their lead. In South Australia, the government pursued a cap on spending and a ban on donations as complementary measures. This parliament could collaborate to do the same thing. Why wouldn’t we? Clearly there’s a recognition from Labor, and I would suggest most if not all, of the crossbench, that the influence of money in politics has become toxic, debilitating, distorting, unfair. This collective recognition could be the foundation of an amazing change in the way our democracy works. So often, it seems almost every day, we see how the government has focused on serving vested interests instead of looking at the wider public good for Tasmania’s people and places.
We see policy decisions that favour donors instead of being a contest of ideas and a vision for the future. Even the threat of making large donations to a political opponent is enough to hobble good policy‑making by a party. We just have to look at the experience of the 2018 election and afterwards, when Labor abandoned its strong‑principled position on pokies and the threat still operates today. That was used by the gambling industry and we have seen the impact on the mandatory pre‑commitment card that has dissolved under the Liberals.
We know that privileged access to political power is what donations buy and the boozy dinners and schmoozing mean that there is a slow pushing of agenda. Money buys access and money buys influence and ordinary Tasmanians do not get to have that same level of access to the Premier. We know big donations are still flowing into political parties and the Greens are incredibly proud of the reforms that we passed that expose those donations to public view, but that legislation was always a position of compromise in a past parliament where there was less appetite for ambitious change than I hope there is in the one we have today. In this parliament, in this minority government parliament, we have a rare opportunity and by working together, we can deliver a huge and important change. We can get money out of politics altogether. We can start to restore some of the community’s trust in democracy and faith in our system of government. Let’s not forget, Tasmanian political parties and MPs already receive public funding. With public funding, there’s no need for political donations.
I want to be really clear: the Greens are not expecting anyone in this place to make their minds up on this proposal here and now. All we are asking is for people to keep an open mind and be prepared to have a conversation about what’s possible if we work together and the details are for conversations that we will have together in good faith.
In January, the United Kingdom government finally released its climate security report with assessments from their agriculture, environment and intelligence agencies. It is a very confronting read. It recognises the reality that nature underpins our security, our prosperity and our resilience. Critical ecosystems that support major food production and water and weather cycles are under stress now across the planet. The United Kingdom identified that failure of these natural systems would be severe and they flag concern about food-supply shortages, price rises and global disorder.
Many of the abrupt changes outlined in the United Kingdom’s climate report, and by our own IMAS and CSIRO scientists, are not in the far-off future. Some of them are already happening and we know it is not possible now to avoid all the risks. We saw the ferocity of fires on the east coast this summer and the Greens offer our deepest thanks to everyone who worked and continues to work, those people who are paid and volunteers, who fight fires, who protect us from floods and the communities and our unique environment.
We want to amplify the concerns of many people who’ve spoken to us about the Liberal government’s dramatic underinvestment in early fire prevention, including Aboriginal cool‑burning land management.
The government needs to do so much more to support local communities, to increase their capacity to keep safe and resilient. There are so many vulnerable Tasmanians who do not have the independent finances or the literacy or physical abilities, transport options or mobile connectivity to keep them safe in a crisis without help and that is a core job of this government.
Sitting suspended from 1.00 p.m. to 2.30 p.m.
Resumed from above.
Dr WOODRUFF – Honourable Speaker, it’s gross negligence for this government to leave councils with the heavy lifting for planning and responding to more extreme weather events and their impact on settlements, rebuilding of infrastructure and maintaining it. We need a far better coordination and funding effort from the state government. Acknowledging the threats we face is critical to being able to meet them head-on, and the Liberals have failed to prioritise the leadership and a proportionate response needed for the climate crisis.
It’s not ideological or political to say that Tasmanians need their government to prioritise resources to prepare us for rapid climate change. The Minister for Environment is currently stalling on releasing the legislative review for the State Climate Change Act. We urge her to grasp the nettle and strengthen it to be fit for the crisis we confront, not just more business as usual. We will work with other members on amendments to strengthen mitigation and act where the government refuses to.
That’s why the member for Lyons, Tabatha Badger, has tabled a bill today on behalf of the Greens to legislate a permanent ban on fossil fuel fracking in Tasmania. We obviously can’t be expanding our fossil fuel industry with climate heating already at dangerous levels. The Victorian government has already banned fracking, and why would the Liberals keep the farm gate open to future gas and oil possibilities at this time? The farmers, scientists and environmentalists we’ve spoken to have all lobbied the state government to permanently ban fracking. The time for moratoriums is over. Our bill will provide current and future generations the genuine certainty that this practice will not occur in the climate crisis.
We’re at a fork in the road for native forest logging ‑ forests that contain precious carbon stores. It’s an industry in its death throes being kept on life support by this government’s handouts, but the writing’s on the wall. After 2027, wood supply falls off a cliff, contracts with sawmillers expire and, for the first time in history, the forestry industry will be required to comply with Australia’s national environment laws. Time has run out and it’s a matter of when, not if, native forest logging will finally end. Right now, pristine and desperately needed habitat is being destroyed every day across Lutruwita/Tasmania by a mendicant and unpopular Tasmanian forest industry cheer-led by both the major parties. Just two days ago, logging started in the Dial Range against the wishes of the community and the Central Coast Council and, as we understand it, some pretty senior Liberal members.
We’re in a climate and biodiversity crisis; we can’t go on trashing our carbon stores and critical habitat for threatened species. It’s only the Tasmanian Greens who have a vision for a truly sustainable, modern, future-focused forestry industry. Plantations are the way of the future, and the longer we keep trashing our native forests for low‑value woodchips, the further our industry is left behind as technology and markets modernise. We have an incredible opportunity to seize the moment before 1 July 2027 and transition out of native forest logging and into a plantation-based industry that we can all be very proud of.
The Liberals want to cling to this old industry well past its use-by date by locking the state into native forest wood supply contracts until 2040 ‑ but make no mistake, the signing of those agreements would present a huge sovereign risk for Tasmania. The forestry industry has received over $1 billion in handouts from the government in recent decades. In a budget crisis driven by a decade of Liberal government mismanagement, are we really considering signing the state up to contracts that we know won’t be able to be fulfilled when the federal government laws come in, leaving Tasmanian taxpayers on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation to sawmillers?
Our forests are worth far more standing, and we know that there are, at this moment, 365,000 hectares of so-called Future Potential Production Forests which contain critical habitat for threatened species and crucial carbon stores. They deserve to be permanently protected in proper reserves, not as they are ‑ left in limbo to be used as an election political football with the industry.
For years, Tasmanians from all walks of life have been putting their bodies on the line to protect the enormous temperate rainforests of Takayna that have been threatened by the foreign‑owned mining company MMG. They want to put a toxic tailings dump into these beautiful forests. Just last month, MMG put forward an alternative site to the Rosebery tailings dam, recognition that Takayna/Tarkine is far from saved. It deserves to be permanently protected in a formal reserve, with its outstanding natural and cultural values properly recognised for future generations.
Last summer, Tasmania’s marine environment was exposed to a mass salmon mortality event caused by the mismanagement and overstocking of farmed Atlantic salmon. Chunks of fat and salmon flesh washed up on people’s beaches in the south. This summer, Tasmanians were aghast again as the Liberal government supported salmon corporations to dump controversial antibiotic florfenicol into public waterways. For months now there have been communities right across southern Tasmania particularly, along with commercial and recreational fishers, who’ve been standing up against this disgraceful contamination of marine waters, and as we’ve seen, the impact on our wild fish export industries.
Today, the announcement by the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority (APVMA) that will suspend the permit to use florfenicol in Tasmania’s south‑east waters is very welcome. It’s a massive community win. However, salmon companies need to be properly regulated and managed to make sure that there’s no adverse impacts to the environment or to communities. The Greens will continue to stand up with communities and other industries who want to protect our marine environment for the beauty that it is, and the other industries that have a right to be able to work unheeded by the impacts of large‑scale industrial salmon production.
Treasury’s Fiscal Sustainability Report 2026 is the most damning evidence of the Liberal government’s utter failure to manage our state’s finances. The Liberals continue to spin a story about being responsible economic managers, but the truth is that they’ve spent like drunken sailors in the last 12 years and brought our state to the brink of collapse. They’ve cravenly focused on funnelling money to big business and corporates. They’re the reckless and rotten financial managers that their federal Liberal counterparts were under Scott Morrison.
Treasury’s devastating statement describes the truly alarming position that our finances are in. We have predictions of a near-future budget with a $142 billion debt bottom line ‑ and that is frightening. Treasury have warned us that we face a loss of sovereignty over control of the state’s finances, and that would be after we would lose our AAA rating. The Liberals – this Treasurer – have refused to heed the warnings from their own departments and independent economists.
The Greens were the only ones in this parliament who came to the table with a budget plan to deliver what needs to be done. We are the only party that has listened to independent economists and Treasury, and addressed their prescriptions for budget concerns. We agree with them that the government has to raise state revenue, and we’ve proposed, as many have, raising taxes on mining and fish farm companies, bringing back the casino tax rates for pokies, and taxing property developers on their windfall gains.
We agree with Treasury and economists that we have to cut unnecessary spending on infrastructure through cutting operational expenditure on things like Tasracing, the Office of the Coordinator‑General and the Defence Industry Advocate, and by ending the state‑subsidised destruction of native forests by Forestry Tasmania.
The Liberal and Labor parties both have to get real and deal with the budget crisis. The Liberals have to, because they’ve created this problem and they’re taking us all down the toilet with them. Labor should, too, because they have a glimmer in their eye about being in government one day and it’s in their interest to be honest with Tasmanians about what their plan is.
There is no silver bullet to fix the budget but the worst thing we could do right now is to add billions to our debt with unnecessary infrastructure. This is why the Greens will continue to stand against the building of a third, unneeded stadium at Macquarie Point.
We do not accept Mr Abetz’s Thatcher austerity fix. The thousands of public service jobs he started to axe provide critical environmental protections and essential services that people struggling with the cost of living desperately need.
There is also now serious housing inequality in Tasmania. The government has finally committed to a review of the Residential Tenancy Act. The Greens are the only people who have been talking about a suite of reforms to this act, and we have been banging on about it for years. We kept at it through two elections and, in between, with our own bill. Finally, this parliament has passed one small but important reform, to allow pets in rentals. Now, there’s a review of the act and we do not know how far the government wants to go. But you can be sure the Greens will be fighting this whole term to make sure renters get better rights. People have to be protected against unfair rent increases and it is utterly shameful that renters can still be evicted without cause. We will keep fighting for proactive enforcement of minimum standards and to stop violations and other bad practices in the real estate industry.
The Premier must listen to the key health stakeholders like the Australian Medical Association (AMA) and Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation (ANMF) and get on with the job of planning for a new Royal Hobart Hospital. It is the single greatest investment we must prepare for in our healthcare system. The Greens have been pushing for this planning to commence. It was one of our key commitments in the 2025 election. With the health crisis worsening every year, we cannot keep ignoring this reality. We need ambitious action that will meet the needs of all Tasmanians into the future.
Building a new hospital does not mean abandoning the CBD site. We need a government to do the work and to look at how that site will be used, where a new hospital would go and how those two facilities would work together. We will work throughout this term of parliament with the government, Labor and the independents to get the multi‑partisan support that is needed over the years to pressure the federal government to come to the party and make this new hospital happen.
In this term of parliament, the Greens are ready to work with all members to confront the challenges we face and provide Tasmanians with what they need and deserve; to stop the corporate control of government budget decisions and policy by banning political donations and publicly funding elections; agreeing on a plan to build our future healthcare infrastructure with a new Royal Hobart Hospital; taxing mining, salmon, pokies and property developer windfalls to correct the budget; and giving renters real rights and protection, and taking strong action on Airbnb.
Together with our work to defend wild places and restore native forests and ecosystems, our focus on strengthening climate action and building communities, our other integrity reforms on transparency and accountability and our advocacy to end family violence and all violence against women, the Greens are focused on making the lives of Tasmanians today better and thinking about how to keep us all safe and ready to respond to whatever our tomorrows will bring.
It is my great pleasure to work in a party room with Vica Bayley, Cassy O’Connor, Tabatha Badger and Cecily Rosol. They are fierce and passionate advocates for people in their electorates and for Tasmania’s extraordinary living ecosystems. The strength of the Greens as a grassroots movement is our continued history of showing there’s a better way to care for the environment, and that it is possible and necessary to also create a just, democratic and peaceful society. With everything that’s happening on Planet Earth, it feels more important than ever that we work together to achieve this in lutruwita-Tasmania. In this collaborative minority parliament, we look forward to working on what we have outlined with all of you here.
