Dr WOODRUFF (Franklin – Leader of the Greens) – Deputy Speaker, it gives the Greens no pleasure to have this MPI, which we have called the war on wildlife. This is the reality that we are trying to point out to Tasmanians. This is what is happening under the Liberals’ policies. It is exactly the policies of the Liberals that is leading to a continued movement along the chain from threatened, vulnerable, endangered, critically endangered and towards extinction of so many of our wild native species in Tasmania. These are animals, birds, insects, fish and all manner of other life, many of which live nowhere else on earth. They are glorious and special. They also have value in keeping intact ecosystems that we all benefit from, that make our agricultural industries possible, that makes growing food in the soil possible, that makes our tourism industry as amazing as it is, that provides us with an opportunity to be in natural places, which is good for us as humans, and good for our mental health.
The State of the Environment report, which was a decade overdue under the Liberals, has shown line by line how damaging the Liberals’ policies are in the impacts it is having on the environment around us. In case some people have not read – I am sure people have not – these are the recommendations of the State of the Environment report that the Liberals have still refused to adopt. After 10 years of trying to hide an assessment of the state of Tasmania’s environment, after finally being pushed to deliver this report, which was undertaken with a comprehensive range of Tasmanian scientists, an assessment of the real state of our environment, the recommendations in here still have not been adopted by the Liberals and they have not committed to them.
The first of them is to develop a long‑term vision and strategy for Tasmania’s environment. You would think, given that our environment is the basis of life here and all our productivity, that would be such an easy thing to sign up to. It recommends that we develop an environmental data strategy. We know we have almost no information about the more than 680 plants and animals that are on the threatened species list. As Mr Bayley said yesterday, we have a paltry amount for each of those to try to protect them. We do not know what we do not know. There is so much information that is not being gathered and underfunded, deliberately, in many cases, by the Liberals when we need proper monitoring of what is happening in our waterways, the impact of waste on rivers, the impact of salmon farming in marine environments. These are all pieces of information that we are not collecting.
We need a change to our regional management. With our RNPS sustainable development planning system, we need to have a change to the Land Use Planning and Approvals Act, the State Policies Act and the Environment Management and Control Pollution Act. These guide the industries that work in Tasmania: the mining industries, the salmon farming industries, and the forestry industries, the developments that are approved that remove the essential habitat for animals. This overarching legislation has to be reviewed and assessed. We need to establish more marine protected areas in Tasmania. We need to have a minimum of 10 per cent of marine protected areas; 30 per cent by 2030 is what is recommended by the United Nations. We need to have better analysis of the fisheries data because we are seeing that fisheries around Tasmania, as they are around the world, are disappearing. People cannot get flathead in rivers in Tasmania anymore.
We need to have measures to end the illegal clearing of our vegetation. We need to have an end to native forest logging in Tasmania. We know that, without protections for their environment, we are not going to save the wildlife that is here today because of the pressures coming down the line because of the climate heating. It is about the Liberals changing business as usual –
Time expired.
