Mr BAYLEY (Clark) – Madam Speaker, thank you to the member for bringing this on as your inaugural MPI. It is a great topic, and from a Greens’ perspective, we are keen to talk about Wielangta. The road is an important part of Wielangta; it is that link between the east coast and the Tasman Peninsula. More so, it is an ingress into an incredible corner of Tasmania and an incredible corner of Tasmania’s forests. There is immense potential there and certainly the road needs to create and deliver the ability to access that safely.
There is the Sandspit River Conservation Area, the Cape Bernier Nature Reserve, the Three Thumbs State Reserve and the Wielangta Conservation Area. For decades these were disjointed, quite beautiful, quite well visited reserves. They were on adjacent private land and there was a conservation covenanted area as well. Through the Tasmanian Forest Agreement, an entire range of state forest areas that linked these forests were put into reserves. They are now part of the reserve network. They are future potential production forests, and they may well be part of the 40,000 hectares that the Liberal government wants to open up and log again.
Why were they put into reserves? It is really simple. There are incredible trees there, incredible tall stands of blue gums. ‘Wielangta’ is the palawa kani name for ‘tall trees’. There is incredible remnant rainforest in the Wielangta area – glacial refugia, myrtle, sassafras, and others in the wet valleys that have never burnt. There are some incredible species: the wedge‑tailed eagle, the Wielangta stag beetles, and the swift parrot. There are immense amounts of carbon stored in that forest as well.
The importance of those species and the threat that they are under from logging was completely exposed in 2007 when then-senator Bob Brown challenged the federal government and challenged the Regional Forest Agreement and its explicit exemption for logging from federal environment laws. I note of interest that Eric Abetz was the federal minister for logging at the time, and senator Bob Brown famously won that case. He proved that just because the Regional Forest Agreement said that species would be protected, those species were not necessarily protected. What was senator Eric Abetz’s response to this? It was not to actually change the logging to fit the law. Together with Paul Lennon, the then premier, I believe, Minister Abetz and John Howard changed the law. They amended the Regional Forest Agreement to fit the logging. That is shameful indeed.
That is the history of this area. There is now a 10,000-hectare block of forest that is part of the Tasmanian Reserve Estate. We have yet to see whether this is some of the forests the Liberal government wants to give back to an industry that does not even want it.
This is a potential new national park. A Wielangta national park has long been proposed for the east coast. There are already tours that are running through this area. There are proposals for mountain bike tracks in this area. There is a tramway, there are walks from the Sandspit River down to the old sawmill sites. It is an incredible spot that that offers a massive amount of potential. It has incredible views across to Maria Island and it is on that important tourist link between the east coast and the Tasman Peninsula.
I think the reason we are in this argument, as the Deputy Premier said, is that there are a number of owners and there have always been a number of owners, including forestry companies. I think Forestry Tasmania and Gunns used to share aspects of it and would regularly fight about who was responsible for its upkeep. That is why, particularly when those forests were not being logged, they would fight about who would maintain it and the road fell into a state of disrepair.
It is an important road link. We Greens support ensuring that it is safe, stable and allows access not only from the east coast to the Tasman Peninsula and vice versa, but also access to those incredible tourism opportunities there. What we need to do when it comes to tourism is make sure that people have more opportunities to do day activities in our great forests so that they will stay regionally at an Airbnb, they will eat at the cafe and drink at the pub.That is one of the opportunities. We are not convinced that the $90 million spend is value for public money but we are certainly supportive of more work being done so that this is a safe and accessible road.
