Transcript of media conference with Janet Rice, Greens Senator for Victoria, and Peter Whish-Wilson, Greens Senator for Tasmania, Tasmanian Greens Headquarters, Hobart, 6 May 20022.

Janet Rice

Janet Rice, I’m the Greens forest spokesperson and I’m really delighted to be here in Hobart this morning with Senator Peter Whish Wilson, who’s up for election, to be launching our Tasmanian forest policy. I mean, Australia’s forests, but particularly Tasmania’s forest, they need to be protected because they are special on a world scale. They need to be protected for their value for their wildlife, for their value for water, for their value as the sovereign lands for traditional owners, and their value for recreation and tourism. And that is particularly the case for Tasmania. Tasmania’s forests are incredible and I’ve had the real privilege of visiting them. And around the world people know how special Tasmania’s forests are; what they don’t know is that they are still being devastated by logging.

What our policy is going to do is basically to acknowledge the importance of Tasmania’s forests, not just for the wildlife, their recreation and tourism values, for their wildlife values, for their water values, for their values and sovereign lands, but also for their value for soaking up and storing carbon. This policy that we’re announcing today would see the federal government granting Tasmania a billion dollars to end the logging of native forests in Tasmania. Western Australia has already committed to ending their native forest logging by next year, Victoria has committed to ending native forest logging by 2030; we think that it’s too slow, but at least it’s going to happen. For Tasmania, they need to commit now to end native forest logging, and the billion dollars that the federal government would grant would basically recognise the value of Tasmania’s forests, in particular for their carbon value, their value in soaking up and storing carbon.

There’s been recent research that has shown that when you stop logging forests, you maintain the ability of those forests to continue to sequester carbon. And it means that Tasmania, because of the reduction in logging over in over the last decade, has now become carbon negative. We can be even more negative here in Tasmania, if we stopped the logging of native forests altogether. That’s what this billion dollars would do, would be a grant to Tasmania to be invested in environmental restoration, in forest management, including fire management and insensitive tourism, particularly enabling people to visit the forest through walking and cycling. It would generate a huge number of jobs and more than offset massively offset the number of jobs that are in the native forest logging industry.

The only other thing I wanted to say as the forest spokesperson is just to recognise the incredible value of Tasmania’s plantation forest estate. Already 90% of Australia’s wood production comes from plantations. And there’s so much more potential here in Tasmania to be using the plantation estate to be maximising the value of those plantations rather than at the moment we have got whole logs being shipped off exported as whole logs. The plantation forest estate that Tasmania has should be being used to be generating more jobs and generating high value products. And that in itself would then help Australia shift to 100% production of wood from plantations. And it needs to happen urgently.

Journalist – Imogen Elliott

What kind of timeline do you think there needs to be for something like this? And how soon can we replace those jobs that would be lost?

Peter Whish-Wilson

This is a very novel approach by the Greens, a very positive announcement to deliver over 10 years a billion dollars to Tasmania to be reinvested back into protecting our forests, and creating new jobs, helping forestry workers transition into new industries. There is a precedent for this. Back in the early 1980s the Fraser Liberal government, followed by the Hawke government offered the Tasmanian government a significant sum of money to protect the wild river, the Franklin below Gordon. Eventually, the money did flow to Tasmania, and part of those funds were used to help find new opportunities for any workers that were displaced by that wild area being saved.

The billion dollars is a very good and up to date estimate on the carbon values, the carbon abatement value of these forests. The government would have to pay someone else to meet our emissions targets anyway, somewhere else around the country. It could be, for example, farmers through the current carbon abatement scheme that replaced the emissions reduction fund. We have to reduce our emissions, we have global obligations. They have deliberately excluded native forests owned by state governments from the current framework and architecture. So this payment of a billion dollars reflects the latest updated reports commissioned by The Wilderness Society, independent reports that show that the areas currently earmarked for logging are worth about a billion dollars in carbon abatements.

Of course, those forests are worth so much more than that. Their biodiversity is, you can’t even calculate the value of their biodiversity or their importance to local communities. So this is a really positive announcement by the Greens to deliver funds for Tasmania, to protect these forests in perpetuity for future generations, and to create new jobs. Why the government hasn’t thought of this, I don’t know. But it’s been sitting there right under our nose, right before our eyes. And given that we’re about to have a massive climate rally in Hobart tomorrow, we thought it was a really good time to announce a policy that’s actually going to be good for climate change and climate action, and also protect our forests.

And a little bit more detail around the policy. We were assuming there’ll be some kind of, the Greens are very close to being in the balance of power in federal government. And we will push the federal government to transfer these funds to the Tasmanian state government. Now, of course, that’s going to require some kind of a memorandum of understanding between the two governments, it’s going to require the state government to legally protect these forests in perpetuity, that’s going to have to be cast iron tight. And then there’ll be some kind of task-force around how the money is going to be spent. It’ll be $100 million over 10 years, it’s not going to come as a lump sum.

We anticipate there’s enormous demand for these funds to be put into ecosystem restoration, into looking after our, our parks and wildlife here have been absolutely gutted by respective liberal state and federal governments, there’s been virtually no money go towards managing our World Heritage areas. We know a future of climate emergency, we’re going to see more and more dry lightning strikes and wildfires in our wild areas like we’ve seen in the last 10 years here in Tasmania. There’s an enormous amount of work that needs to be done to help with fire management, to have front-line rapid response units, this money will be very well spent. And it will create, in our opinion, hundreds of new jobs.

Journalist – unidentified

How much native wood harvesting harvested happens in Tasmania,

Peter Whish-Wilson

How much native wood harvesting? So these forests, based on their schedules, would be between 68 and 70 million tons of carbon will be abated. So if you multiply that by any kind of carbon pricing, the assumptions in this report are actually very, I think, very conservative. It’s $15 for a carbon price, carbon prices in the EU voluntary market are around $80. So you can see that actually it’s probably worth a lot more than a billion dollars. So you’re looking at a 68 to 70 million tonnes of carbon being avoided. That’s provided – I can’t give you a date on that – but that depends when the government gets around to logging those forests.

My opinion. Now the reason they just announced – Janet and I both commented on this a few weeks ago – a nearly $300 million package to invest in the forestry industry, they are looking to underwrite new demand for native forests, trying to put money into new research and development projects to find new markets so they can go out and log more native forests. So if they get those markets set up, and they will be very controversial and we will rally against and protest against native forests being used, for example, for new for new markets, they could access these forests in the next five or ten years. At the moment, they’re sitting there, earmarked for logging.

But what’s constraining them is markets. The demand is, actually these are conflict timbers. No one wants them, except the Liberal Party in Tasmania and then the federal government. And Labor have been very duplicitous on this issue as well, where they of course helped negotiate the forests peace deal, which earmarked 500,000 hectares of these forests to go into reserves to be permanently protected. And the Liberal government, they campaigned before the 2014 state election and of course, the 2016 federal election to rip the forest peace agreement up and make these forests available for logging. So there’s no doubt in my mind, they have a plan to log Tasmania’s native forests. And it may well be a lot more than the 70 billion tonnes of carbon that they’re going to release into the atmosphere.

This is a no brainer. How can the Liberal government or the federal Liberal government say no, to a billion dollars from the federal government to protect these forests, do everyone a solid on climate change, protect their biodiversity, protect them for communities, protect them for future generations, I would be absolutely shocked if the Liberal government would turned down a billion dollars, especially considering this industry makes a loss. It is subsidised by taxpayers. We have estimated billions of dollars in subsidies in the recent decades have gone into the forest industries. Just the Manage Investment Schemes alone was $4 billion in tax avoided that could have gone to schools and hospitals, and it was a complete failure. And now they’re trying to do it again. Let’s protect these forests. Let’s pay the state government for their carbon value and their other values. And let’s get on with actually protecting them and creating new jobs.

Tasmanian Times

The last Forestry Stewardship Council assessment in 2020 showed that there were about 660 equivalent full time jobs in Forestry Tasmania and almost 300 contractors. So can you talk about where those jobs are going to be under this scenario? What will those people be doing? What sort of things can you do in retraining? I remember Tim Morris, former local member for Lyons in Tasmania, saying to me during the time of the Tasmanian Forest Agreement that one of the problems was, quote unquote, ‘a lot of these blokes really like cutting down trees’. So where are these jobs going to be? And how do you get people into them?

Peter Whish-Wilson

The plantation industry is clearly going to employ a large number of forestry workers, especially contractors that have log trucks and other harvesting equipment, bulldozers, excavators. The previous packages that were federally funded packages that were hundreds of millions of dollars, were designed to buy out those contractors and their equipment. But we know that those systems, those packages were rorted over time, and many contractors are now back in business. So it didn’t achieve its stated purpose. And the Greens actually had a Senate enquiry into this. There’s plenty of work for those workers in the plantation industry. Janet’s done a lot of work on the plantation industry, the Greens support the sustainable plantation industry, but we do feel like the industry itself also needs to change, they can do things a lot smarter and a lot better.

And you know, I was just in Burnie two days ago. And if anyone hasn’t been down there and seen it, there are thousands of whole logs for structural timber sitting on the wharf waiting to be exported. Now, the Labor Party’s current line is that they support native forest logging, because we need structural timber for our housing market because there’s a shortage. Apart from the fact if we log it today, it’s going to be a years before it’s available. So it’s not going to solve any short term bottlenecks. These logs are already there. They’re dry, they’re ready to go. But they go to foreign markets. Why aren’t we having some kind of policy to keep that timber here in Tasmania where we need it or in Australia? That’s another thing that the government refuses to answer.

And I’ve got no doubt that if we reinvest money into managing these areas, we’re certainly going to need that equipment that’s already there for chopping down trees to help with fire management. There’s no bigger danger to our World Heritage areas, to our national parks, to our wild areas, than climate change and wildfires. Unfortunately, our movement spent fifty years protecting these areas fighting tooth and nail to have them protected. And I thank all the people that have gone before me and Janet who have done this, but unfortunately, you can’t run and you can’t hide from climate change. Dry lightning and increasingly dry areas is the biggest threat. So we need to spend a lot more time and energy on our rapid deployment when when lightning hits. We’ve come some way with that. The Greens initiated a Senate enquiry in 2016 into exactly this issue, what kind of resources we needed.

There’s plenty of work in ecosystem restoration. Some of these areas urgently need restoring. We’ve got other major projects we could look at, like restoring Lake Pedder ecosystem. This is the UN decade of ecosystem restoration. It’s something David Attenborough talks about all the time, there’s a massive, massive amount of jobs, especially for a lot of the students that are coming out of university that are working in environmental services and environmental consulting. I’m very fortunate to have Tabitha Badger running on the Senate ticket with me in this election, who has been working in this area. She goes out to these wild areas, she does an incredible amount of work, from simple things like weed management through to restoring these areas.

Our parks and wildlife have been absolutely gutted, there’s plenty of potential for new track management. Douglas Apsley just got $7 million from the federal government to finally upgrade their tracks. I don’t know if anyone’s walked those tracks or tried to walk them in the last five years, it’s pretty much non existent. That’s one of our key national parks we push to tourists, there’s a huge amount of work in there for contractors. So I’ve got no doubt at all, that $100 million is a lot of money on an annual basis to come into this state to drive programs, I actually think we’ll be needing to find workers to meet the demand for these these new jobs. And look, forest workers like spending time in the forest, that’s great because that’s where these jobs will be. And I want to acknowledge that a lot of forest workers do have good knowledge, especially around fire management in forested areas, they understand many elements of biodiversity, I think that’d be perfectly suited to working in environmental restoration. Let’s pay them to protect those trees, not to chop them down.

Janet Rice

There was some recent research in terms of failed regeneration in alpine ash forest, in particular in the mountain ash forest in Victoria, that showed that showed there was about 30% of those alpine ash forests failed to regenerate after logging. And I’m sure that research hasn’t been done across Tasmania’s forests, I’m sure if that research was done, it would probably show pretty similar results. And so there’d be plenty of work actually getting into these areas which have been logged in the past which have not regenerated and have actually people being employed to regenerate them as biologically diverse forests.

Tasmanian Times

In some parts of the world is a culture of forest bathing as in Japan, like people genuinely appreciate the restorative benefits of forests. Do you think our culture still has some way to go to develop that sort of appreciation of what we have in forests?

Janet Rice

I think people really do appreciate our forests. When people visit our forests they are in awe. What we don’t do is actually promote forests to people as being those places of absolute beauty and awe where people can really feel regenerated and feel revitalised by being in the forest. There are plenty of people that once they do visit our forests, they know the value of that. And I think the potential – particularly for Tasmania where we’ve got such large areas of such absolutely beautiful forests – potential for more people visiting him and getting that benefit to their health and well being is just massive.

Peter Whish-Wilson

Can I just add something to that? Janet was actually hoping to go out to the Styx. But given the weather, it might be difficult today. The last time I was actually out in the Styx and Florentine was last year and I was on holidays. And I’ve got to say it’s the closest I’ve come to dying. I was in an RV that I’d hired with my wife and we nearly got run off the road by three log trucks. Some of these beautiful areas that absolutely, the tallest flowering plants in the world, the eucalyptus regnans, the stringy barks out there, there’s nothing in the world like that. But if you go out there, the infrastructure is all rotten and broken down.

We were on our way to the old Lady Binney walk that was originally set up by Forestry Tasmania that’s now gone to wrack and ruin. Some community have tried to restore it, it is one of the most beautiful little walks, but if you didn’t know it was there, you wouldn’t go and visit it. We’ve now got queues of people signing up for going and doing not just walks in the forest, but also climbing those trees with professional tree climbers who are actually taking them out to the forest and showing them there’s so much we could do. Bob Brown himself had a plan in 2002 for a forest tourism walk with interpretation centre, with cafes in the Florentine and the Styx. And that’s been sitting there gathering dust for nearly 20 years. And Bob said to me, ‘Well, why don’t you relaunch that policy?’ That’s a little bit too much detail for us today.

But that’s exactly the kinds of things that we would look at doing, there’s enormous potential. But let me tell you, Forestry Tasmania or Sus Timbers does not want you to go out to these areas. I swear, if you haven’t been, please go out there. You will be a changed person just for visiting them. But it’s dangerous. There’s no interpretation, there’s no signage, it’s hard to know where you’re going. It could absolutely be a tourism bonanza if it’s done the right way.

Journalist – Imogen Elliott

There’s a lot of support among younger Tasmanian Australians for climate action and protecting the forests. Would it help you this election campaign if younger people could vote?

Peter Whish-Wilson

The Greens have been campaigning at a state and federal level to drop the voting age. You know, if you’re old enough to sign up in the military and go and fight, you should be able to vote. That’s always been my view. And I think young people, it’s their future at stake. You know, this election is the most important election in our nation’s history, in my opinion. For those people who care about the future generations and current generations who care about climate action and the planet, we don’t have another three or four years of what we’ve seen in federal parliament, with a government who’s in bed with the fossil fuel industry actively undermining climate action. The more young people we can vote, the stronger message we can send to politicians that they’re selling out their future. So yes, we’re very pleased that we saw a number of young people enrolling at the last minute, very pleased. But if we could drop the voting age to 16, I have no doubt at all that would get rid of this government.

Journalist – unidentified

Today Labor announced funding to help with wetland restoration. What would the Greens do to address that issue?

Peter Whish-Wilson

We would support any additional funding for wetlands restoration. It’s exactly what our policy that we’ve launched today is. 100 million dollars a year in Tasmania for ecosystem restoration. It’s exactly why we need more money in this state to actually help us restore not just our wild areas, but on some of our most biodiverse areas like wetlands. Tamar River, any additional investment in wetlands is going to help. But it’s part of a holistic, you know, suite of policies that we need to actually help the river. It won’t necessarily clean up some of the issues we had with heavy metals and siltation, or bacterial contamination of the river. That’s going to require hundreds of millions of dollars investment in infrastructure upgrades, which we’ve been calling for for some time. Additionally, we need to take kind of a cradle to grave approach with this, with farmlands in areas further up river. So whereas wetlands are down a down river and will help filter some of the nasties that are in the water it won’t solve the problem.

So good on Labor for for this initiative, I encourage them. I also encourage them to look at Robbins Island, up in north-west Tasmania, which is the most significant wetland and shorebird breeding habitat in the state and one of the most significant wetlands in the world. That looks like it’s going to be potentially subject to industrialisation I’ve been fighting hard with Van Dairy, a dairy farm in the north-west there that’s been pumping raw effluent into this critical wetland. We’ve managed to force the state government to take some action. That area needs to not only have more investment in in ecosystem restoration, it also needs to be Ramsar-listed and protected for its value. So I’d urge the Labor Party if you’re going to protect wetlands in the Tamar, please do it in other parts of the state where we urgently need assistance.