Media release – Bob Brown Foundation, 17 August 2023
Labor lops forest hopes
Labor’s national conference will end with zero action on the much-anticipated move for an end to native forest logging in Australia. Instead, delegates passed a motion to ‘rewrite the National Forest Statement’. The NFS was developed three decades ago to greenwash the native forest destruction which has been rampant ever since.
“What a sellout of its members, its voters and our forests,” said Bob Brown Foundation campaigner Scott Jordan, who is at the conference.
“This is Labor ignoring its own voter base in favour of corporate loggers and woodchippers of native forests when Australia could and should move to a totally plantation-based future, as New Zealand Labour did in 2002,” Bob Brown said today.
“This will be a vote-loser for Labor at the next election with no choice between Albanese and Dutton on forests.”
“Our rally outside the Labor conference in Brisbane on Saturday morning will highlight Prime Minister Albanese’s intransigence on forests, despite the great majority of Labor voters wanting native forest logging stopped in Australia,” he said.
Editor’s note: Here is the text of the watered-down motion that was passed, after the proposed ban on native forest logging was removed.
