Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I want to look at the report Tracking to the Kyoto target 2007, which was tabled here this afternoon. It is a report on Australia’s greenhouse emission trends from 1990 to the Kyoto test period of 2008-12 and then onwards to 2020. The section on land use, land-use change and forestry starts on page 13. Then there is the section on forestry itself on page 14, and it says in the third sentence:

Under Kyoto accounting rules, no forestry sinks are included in the 1990 baseline and only afforestation and reforestation that occurred since 1 January 1990 on land not previously forested is credited.

I draw the attention of the Senate to what that sentence means because here we have an absolute deceit in the accounting procedures which were used by the Howard government and have now been adopted by the Rudd government in assessing the impact of the logging activities of the forest industries from Australia on the pollution of the global atmosphere.

Let me go back to the sentence. It says ‘no forestry sinks’. Forestry sinks are actual forests. Like a sink holds water so forests hold carbon. Trees are largely columns of carbon and water. So when the term ‘forestry sinks’ is used here it means forests, and I particularly refer to native forests and the logging industry. So the sentence really reads: ‘No native forests are included in the 1990 baseline and only afforestation and reforestation that occurred since then on land previously not forested is credited.’ In other words, the only thing this report looks at is land that had no trees on it where plantations have been put and are growing and absorbing carbon. But the thousands of hectares of forest in Victoria, New South Wales, Western Australia and Tasmania which were growing in 1990 but have since been logged and burned are not taken account of at all. That is because, as this report makes clear in this hidden sentence, forest logging that takes place on land with forests on it previously is not credited. There is no account taken of this.

The Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts, Peter Garrett; the Minister for Climate Change and Water, Penny Wong; the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd; and indeed the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, Tony Burke, are all well aware of this sleight of hand. And it is not going to be acceptable to the Australian people as it becomes better known.

Then we come to the proposed Gunns pulp mill, on which a decision on finance will be made this month, according to the company as recorded in the Mercury of Hobart this week. A final decision will be made in June. Gunns hope for a go-ahead in July. This vast pulp mill will entail the logging of 200,000 hectares—that is 200,000 football fields—of Tasmanian native forest in the coming 20 years and it is not accounted for and is not going to be accounted for under these rules. The ministers might say, ‘That’s how it was written in Kyoto in 1997.’ One of the reasons for that is that Australia lobbied very strongly to have this sleight of hand. But I doubt it will be acceptable into the future. Certainly it is hypocritical for governments, including the Rudd government, to say that we are motivated to protect the global atmosphere when we do our best to prevent logging—and they are talking about Indonesia and Papua New Guinea—when at the same time the government have now allocated more than $100 million in infrastructure to help Gunns build its pulp mill. That is money coming out of taxpayers’ pockets which is going to lead to the logging of vast areas of native forest and the pollution of the global atmosphere with greenhouse gases coming out of those forests. And yet no account will be taken of it.

This is a dishonest process and it is a sleight of hand officially endorsed because of the power of the logging industry over the Labor Party—and, indeed, over the coalition before that—which is simply not going to stand. When the public gets to understand that the logging of forests in this country is not accounted for when the government says it is on track to meet the Kyoto target—it is totally dismissed, but the same accountants employed by the government are counting plantations planted on areas where there was no previous forest—the public is going to become, rightly, annoyed. This is a dishonest process and it is cheating on the global account, which we must know is an honest process if we are going to take that leadership role that the Prime Minister espouses in this age of dangerous climate change.

We are about to get into the regeneration burn period in Tasmania and Victoria. That means that, in the coming autumn months, thousands of hectares of these grand forests—which were logged last year, with the logs taken out and primarily sent to Japan as woodchips—will have incendiaries, napalm-like materials, dropped on them to create a firestorm to burn every remaining stick, branch and fern and, goodness knows, the remains of any wildlife, which is eradicated completely from these logging areas. The carbon and other greenhouse gases from this process—which includes the burning of peat and the soil underneath, which holds 50 per cent of the forest carbon—will go into our global commons, into the atmosphere. When you look at these massive burns, you see a huge column of smoke going up after the firestorm has been deliberately created by the loggers under the imprimatur of Prime Minister Rudd and several state premiers, including Labor Premier Lennon in Tasmania. So intense is the carrying of the smoke and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that with it goes the heat. On top, a thundercloud forms, and you get this extraordinary event whereby a Hiroshima-like cloud appears over the destroyed forest on a clear day.