Lin Thorp (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Minister for Employment (Senator Abetz) to a question without notice asked by Senator Thorp today relating to the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area.

Today Australians can be in no doubt that we cannot trust this government to look after our environment. Since it gained power, the Abbott government has systematically tried to dismantle Australia's strong environmental protections and attempted to open up Australia's precious World Heritage spaces to loggers and big polluters, but overnight in Doha, common sense has prevailed. The World Heritage Committee took just seven minutes to reach agreement that the Abbott government's attempt to delist 74,000 hectares of World Heritage forest in my home state of Tasmania should not proceed. The committee saw what was clear to anyone who had even a passing acquaintance with the facts: that the delisting was completely unjustified and, if approved, would have set a dangerous global precedent.

Ironically, the very area in question is the very area the World Heritage Commission itself requested Australia to include in our World Heritage listings in 2007, 2008, 2010 and again in 2012. Really, the government was asking the World Heritage Committee to say that it was wrong when it repeatedly asked for the extensions in these years and wrong again when it supported the extension application in 2013. Not only that, but in preparing its submission for the excision, the government relied on exactly the same data that convinced the World Heritage Committee to list the area only a year ago. No extra information was sourced, no field trips were undertaken by the department, no further mapping was done and no experts were consulted. Instead, in its submission to the World Heritage Committee, the government simply jotted down a few words next to each of the 13 areas they wanted to excise. In fact, 10 of these areas only had the words 'contained logs/degraded areas' as the single justification for their excision. It is almost as though the government thought they did not need to provide any sort of evidence to support their claims—as if their very words alone would make it so. Well, it is not so.

It seems the World Heritage Committee agrees; one member nation referred to the Abbott government's application as 'feeble'. And feeble is exactly what it is. Recently I chaired an inquiry into the delisting which found that the vast majority of the proposed excision area—unlike the comments from Senator Abetz earlier—is pristine, untouched wilderness. During hearings, expert witnesses described the government's claims to the contrary as 'incorrect', 'grossly overstated' and 'blatantly misleading if not downright dishonest'. Again and again, witnesses asserted that the vast majority of the 74,000 hectares is in no way degraded. Many attested that more than 90 per cent of the excision area has high conservation values and no evidence of logging. Tellingly, the Department of the Environment representatives agreed under questioning that only four per cent of the area could be described as heavily disturbed.