Cassy O’Connor MP | Greens Leader
The large burn scars left by an escaped logging burn that threatened the Styx Tall Trees Reserve this March are an indictment on both the major parties.
In an age of global heating and ecological decline, their ideological, unscientific devotion to native forest logging and burning makes them complicit in a crime against the planet and future generations.
It is also an economic crime for successive Liberal and Labor governments to keep funnelling public money in to the loss making native forest logging industry.
After decades of destruction and division, it is beyond time native forest logging was ended in Tasmania. Young people understand this, and so do the Greens.
It’s time to listen to the science, and apply the principles of sustainability, inter-generational equity, and the precautionary principle to this island’s forests.
The Tasmanian Greens today released an evidence based and costed plan to end native forest logging and for Tasmania to be a global leader in carbon banking.
Our plan delivers a just transition for skilled forestry workers to help better manage forests, rewild Tasmania, become carbon bankers and bushfire mitigation specialists.
We will rename and repurpose Forestry Tasmania into a new government agency, Forests Tasmania, that becomes a force for restoration rather than destruction.
Rather than accelerating global heating and increasing bushfire risk, Forests Tasmania will help Tasmania become a world leader in forest and biodiversity protection, and carbon storage for a safe climate.
Under our plan, the 356 000 hectares of high conservation value forest set aside under the Tasmanian Forest Agreement will go in to reserves, as they were intended to be.
This will include areas of forested lands to be owned and managed by Aboriginal Tasmanians.
We will reclassify the Permanent Timber Production Zone (PTPZ) forests as Carbon Capture and Conservation reserves.
And we’ll work to monetise the carbon stored in these forests to provide an income, instead of a loss, to the State Budget.
The Greens will ban high intensity logging burns to improve community safety and benefit public health. We’ll also make sure fuel reduction burns are underpinned by science rather than arbitrary, politicised targets.
Aboriginal cultural burning practices will be integral to safe, strategic bushfire risk management in a warming climate.
The Greens strongly support the adoption of cultural burning techniques, led by Aboriginal practitioners, as an important fire management tool on forested land in the future.
The subsidies that enable cheap native forest wood chips to dominate the timber sector will end under the Greens’ plan, and the transition to a plantation based industry will be accelerated.
We’ll provide the resources to crack down on illegal wood hooking, and a licensing system for sustainable firewood sales from plantation lands.
Tasmania’s incredible, carbon rich forests have never been worth more standing than they are now.
We believe our plan for this island’s forests is the clear and ethical path forward, and it will give young Tasmanians real hope for a safe climate future.
You can read our plan here - https://tasmps.greens.org.au/green-new-deal/restoring-forests-rewilding