Cassy O'Connor MP | Greens Leader and Forests spokesperson
The Liberals, Labor and Clark MP, Madeleine Ogilvie, voted to allow logging the 365,000 hectares of high conservation value, carbon sink forests - set aside under the TFA - from April next year.
In time of accelerating climate disruption and increasing CO2 emissions, we must protect natural carbon stores. It is that simple.
In voting against the Greens’ motion to protect the 356,000ha of high conservation value forests set aside under the Tasmanian Forests Agreement, Labor, the Liberals and Madeleine Ogilvie MP, are supporting a crime against the climate, nature and future generations.
Tasmania’s natural, carbon rich forests are being logged at an accelerating pace under the Liberals.
During the debate, Minister Barnett predictably backed in the Liberals’ plan to log Tasmania’s precious high conservation value forests which he refers to as a ‘woodbank’.
Labor’s Dr Broad, a scientist, made it clear Labor have well and truly returned to their decades-long logging-at-all costs agenda.
In a climate emergency and biodiversity crisis there is no economic, social or environmental justification for logging old forests and releasing their carbon stores into the atmosphere. Labor, the Liberals and Madeleine Ogilvie should hang their heads in shame.
We may have lost the vote today, but we will not back down. We know that community attitudes are shifting in the face of climate change, and that Tasmanians increasingly see logging old, carbon-rich forests as immoral and unjustifiable.