MATTERS OF URGENCY
Senator WHISH-WILSON (Tasmania) (17:00): What Four Corners exposed last night was absolutely shameful. I want to give a special shout-out to Basil O'Halloran, an ex-Greens MP, who was featured in that last night, along with Patrick Johnson, who's also a Greens member, and a number of other people that have spent so many years tracking the movement of these whole logs and saw logs from our beautiful native forests onto the ferry Spirit of Tasmania and across to Victoria under the cover of secrecy and, apparently, to the complete ignorance of the Tasmanian government.
While I'm here, I also want to thank all the forest protesters who, over many years, have done everything they can to try and stop this insane destruction of some of the most carbon-rich, biodiverse forests on the planet. Senator McKim joined the Greens not long after he was arrested in a forest protest at Farmhouse Creek, and I came to the Senate on the back of a long protest to stop one of the world's biggest pulp mills in Tasmania, which would have consumed four million tonnes of our old-growth forest every year for 30 years.
It would have literally destroyed the spirit of Tasmania. So we come armed with a lot of knowledge and information on this debate. I think I can speak for Senator McKim, and I know you're going to hear it from Senator Shoebridge and my other colleagues who have campaigned for many years against forestry destruction.
I acknowledge the work of Christine Milne, Janet Rice, Bob Brown and many other Greens that have stood up in this place for many, many years and have tried to stop this. We are in disbelief that this is still happening in 2026, and it couldn't happen without taxpayer subsidies. We found out that $1½ billion went in to transition the Victorian industry away from native forest logging, and now we find out that the Victorian government is buying and paying for logs to come over from Tasmania to be milled—not to mention that the taxpayer is funding the freight charges for these logs on the Spirit of Tasmania, which displaces tourists, who, by the way, come to Tasmania to see our forests, the wilderness and the natural beauty.
That is what is the spirit of Tasmania. That is what is rare about Tasmania and needs to be defended. It's really frustrating to hear from senators who come in here and clearly know nothing about the facts.
They say, for example, that the federal government doesn't fund or subsidise forestry. Senator McKim just reminded me that, in the last budget, they put $300 million of taxpayer funds into subsidising native forest logging around this country, and another $28 million in the most recent budget. Do you know what?
When I was campaigning against this giant factory in my valley that would have literally burnt these forests night and day to make paper or toilet paper for Chinese markets from some of the oldest, biggest trees on the planet, back then they said, 'Well, if we don't do it, someone else will.' That's exactly what we heard here today. It's what we heard from the forest industry today.
It's the drug dealers' defence: 'Don't buy drugs from the person down the street. Mine are purer than theirs.' It's the same old argument. We, in this day and age, can use plantation for our timber needs, and the Greens wholeheartedly support the development of the plantation industry, as we have done for many years.
Leave our precious old forests alone. We don't have many of them left. The tree that was featured in Four Corners last night would have been around in the age of Napoleon, living and breathing the clean air of the Southern Ocean, and it's gone because some idiot has gone and knocked it down and burnt it.
This has got to stop. People are horrified when they come to Tasmania and see this destruction, and I invite all senators to come for a walk in the forest with their Greens colleagues and see the beauty for themselves.