MATTERS OF URGENCY

Senator SHOEBRIDGE (New South Wales) (17:04): Last night's Four Corners was genuinely shocking. It was shocking to see the way in which public money that was set aside to end native forest logging was actually being used to subsidise it and to continue it in some of the most destructive logging you could imagine. We know that it's happening across the country, wherever native logging is still running, and it's largely in the beautiful forests of Tasmania and the beautiful forests of my home state of New South Wales—two of the most magical parts of the planet.

These are extraordinarily biodiverse forests, part of the great southern forest that used to cover the whole southern part of this landmass. The burning, the napalming, the chainsawing, the hacking, the gouging and the death can only happen with public subsidies—and large-scale public subsidies. What is really obscene is that, out of the $1.5 billion that was put aside for the Victorian government to stop native forest logging—because, for decades, forest protectors have been going out into those beautiful forests in Victoria, looking up at these majestic, incredible, impossibly beautiful sentinels that have stood there for centuries and said: 'Protect these.

Don't log these, don't chop these, don't mill these, don't chip these.' Finally, there was a decision made to stop logging Victoria's state forests and to finally transition them across to protection. And what happened to the money put aside by Victorian Labor? It then found its way into subsidising the same destruction of those same forest giants, those same sentinels of nature, only this time in the Tasmanian public forest.

You couldn't believe this was happening unless you saw how utterly crooked the forestry industry is in Tasmania, how it's protected by a protection racket in the state parliament—by both the Liberals and the Labor Party—and how the same protection racket continues to run in the New South Wales parliament and, it turns out, is still providing that flow of money out of the Victorian parliament.

What should be happening with that money is it should be set aside to protect the forests, to plant the plantations and to actually end native forest logging. In New South Wales forests, the southern forests, there is an extraordinary plan to create a new great southern national park, to link more than 55 current state forests to hundreds of thousands of national parks and create an extraordinary protection area in the southern parts of New South Wales.

I want to thank the National Parks Association, the forest protectors and all those campaigners who have been spending years, decades, fighting for that. And why are they fighting for it? They're fighting to protect places like the Glenbog State Forest.

Those locals and those campaigners who have been fighting to stop the logging in Glenbog State Forest—beautiful high forests where logging activities bury wombats alive—are still fighting to protect that. I'd invite anyone to come along to the North Brooman State Forest to stand under 'Big Spotty', one of the tallest hardwood trees on the planet, and to look up at this extraordinary piece of nature.

It's only able to be protected because it's in a deep forest with layers and layers of protection. Come into these forests. Look at these magical parts of our world.

Look at them with eyes that actually see nature for what it is. Join with the Greens and join with forest protectors to stop the subsidising and to protect these magical parts of nature. The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT ( Senator Hodgins-May ): The question is that the motion moved by Senator McKim be agreed to.