FIRST SPEECH

Senator BLEYER (Tasmania) (17:00): Thank you, President. After having to tell you yesterday that it wasn't my first speech, I'm pleased to confirm that this is my first speech! I acknowledge the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples, the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet today.

I also acknowledge the Palawa and Pakana peoples, the traditional owners and custodians of Lutruwita/Tasmania, the state I have the great privilege of representing. I pay my respects to elders past and present, and I acknowledge how kindly they cared for our native forests for tens of thousands of years. After a brutal invasion and just over 200 years of colonisation, our native forests have been the subject of blatant and senseless destruction.

I have and I will continue to protect our remaining native forests and return them to the kind care of First Nations people again. I am here for nature, to protect our natural environment and all living species on Earth. For us, as humans, to be in the best position to protect and nurture our planet, we need to look after ourselves.

So I reflect on the life that I have lived and how it has shaped me to fight for our wild places and how it has shaped me to identify the services that we need. On 4 May this year, my mum died 10 weeks after being diagnosed with terminal cancer. She had squamous cell carcinoma.

Whilst working from her hospital bedside over the 10 weeks, I would take in her bills, and one of the things we did together was sit and pay them on my laptop. It made her happy. I was with Mum when she died, and the last words that she spoke, which she said to me, were, 'Have we paid all the bills?' Yes, Mum, we have paid all the bills.

Everything is in order. Paying the bills meant so much to me and Mum. When I was in high school, my dad went away on business, and he didn't come back.

He was no longer the breadwinner. For the next two years, my mum, my brother and I worked so hard to pay the bills. I had an after-school job.

I had a weekend job. My mum worked nights as a theatre nurse in emergency. One of us was always home to care for my sister, who has Down syndrome.

But, despite our best efforts, when I was in year 12, we just couldn't meet the full mortgage payments. We were evicted from our home by a big bank, and I studied for my final exams on boxes. This experience filled me with strength and a determination to fight for secure and affordable housing, and I did that as a social justice lawyer by stopping unlawful evictions of long-term residents at a caravan park in Tasmania and helping to create laws that protect long-term residents across the whole of the state of Tasmania.

Today, with many more battles behind me, I have the extraordinary privilege of continuing that fight as a Greens Senator for Tasmania. I acknowledge my friend and former senator, Peter Whish-Wilson, whose contribution to Tasmania, to the Greens and to this parliament has been enormous. I am proud to follow him into this place.

And, yes, as many of you have told me in this chamber, I know I have big shoes to fill. I have come here to keep fighting for the people, places and causes that have shaped my life and to turn those fights into laws for a better society. That begins with secure and affordable housing, rent caps and more public housing.

I acknowledge my brother here today. I remember the moment when someone from the big bank knocked on our door with an eviction notice in hand and the look of profound grief on my brother's face. I acknowledge the tireless work he now performs supporting people who are homeless and the improvement he brings to their lives.

My sister, who has down syndrome, struggled to understand what was happening. She didn't know where her dad had gone or why we suddenly had to leave our family home. She was also going through puberty at the time, and the upheaval took an enormous toll on her.

I am my sister's plan nominee under the NDIS. I don't know how she'd survive without the NDIS. I am here to fight for the rights of disabled people and for the NDIS, which is a vital human right that must be protected.

But there was something else happening in our home that was a secret for many years. My dad was violent. My mum used to say that she stayed with dad despite the violence because she thought it was best for us kids to have a dad.

But I've got to tell you, when he left, I was relieved. I could live in peace and not go to school every day pretending that everything was happy at home. I am here because we do not need to be silent bystanders.

Family violence continues to be prevalent in homes across Tasmania and this nation. Why? The system should respond without people like me having to tell stories like this.

When I was in my late teens, I remember this moment when I realised I had a past, that I was old enough to have memories rather than just a now. I looked back on my life. I thought that what I had endured at the hands of my dad should not be normal, it should not have occurred and it was something that I should try and work through for my own sake.

So I read every book I could get my hands on, and then, when my dad resurfaced when I was about 21 years of age, I organised an in-person meeting with him to confront him for his violent behaviour and to forgive him. I forgave him, and it felt good. His response was: 'You should be thanking me.

I think you are only as strong as you are because of how I treated you.' I am here to fight for fathers to not think like my dad did, for the women who feel stuck like my mum did, for the children who grew up believing family violence is a normal part of life and a secret that only lives at home. A few hours after my mum died in May this year, I watched as she was being taken to the morgue.

Then I went straight to Canberra. I jumped on the next plane from Melbourne to Canberra for what would be my final High Court case as a lawyer. On 30 June this year, I retired from legal practice to begin this new chapter here in parliament.

The High Court case was about the illegal cruelty against non-human animals at slaughterhouses and the public's right to know what goes on in slaughterhouses and how non-human animals are treated as they make their way to the plates of those who choose to eat them. I acknowledge my then client and fellow animal rights campaigner, the great Christopher Delforce and his team at Farm Transparency Project.

Be assured I am here to continue to fight with you for the rights of non-human animals who, without us, don't have a voice and who are thinking and feeling beings that deserve care, respect and protection from cruelty. That case continues to await judgement. When I left legal practice in June this year, I had to entrust a number of ongoing important public interest cases to other lawyers, and I am deeply grateful to the very capable people who have taken on that legal work to protect the threatened species that I care so much about—species like the critically endangered orange-bellied parrot, which stops and forages on Robbins Island in north-west Tasmania.

I acknowledge the work of the Circular Head Coastal Awareness Network, for which I acted as lawyer. This Labor government approved a wind farm at Robbins Island that is simply in the wrong place because it will push the orange-bellied parrot to extinction as it instinctively follows its migratory pathway only to be suddenly pulverised by wind turbine blades. I will continue to fight for the orange-bellied parrot's existence and to ensure that wind farm does not proceed.

I will continue to fight for the Maugean skate, which is being driven to extinction by fish farms in Macquarie Harbour that are suffocating the skate to death. I acknowledge the work of NWTAS for Clean Oceans, for which I acted as lawyer. The science is clear.

We must urgently end the industrial-scale fish farming at Macquarie Harbour if we have any chance of saving the Maugean skate. These are all such important issues that I have had the great pleasure of being able to prosecute as a lawyer but that I will now have the pleasure of being able to continue to prosecute as a senator. But there is one important issue that I grew up on: protecting our remaining native forests and the species dependent on them to live.

Protecting our natural environment is not something I discovered as a lawyer; it has been part of me for as long as I can remember. As a little girl growing up on the northern beaches of Sydney, I wrote a poem about saving the Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle. This was profound because I had never been to Tasmania, I didn't know anyone who lived there and I don't even know if I knew where it was.

But, even then, I cared deeply about our native forests and the threatened species that depend on them. So, when I became a lawyer, I got on to looking at how we could use the law to do what the government wasn't doing. In 2009, I started the Brown Mountain case on behalf of Environment East Gippsland Inc. for the purpose of protecting native forests in far-north-east Victoria and the plethora of threatened species that inhabit it.

In 2010, we won. We achieved the first permanent injunction to end native forest logging ever in this country. That case then set the way for a series of litigations in Victoria that achieved injunctions to stop native forest logging across the state of Victoria and which played a significant role in the Victorian government announcing an end to native forest logging in Victoria from January 2024.

Finally—and I am sorry that it took so long—in September 2025, September last year, we achieved the first permanent injunction to stop some native-forest logging in Tasmania in Southern Forest. There has not yet been the time to achieve what we did with litigation in Victoria, but it is underway. Meanwhile, elsewhere in Tasmania, native-forest logging continues.

Why? It makes no social, environmental or economic sense. Australia Institute research tells us that less than one per cent of employed Tasmanians work in the native forest logging or associated industries.

That is a small enough number of people to be able to justly and respectfully transition into a different industry. I live in the beautiful north-west of Tasmania, and that means that I speak to plenty of people who work in the native-forest logging industry, and many of them tell me they want to continue to work in the forest. That's easily done.

We need to repair the damage that we have done to our native forests, and those who currently work in the native-forest logging industry can continue to work in the forest in restoration. The tertiary education courses already exist. Logging of our remaining native forests is a massive loss-making industry, which is propped up to the tune of tens of millions of dollars a year in taxpayer subsidies.

It's hard to fathom, right? Native-forest logging is a loss maker and a small employer not to mention a massive contributor to the climate crisis and a major cause of extinctions due to habitat loss. No wonder Australia Institute research tells us that seven out of 10 Australians want an end to native-forest logging.

I have been successfully saving native forests from logging purely for their intrinsic value, with no strings attached, for over 20 years I have proved it can be done, and I fought to get here to do the same thing once and for all—end native-forest logging across this country. I will not stop until I do. I am getting closer.

We are getting closer. We don't need to choose between saving forests and saving the climate. It is my mission to do both.

I just got here. Give me a moment to have a go. Thank you to my family, including my brother, sister-in-law and cousin who are here today; my friends; my colleagues; and my fellow campaigners, plenty of whom are here today who stood beside me throughout my life and my work.

I've got to say I'm proud of what I achieved as a lawyer, using the courts to protect our environment, defend people's rights and hold governments to account, but eventually I realised that my job as a lawyer interpreting laws wasn't enough. I wanted to be here making better laws. That is why I am proud to take my place as a Greens senator for Tasmania.

I have come here because I know what it means when the systems that are supposed to protect people fail them. I know what it means to lose your home. I know what it means to live in violence and keep it secret.

I know what it means to fight for someone you love who depends on a strong public system to live with dignity. I have seen what happens when governments know that forests are being destroyed, species are being pushed towards extinction and communities are asking if not begging for help, but governments choose not to act. I can't promise that every fight will be won, but I can promise you that I will not turn my back, and I will fight all the way.

I will fight for people who need a secure home, for disabled people and a strong NDIS, for women and children who deserve to live free from violence, for animals who can't speak for themselves, and for our forests, our threatened species and the extraordinary places that Tasmanians have entrusted to us to protect. And I will always remember why I am here. When my mum was dying, the last thing she wanted to know was whether we had paid all the bills.

We had. Everything was in order. She taught me what it means to take responsibility for the people and the things entrusted to us.

We all inherit obligations to one another, to the people who come after us and to the places we are fortunate enough to call home. We do not get to leave these obligations unpaid. That is what I bring with me into this parliament, and I am proud to take it alongside my Greens colleagues and our movement.

Anyone and everyone can join me on this journey.