2016-10-11
MR BARBER (Northern Metropolitan) — This bill, among other things, increases penalties for offences like driving off-road, damaging or destroying vegetation, damaging or destroying natural features, damaging or destroying native fauna, and polluting. If only someone could enforce these laws in relation to the Andrews government's destructive environmental practices in the native forests of Victoria! I wish somewhere there was some kind of global police officer who could come down here and actually enforce on the Andrews government massive fines for the exact practices that are talked about in this bill.
I was in East Gippsland on the weekend. I was visiting various places and regions that I have visited many times in the past, including a number of half-logged logging coupes where the destruction is the worst I have ever seen, and I have lost count of the number of logging coupes that I have inspected over decades. Whatever there used to be in relation to the code of forest practice has been tossed out of the window in the absolute desperation of the government-owned logging company, which knows its days are numbered, to tear through that bush and get out what it can. Endangered plants are missed in the surveys and destroyed by logging. Entire gullies are taken out by bulldozers, leaving bare earth with slash thrown down into those gullies. The vast majority of the material, by the way, is left there to be burnt because even Japanese woodchip companies these days have developed a bigger environmental conscience than Ms Shing over here, and they have actually turned up their noses at the product; and there is a massive dollar subsidy going into the East Gippsland logging operation just to keep it alive. If only Ms Shing or somebody in her party could apply those same nice rhetorical flourishes we heard from her before and actually look at what is happening down there and say enough is enough.
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Mr BARBER — If Ms Shing has not yet been down into these same bush tracks to see what I have seen, I will happily make an appointment for her and she can visit the exact same sites that I did on the weekend. Species like the rough tree fern, for which it took citizen scientists — —
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Mr BARBER — Well, Ms Shing is the last Labor MP between the Dandenongs and New Zealand, so if there is anybody that we can hold accountable for this matter, it is her. But there are many citizen scientists down there who have been doing the government's job for them, and they would be very happy to take Ms Shing or any other MP from this Parliament on the same tour that I got on the weekend to see these threatened species that apparently, despite the fact they are just tree ferns standing there and pretty easy to identify, the government's own inspectors, who we are constantly assured here by the Minister for Agriculture are on the job, somehow missed. A bunch of citizen scientists found it with a 100-yard walk into the nearest gully.
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Mr BARBER — Well, what I oppose, Ms Shing, as I have in the life of the governments of Cain, Kirner, Kennett, Bracks, Brumby, Baillieu —
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Mr BARBER — Napthine — thank you — and now this current mob, is the continued subsidised destructive woodchipping of Victoria's forests. The scenes that you would see there look like something out of Indonesia or Borneo, but they are actually being licensed and promoted by this so-called progressive government. We keep hearing about the progressive Andrews government. Well, you show someone a picture of that logging coupe that I visited and you ask them if there is anything progressive about the destruction of old-growth forest.
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Mr BARBER — Well, bring a bill before the parliament, Ms Shing — through you, Acting President — to end this destruction, and of course you will have my vote. But you will not.
It is a publicly funded make-work scheme. If somebody was making a bazillion dollars out of this, I could understand why it was continuing, but you are propping it up with public subsidies. In fact you are cross-subsidising logging operations from West Gippsland and feeding that money into keeping up the same destruction in East Gippsland just as some kind of ideological position that your party has always had. The destruction that is happening there pales in significance against anything that this bill might seek to regulate, including approving administrative functions of land managers caring for reserves, including being able to set aside areas for revegetation — —
[Speech was interrupted.]
Mr BARBER — Ms Shing, you have established yourself as an effective haranguer and noisemaker in this chamber in a much faster time than anyone else has — through you, Acting President, just responding to that barrage over there — but as a local member that has been able to deliver anything for the environment or the community, I would say the jury is out.
The bill also regulates being able to set aside areas for revegetation or other management purposes and allows setting of fees for permit-authorised land use and reduces, waives or refunds some tolls, fees and rent charges imposed by regulations. The bill seeks to make it easier or cheaper to issue riparian management licences. Well, if they can just keep their own bulldozers out of the creeks, that would be a massive improvement compared to anything that is being put forward in this bill.
It is a disgrace. Their environmental credentials are an absolute joke. The public are twigging to it. The Premier has not got a green bone in his body, and his entire party are cowering behind him. They cannot face up to the level of government-sponsored environmental destruction that is ongoing and that would not actually be happening without government support, and here we are dealing with this fiddling around with increasing the penalties on a few matters in relation to private citizens. The Greens will support the bill.
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