Ken Henry urges end of forestry and land clearing loopholes

ABC NEWS (Australia)

The federal government is being told it has a once in a generation opportunity to protect our environment. In a major speech today, former Treasury Secretary, and head of the Australian Climate and Biodiversity Foundation, Ken Henry will argue it's time to close forestry and land clearing loopholes. He's confident the Australian parliament will agree with him.

Transcript

00:00This is the third Parliament to try to fix Australia's broken national environment laws

00:07that have been around for 25 years and I think on this occasion there's a very good chance

00:13that the Australian Parliament will fix the laws and that will make a big difference to

00:18the protection of Australia's environment and also to the achievement of our net zero

00:23goals.

00:24To follow the legislation or have followed the operation of the legislation closely over

00:31the past 25 years have all been aware that the legislation contains a glaring loophole

00:36when it comes to deforestation and the impact of that glaring, I mean basically it doesn't

00:43apply to most of the deforestation that is occurring in Australia and the impact of that loophole

00:49is that every year in Australia several hundred thousand hectares of vegetation continue to

00:54be cleared and that clearing of vegetation, it's mainly forests of course, the clearing of that

01:00vegetation does enormous damage to environmental integrity, it destroys fragile ecosystems,

01:08it puts threatened species at greater risk of extinction, in fact renders some extinct and

01:14at the same time it releases more carbon into the atmosphere rather than drawing or sequestering

01:21carbon out of the atmosphere which is something that the Australian landscape has to do if we've

01:25got any chance of meeting net zero. Indeed it's well understood now, at least by some, that the Australian

01:33landscape is going to have to draw out of the atmosphere by 2050 two and a half times as much carbon as

01:40it presently draws out of the atmosphere each year. That's a massive increase in carbon sequestration in

01:47the Australian landscape and right at the moment we're heading off in the opposite direction clearing vegetation.

01:53Without a healthy natural environment there will be no economy. I mean it is often said that the two are

02:04necessarily in conflict that we have to destroy the environment in order to enjoy economic growth and Australia's experience though

02:14so far this century has been that we have accelerated the rate at which we're destroying the environment

02:20and at the same time our productivity growth has slowed to something which is barely measurable.

02:26So we have not achieved faster economic growth, we've not achieved higher productivity

02:32by ramping up the rate at which we destroy the natural environment and it's about time that we

02:38understood that unless we pay attention to the way in which the environment supports everything else we do

02:44we won't have anything else. We won't have an environment, we won't have anything else.

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