Aussie Enviro

Hundreds of thousands of hectares of Australia's native forests, along with their wildlife, have been destroyed, often involving "Regeneration" burns that incinerate the remnants of the forests and emit their carbon into the atmosphere.

Leading up to Labor's national conference in Brisbane this year, the Labor Environment Action Network proposed a motion to end native forest logging.

A meeting of the Montréal Process working group on forest sustainability, to be held in Sydney in October, will put new focus on the unsustainability of Australia's native forest operations, not least those destroying koala and greater glider habitats in New South Wales.

Australia has two million hectares of established soft and hard wood plantations and faces comparatively less trouble converting to a plantation-based timber industry than New Zealand did when its incoming Labour government ended native forest logging in 2002.

As the Labor conference got under way in Brisbane in August, 6000 people turned out at rallies across Australia calling for an end to native forest logging.

The native forest logging industry knows it has lost the public argument: its own polls tell it so.

Professor David Lindenmayer, of the Australian National University, has pointed out that ending native forest logging would be the quickest and cheapest way for Albanese to meet his target of a 43 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 - a modest target currently slipping away from being achievable, with emissions actually going up last year.