Former senator and Greens co-founder Bob Brown has been moved on by police while staging a protest against logging in Tasmania.
Protesters were staging a “peaceful occupation” of swift parrot habitat near Swansea in the state’s north east, where birds have been pushed out of their usual breeding and feeding forests by intensified logging.
Police attended the timber production zone at Lake Leake following reports a group of people was obstructing the work of logging contractors.
“Some of the people in the group were moved on without incident, however a man who initially failed to move on from the area will be summonsed to attend court on a trespass matter,” a police spokeswoman said.
Protestors tied themselves to logging equipment
Two women who had tied themselves to logging equipment were arrested and charged with trespass and obstructing police.
They will appear in court at a later date.
Mr Brown said he was “upholding the laws of nature” and an international convention on biodiversity.
“The parrots cross the Bass Strait in three hours, whereas it takes the ferry all day or all night, and they find where the eucalypts are blossoming and that’s where their biggest population will be,” he said.
“This year, it’s in the north east of Tasmania, and instead of protecting that habitat as the biodiversity convention would have us, they’re logging.”
Decries ‘broadscale destruction’ of habitat
The former senator joined the protest on Monday and camped out overnight at the site, where two people had tied themselves to machinery and one staged a tree-sit on Tuesday.
“It’s broadscale destruction,” Mr Brown said.
“The current coupe that they’re logging is 200 hectares and, significantly, what they’re doing is taking out the big trees, and they’re the very ones that these birds need for nesting.”
Mr Brown questions the legality of logging in the area.
The state’s north eastern highlands are home to nesting and foraging swift parrots, which Mr Brown said were rapidly approaching extinction.
He is calling on Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to end logging in Australia’s native forests.
Bob Brown Foundation campaigner Erik Hayward said protesters’ requests to save swift parrot habitat had been ignored by the Tasmanian premier and forestry authorities.
“The forests of the Eastern Tiers are some of the last remaining habitats for the swift parrot,” he said.
Mr Brown was arrested twice in two days in December 2020, also over anti-logging protests in swift parrot habitat in Tasmania’s Eastern Tiers.
-AAP
