Pictures of a massive, centuries-old tree on the back of a logging truck in central Tasmania have sparked calls from environmentalists for Anthony Albanese to visit the area to see damage being inflicted on native forests.
A community member on Sunday recorded images of the large tree, which filled the width of the truck, being taken from a logging coupe in the Florentine Valley.
It prompted about 20 conservationists, including former Greens leader Bob Brown, to protest in the forest, about 100km from Hobart, on Tuesday.
The activists said the coupe included three stumps of Eucalyptus regnans that matched the tree on the truck. They said they had been recently felled, were more than 3 metres in diameter and would have been hundreds of years old.
The Wilderness Society said citizen scientists surveyed the area earmarked for logging earlier this year and found another 49 trees more than 2 metres in diameter.
Brown, now the chair of the Bob Brown Foundation, said felling trees that size was “globally shameful”.
“Just days ago this wonder of nature, centuries old but still unimaginably strong and youthful, was alive and a natural wonder,” he said. “Today the tree’s death is a national disgrace. It was publicly subsidised and entirely unnecessary.”
He called on the prime minister to “come and see this” and legislate to ban native forest logging. “The giant Eucalyptus regnans backed by the snow-topped Mount Field make this a place of enormous tourism potential,” Brown said.
The future of native forest logging is an issue of focus for the Labor party ahead of its national conference in Brisbane this week. More than 300 Labor branches have backed a push for the government to end native forestry – a step already promised by state governments in Victoria and Western Australia – and fund an expanded, publicly owned plantation industry to replace it.
The Tasmanian Liberal government defended the state’s logging practices. Responding to a question from the Greens in state parliament, premier Jeremy Rockliff said Tasmania had giant trees of “national and international significance” in both protected areas and “public production forests”, and the timber agency had well-developed procedures to protect them.
The state-owned agency formerly known as Forestry Tasmania, now rebadged as Sustainable Timber Tasmania, said the tree pictured on the truck had been assessed and felled “for safety reasons”.
Suzette Weeding, the agency’s general manager for conservation and land management, said it had measured the biggest trees in the coupe beforehand and found no giant trees. She said the logging plan included a “prescription to minimise impact to live trees greater than 2 metres diameter at breast height where it is operationally safe to do so”.
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The agency defines giant trees as those at least 85 metres tall or at least 280 cubic metres estimated stem volume. Any tree larger than this is required to be protected by a minimum 100 metre buffer in which logging is not supposed to happen.
Guardian Australia asked Sustainable Timber Tasmania why the threshold for a giant tree was set at 85 metres. Its response did not address the question.
Alice Hardinge, a campaigner with the Wilderness Society, said citizen scientists working with the organisation found the forest in the coupe had high conservation values, including being prime habitat for hollow-tree dependent species such as the endangered masked owl. She said laser measurement suggested the biggest tree in the coupe was 87 metres tall.
“Forestry Tasmania says that it doesn’t log giant trees, yet every other week Tasmanians see giant single-log loads on the back of trucks, and concerned citizens find giant stumps in public state forests,” Hardinge said. “Citizens should not have to do the government’s surveying work for them.”
Dr Jen Sanger, a forest ecologist and co-founder of the conservation group Tree Projects, said the 85-metre definition for a giant tree had “absolutely no basis”. “It’s completely arbitrary,” Sanger said. “Ecologically speaking, any big tree that is large and hollow-bearing is worth protecting.”
She estimated the tree pictured on the back of the truck could have been more than 400 years old.
The Tasmanian Greens leader, Rosalie Woodruff, said the felling of the tree on the truck was a “crime against nature” and “not an isolated incident”.
The state Labor party did not respond to questions about native forest logging, and the Tasmanian Forest Products Association declined to comment.
