Bob Brown
Former Greens leader Bob Brown has been charged over a protest at the contentious Lapoinya logging site in north-west Tasmania. Source: ABC News
The Friends of Lapoinya Action Group (FLAG) said Mr Brown and three other people walked into the Lapoinya Forest exclusion zone on Monday morning.
Mr Brown and a 67-year-old Tasmanian man were arrested, while the others were escorted out by police and fined.
Mr Brown said he was walking towards a bulldozer, which backed off when it saw him, before he was arrested.
“The police arrived and directed us to leave and three of my companions did, but Roger Bradley … and I stayed there and we were arrested,” he said
“They gave us the choice of deciding whether we obey a direction to leave a so-called business access area, to me it’s leaving an area of totally unnecessary forest destruction to feed an over-wealthy Malaysian forestry corporation.
“If you leave that, you abandon it and I wasn’t prepared to.”
He was released and summonsed to appear at Burnie Magistrates Court in March.
It follows two days of protests at Lapoinya, which resulted in the arrests of a 35-year-old Hobart woman and a 66-year-old man from Wynyard under the workplace protest legislation.
Mr Brown has a long history of environmental activism and served 19 days in Hobart’s Risdon Prison following the infamous Franklin River Dam protests of 1982-83.
He retired from Parliament in 2012 after serving as a Greens senator for 16 years.
The 49-hectare section of forestry earmarked for logging, or coupe, is due to be harvested by Forestry Tasmania as early as next week.
FLAG said the area was of high conservation value, but Forestry Tasmania said it had been logged before.
The Tasmanian Forest Industries Association said the coupe was never placed into reserve under the Tasmanian Forest Agreement, which was dismantled by the current Liberal Government.
Resources Minister Paul Harriss said Mr Brown was a hypocrite.
“He was leader of the Australian Greens when Labor and the Greens signed off on the harvesting of Lapoinya as a production coupe,” he said.
“At the time he didn’t raise even a squeak about Lapoinya.
“The question he needs to answer is: What’s changed? The answer is obvious: Nothing at all.”
Labor candidate for the federal seat of Braddon, currently held by Liberal MP Brett Whiteley, said Mr Brown’s arrest diminished the credibility of FLAG and its campaign.
“For Bob Brown to allegedly enter into an exclusion zone is nothing short of a publicity stunt that is counterproductive to addressing the community concerns and creates an unsafe workplace for forestry workers,” she said.
“With two bull-headed and arrogant opposing sides, Bob Brown and the Liberals, the forestry debate will now rage on.”
