The last three days have been quite a revelation of exactly what’s going on in Tasmania’s forests. Regardless of the rhetoric of sensitive management of the forests, the real story is one of wantonly sending species towards extinction and viciously attacking those brave souls who stand up for protection.
On Monday, Bob Brown launched a new report by Margaret Blakers and Isobel Crawford into the state of the Swift Parrot (pictured). This amazing parrot, named in honour of its ability to cross Bass Strait in 3 hours (the ferry takes all night!), is listed as endangered, but, as the paper argues, should be upgraded to critically endangered as its population has recently crashed below 1000 pairs thanks to the logging of its only breeding grounds – the forests of south-eastern Tasmania.
Last Friday, Forestry Tasmania proudly announced that they would halt logging in the Wielangta coupes where the birds are nesting this season. Once the birds are gone, of course, Forestry will continue the slash and burn, destroying forever one of the last remaining nurseries for this beautiful little bird.
Bob made the point to Fran Kelly on Radio National breakfast on Monday that, with a species on the brink of extinction and the State Government doing nothing to protect its long-term future, the Federal Government has the right and the responsibility to step in and terminate the Regional Forests Agreement that covers the area preventing the Federal Government from taking any action to save the bird.
When challenged on the issue by Fran Kelly on this morning’s breakfast, Peter Garrett ducked the issue, passing the buck to the Tasmanian Government:
“Under the RFA Act, it is the responsibility of the Tasmanian government to ensure that those management prescriptions that have been identified as necessary are undertaken and it’s our expectation that that would be the case… The EPBC [Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation] Act does not apply, and hasn’t for some time, to override or to provide … any necessary or additional actions over the RFA. Now that’s always been the case.”
A bold move by one of my former heroes.
Meanwhile, the Tasmanian Government, in whose trust Minister Garrett places the fate of the Swift Parrot, is led by a man crassly and wilfully ignorant of science. A recent study by the ANU has backed up what many of us have been arguing for years — that standing forests are far more valuable as carbon stores than they are as woodchips.
Premier Bartlett, on the other hand, told The Australian newspaper that “I don’t think the logging of old-growth forests is necessarily related to climate change” and called the clear global position that standing forests are more valuable than logged forests “b-llsh-t”. You can read what Christine Milne has to say about that here.
But just to confirm one of the worst weeks for Tasmania’s forests in years, we were notified last night of a horrific attack on protesters in the Florentine Valley yesterday, brave people from Still Wild, Still Threatened, trying to protect forests on the eastern edge of the World Heritage Area. They had locked onto a car in the middle of a forestry access road, peacefully but effectively blocking the ability of loggers to gain access and chop down the trees. They were attacked in their car, with loggers bashing the vehicle with a sledgehammer, eventually dragging one protester out and kicking him in the head. One particularly brave protester caught it on a phone camera and the footage is now making its way around the globe.
A warning. This footage is not for the faint-hearted, or for those who dislike coarse language.
I recently returned from my first ever visit to Tasmania. I met these brave activists in their tree houses in the freezing cold. Later I met loggers and truck drivers worried about their jobs. Why can’t the government use loggers for conservation instead of the destruction of Tasmania’s unique and magnificent old growth forests? This divide and rule tactic overrides the public good and serves a government addicted to keeping the big end of town sweet.
Sorry. You’re wrong.
I live in Hobart and visit the Weilangta every now and then. It was clear-felled 100 yrs ago. Now there’s a forest with parrots.
GET REAL. You mainlanders who want Tasmania to be your “holiday-whore” need to get a grip on your own foul problems.
Sydney Water tells a sad and sorry tale. More than 922,000,000 litre of RAW sewerage are pumped into the ocean EVERY DAY.
When people complained about shit on Sydney beaches they moved the outfalls 5km further out.
At a conservative estimate that’s 500,000,000 litres of drinking water Sydney flushes every day. Plus 200 tonnes of heavy metal and 20 tonnes of organ-chlorines a year.
What is wrong with you people. Is it too hard? Too close to home? Easier to pick on some-one else?
Scum
Go to gaol, directly to gaol, do not collect logs, nor woodchips and … go to gaol. We don’t live in a vigilante lawless society yet. Just another reason why the majority of Australians are sick of their gst and other taxes going to prop up loss making loggers from Tasmania in a population 1/3 the size of western sydney.
They trash our national forests on PUBLIC land for private profit and expect us to subsidise them while they do it with our tax subsidies. They would fit right in on Wall St with the rest of the corporate welfare junkies. That fool with the mallet would be better on the dole rather than destroy the future of this planet.
The appalling management of the Swift Parrot habitat in Tasmania is a reflection of the failure of Australian society as a whole to admit that we have made serious mistakes in how we manage Australia. Whether it is the overallocation of water in the River Murray, the failure to act to stop the spread of the cane toad, or the destruction of old growth forests — in all these and many more examples, we let our political leaders continue to fail to act decisively to correct the problems.