Environmentalists are crying out for federal government intervention and regulation on environmental policies nationwide following the government’s payout deal struck with Tasmania’s lumber industry over the weekend.
On Sunday Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced that the government would inject $274 million into disassembling Tasmania’s forestry industry — kicking loggers out of at least 430,000 hectares of Tasmanian old-growth forests. Meanwhile, more than 100 protesters gathered at Victoria’s logging coupe in Sylvia Creek on the same day.
State-owned company VicForests recently rejected the Department of Sustainability and Environment’s reportage that old-growth forests exist in the logging area of Sylvia Creek.
“It is now up to the federal government to gain control across areas where extinction is high, conduct a review and then consider a new approach,” Victorian environmental activist Sarah Rees told Crikey.
The Commonwealth delegated power to state governments to reconcile clashes between conservation and commercial interests in the 1998 Regional Forestry Agreements (RFAs) Bill. The Bill is renewed every 20 years in order to ensure industry security but also means that conservation policies quickly become dated.
“The RFAs provided a way for the Commonwealth to extract itself from a difficult policy area,” Griffith University’s Head of Politics, Robyn Hollander, wrote in a 2004 essay. “One problem lies in the conceptualisation of the regions. While it may have been politically astute, it was environmentally flawed because it was determined by state boundaries rather than ecological criteria.”
Questions have started to emerge around the government’s rationale in prioritising intervention in Tasmanian forests over old-growth trees on the mainland. The Toolangi community near Sylvia Creek and its local government have banded together to protect the patch of green or “hole in the donut” that miraculously survived the 2009 Black Saturday fires.
Environment Minister Tony Burke told Crikey the Tasmanian agreement “was a process led by the community. It was not an intervention by governments”.
NSW environmentalists campaigning to protect the south-eastern forests near Eden were disheartened by the prospect of an intervention by the current federal government after experiencing 14 years of Labor government in state power.
“We always assume that someone else would do better handling environmental issues than the state government. But we’ve had a Labor government running the wood chipping industry for a number of years because of the union influence,” said Harriet Swift from the South East Forests Conservation Council. “Frankly, it’s hard to see a Labor government doing a lot differently.”
For more than three decades, environmentalists have campaigned against the Harris Daishowa woodchip mill near Eden, with more than 1000 people arrested for protesting against the mill’s licence renewal as early as 1989.
“In theory, the RFAs were a great idea and great ways for the government to engage in the community,” environmental lawyer Andrew McIntosh told Crikey. “[But] the Commonwealth first needs to listen to the communities and then secondly make sure it enforces conditions of the RFAs.”
McIntosh says the government’s payout scheme could be attributed to the ill-fated logging industry’s market challenges and international competition, along with the political risks of losing seats.
Conservationists have also queried state governments’ handling of information concerning forests in their jurisdiction due to conflicting interests. In Western Australia, an audit conducted by the Environmental Protection Authority last year expressed concerns about logging:
“The EPA has serious doubts that continued logging in the low rainfall zone and adjoining medium rainfall zone in the eastern portion of the forest would be capable of meeting Ecologically Sustainable Forest Management objectives.”
Perhaps the Tasmanian outcome will repeat itself at a national scale without the green lobby. Harvesting has already plummeted from 151,000 hectares in 2001 to 74,000 hectares last year, according to a report that will be released later this year.
For years, the national forestry union has been pushing for the federal government to create schemes to ensure security in the sector. In 2008 it urged the federal government to draw up a comprehensive national plan for the soft timber industry following the closure of mills in Dartmoor, Victoria, and Scottsdale, Tasmania.
“We have been calling for federal government involvement in discussions to put the industry in the country in a more sustainable fitting,” said a Coal, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union spokesperson.
Australia’s carbon tax introduction might also change the future of the logging industry’s course as Australia’s forests contain more carbon than any other forest in the world, according to the Green Carbon Report.
“The Commonwealth might actually get sucked into this overnight over the coming years because there’s a lot of carbon credits on the line. Everybody knows it,” McIntosh said.
No Andrew McIntosh the RFA’s were not “a great idea” in theory. They were driven by Keating in response to the 1992 Forest and Timber Inquiry which rejected resource security as anti science, and the legislation that failed to pass in 1991 – proven now by climate, let alone new discoveries of species.
The real politik concept was to break the national focus of forests in a brown land cover of 20% in 1788 down to 10% now and most damaged with much less than 1% land cover as original forest. So figures like ‘40% of Tas is already protected’ can be driven forward in ignorance of the national profile.
The break up of the national focus of the only big green groups that mattered in 1992-95 – The Wilderness Society and Australian Conservation Foundation – enabled the feds to cut (literally) deals with any number of splinter groups with small memberships in the name of “democracy” and token areas, but actually unrepresentative of national polling.
It was probably unconstitutional too with differental funding across states and regions.
The parallel real politik track was boosting of rival green bureaucracies like WWF, Greening Australia, (and my favourite – the partial environment centre) etc to neuter the “no compromise TWS”. The other real politik was the infiltration of TWS by Labor Party apologists including former staff of minister Ros Kelly. As a result volumes of forest destroyed has only increased since the first RFA in the late 90ies.
The critical mistake the loggers have made is conversion of wet old forest to dry schlerophyll leading to megafires. The metaphorical chickens are in flight on that thanks to the broken water cycle in the green landscape.
Where to start with this? Where to end? Forest management decisions that lead to good environmental and social outcomes won’t occur in the whirlwind of sentiment and hyperbole displayed in articles such as this. I’ll limit my comment to the issue of carbon storage.
Forest grow, forests burn or are logged, then they grow again. Carbon stored goes up, carbon stored goes down, carbon stored goes up again, ad infinitum. It’s really not that hard, is it, to see that forests are dynamic systems? For a great read on the current state of knowledge on carbon storage in forests I can recommend http://www.forestrytas.com.au/uploads/File/pdf/pdf2010/fire_carbon_steve_read.pdf
And on the issue of carbon permits I find it difficult to see how pricing carbon from forests will negatively impact on the economics of timber harvesting, since that same price will be applied to the alternative materials (the concrete and steel in the house you live in, the manufacturing price of the e-reader you’re viewing) that will make them far less competitive in the marketplace. I quote from the IPCC : “In the long term, sustainable forest management strategy aimed at maintaining or increasing forest carbon stocks, while producing an annual yield of timber, fibre, or energy from the forest, will generate the largest sustained mitigation benefit.” http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg3/en/ch9s9-4-1.html
If only economic rationalism were allowed to triumph in the forest. Plantations are far more efficient and cost effective and the only reason native forests are still logged is because the state is willing to perpetually suffer a financial loss to offload them.
Without government subsidising, and selling native forest at a price competitive with plantations, the native forest logging industry would be finished and all those workers would be in plantations…
Hola Modus Ponens,
Some big assumptions there. Native forest logging certainly makes big profits for many of us. And some of us even pay taxes on those profits and so the merry-go-round goes. Long may we continue to harvest (and regenerate) native forest. It doesn’t displace food production, it doesn’t use herbicides or pesticides and it keeps us living in the regions where we are happy!
Native forest logging is really woodchipping with some tiny elements of timber milling (see the stats). Most sawn timber used in Australia (structural timbers) are from plantations. Go and have a look at a house under construction. The RFAs were as one writer commented a complete dog of a policy that was all about ‘resource security’ and just resulted in billions more going to lay off workers over the years despite ‘locking in’ clearfelling. Now that the world market for woodchip and pulp is in the doldrums due to massive hectareage of plantations maturing here and overseas (eg South America) the industry is struggling. Hence the desperate plea in Tassie by the industry to the green groups to lobby the govt for more free money to bail them out again. Native forest that’s clearfelled doesn’t regenerate, only a tiny percentage of species come back, and the one’s that depend on hollows (which are heaps of our native spp of birds, possums etc) to nest don’t ever come back as it takes 80-100 years to form a hollow on a tree and we are clearfelling on much shorter rotations. The only solution for employment in this industry is value added production in clean pulp mills in places where people want them that sources product from the gargantuan plantation estate we already have in the ground and which is already supplying so many ,mature logs we can’t keep up. Lets hope we can sort Tassie quickly or else in 5 years time we’ll be bailing out the continually failing native forest industry there again. Then we can hopefully sort out the south east forests and maybe turn our attention to the massive rates of landclearing still happening outside wet forests, in our tropical woodlands and savannas. A smart country would sort them all at once and save billions of tonnes of carbon in the process.