Talking Point: Premier, drop the obsession with logging

VICA BAYLEY: Premier makes no mention of plans to clear rainforest protected by John Howard and Paul Lennon

RESERVE: Vica Bayley in World Heritage Area white gum forest earmarked for logging. Picture: Peter Mathew

KUDOS to Bob Brown Foundation staff and volunteers for flying the flag for takayna/Tarkine and drawing out new premier Peter Gutwein to engage in the debate over logging old-growth and rainforests of global importance (“Greens must lay off the loggers,” Talking Point, February 15).

The Premier says his government has worked hard and it understands the “importance of working together”.

The Tasmanian Government worked hard to tear down the Tasmanian Forest Agreement, a defining example of competing stakeholders “working together” and the best opportunity for a shift in the way Tasmania resolves conflict over land use.

Premier Gutwein’s government worked hard to delist world heritage forests to log them.

It worked hard to achieve FSC certification for logging, but failed.

It worked hard to strip $30 million from TasNetworks and privatise public plantations to pay out debts and cash up its own logging agency, and not call it a subsidy.

It worked hard to rename Forestry Tasmania.

Everybody expects a selective focus, spin and rhetorical flourish in a Premier’s opinion piece but what’s fascinating in this one is Mr Gutwein’s irony and cheek.

He’s “proud” of Tasmania’s “world class environmental record” citing the “more than 50 per of Tasmania in formal or informal reserves”, omitting to say his government wants to reverse protection for hundreds of thousands of hectares of those reserves come April.

No mention of his government’s statutory plan to log old-growth rainforests inside other conservation reserves, including reserves specifically protected from “selective logging” by John Howard and Paul Lennon way back in 2005.

Most galling of all, is his inference conservationists agreed to logging rainforests in the Tarkine, “an area set aside by Parliament after consultation with the environment movement specifically to support production forestry in perpetuity”.

By this he can only mean the Tasmanian Forest Agreement (TFA).

Bob Brown and others protesting in the Tarkine never supported parliament’s implementation of the TFA so to use it as a weapon against them is ignorant and vain.

As a signatory I did support the TFA and having lived every detail, see Premier Gutwein’s use of it also desperate and deceptive.

The TFA wasn’t any old consultation. It was a detailed negotiation and agreement seeking outcomes for all sides and a new way of doing things in Tasmania. It led to the World Heritage Area extension and a larger (but far from secure) reserve estate, restructure support for industry and workers and an ongoing role for conservationists in decisions about logging and conservation.

But Premier Gutwein rejected all that. In opposition he refused to meet with negotiators and in government he helped tempt industry to walk away from the agreement and support legislation to tear it up. His government has worked hard to attack the conservation elements of the agreement and vilify people wanting to protect forests.

Thanks to his government the TFA is defunct and industry players like Britton Timbers and Ta Ann know it. Any attempt to trade on the agreement or use it as leverage over those wanting better protection for native forests should be seen for what it is, opportunism.

Putting all that aside, when it comes to specialty timbers logged from rainforests like the Tarkine, the TFA didn’t get to reach agreement on a way forward.

Areas like the one referenced by Premier Gutwein were set aside for a future negotiation, with new reserves a live option. Stakeholders would develop a specialty timber management plan and land tenure, including reserves, would flow from that. But the incoming Liberal government sacked environmentalists from the process and wrote its own plan, ignoring the advice of expert advisers and Forestry Tasmania along the way. As a result, the plan proposes logging in the Howard/Lennon reserves and vast areas of the 50 per cent of Tasmania that makes Premier Gutwein so proud, the Tasmanian Reserve Estate.

Specialty timber is a vexed issue in Tasmania. As the woodchip juggernaut trashed vast areas of native forests, the specialty timber sector sat back and said little, profiting from an unlimited supply of high quality, subsidised timber.

What couldn’t be sold was burnt, sending decades worth of specialty supply up in smoke.

In the 21st century, using rainforest timbers cut from 600-plus year old trees for decorative lining in a Hobart development should be seen as an unsustainable fashion choice. It’s a non-essential, nonsensical luxury that is viewed by many as the equivalent of Tasmania’s own ivory.

The debate over logging will heat up further as the April deadline protecting TFA reserves approaches and expires. Let’s hope Premier Gutwein drops the obsession with native forest logging, stops spouting division and denial and demonstrates some credibility with regards the status of the Tasmanian Forest Agreement and his own role in wrecking it.

Vica Bayley is a former campaign manager of the Wilderness Society and signatory to the 2012 Tasmanian Forest Agreement.