Talking Point: Forest unrest will continue until logging stops

BOB BROWN says civil unrest will go on until logging destruction is stopped

Tasmanian forest protests.

WITHIN a month of being welcomed as Tasmania’s new premier, Peter Gutwein sounds nothing new at all.

That’s a real pity because Tasmania relies on its natural advantages for its future and needs a breath-of-fresh-air leader prepared to ensure our island’s bountiful natural assets in perpetuity.

A big test of our times is the Tarkine, listed by one US review as top of the 10 most desirable unprotected places left on Earth. Takayna/Tarkine has an incredibly rich landscape of Aboriginal heritage and would best be back in the Aboriginal community’s hands. It has Australia’s largest temperate rainforest. It is a stronghold for globally attractive but increasingly endangered species like the world’s biggest freshwater crayfish, the Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle, Tasmanian devil, masked owl, white goshawk, platypuses and our recently decimated wombats.

The Tarkine is a major attractant and economic stimulus and job creator for the North-West, in particular the small business sector. But Premier Gutwein, who cannot be ignorant of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area as the single biggest drawcard for tourism and hospitality, sideswipes this sector by claiming that nominating the Tarkine for World Heritage status “would see another 10 per cent of the state off-limits to productive, job-creating industries”.

In 2020, there is little excuse for a former treasurer and new premier to be lionising the extractive industries — mining, logging and industrial fish farming — at the expense of jobs-rich tourism and hospitality-based on retaining Tasmania’s natural intactness in a world of rapid destruction of the biosphere. This is being blinkered, unimaginative and a loser for most Tasmanians.

This is no longer Greens theory. This is the highly prospective economic and business reality Tasmania finds itself in in an overpopulated world searching for natural beauty, security and inspiration. The essence of that beauty, security and inspiration requires its own security and rescue from being eroded away. However, logging of native forests and wildlife as in the Tarkine, expansion of industrial fish farming in pristine marine ecosystems and secretive government processes allocating exclusive private resorting in wild and scenic protected areas is erosion on multiple fronts. It is gutting the goose that lays the golden egg. It is government by the imprudent policy of having private enterprise, not the public good, call the shots.

Here are simple questions for the Premier: “What is your vision for Tasmania in 2050 or 2070, let alone 2120?” What are your plans for the reality that, down the line, Tasmania, same size as Ireland, will need to manage eight million visitors a year as Ireland is doing now? Drawing up such plans needs wide community involvement as well as world’s best practice for our wild and scenic isle and not just government bending to the pervasive backroom lobbying by vested interests.

The last time a state government – Jim Bacon’s – canvassed public opinion to help chart Tasmania’s future, the feedback was that logging wild forests should end. Instead of heeding that advice, Bacon and all premiers since have ended true public consultation. In a state not adequately funding health or education, the extractive industries are propped up by taxpayer subsidies or exemptions from regulatory oversight or laws applying to everyone else. The backroom lobbying of vested interests has overcome the public good. Everyone knows it.

Mr Gutwein should not squander his chance to break the cycle by putting protection of Tasmania’s natural and cultural assets, not least its wilderness, first. He should be encouraging those many local job-rich small businesses.

This might begin by accepting the Macquarie Dictionary’s definition of sustainable economics: “an economic system that can remain in place over an indefinite period without causing any adverse effects on the environment”.

Mr Gutwein’s description of the destructive impact of logging in the Tarkine, where hundreds more football-field- size areas will be clear-felled as “our renewable, sustainable, world-class forestry industry” is sanctimonious piffle.

We can meet our timber needs from Tasmanian plantations. Vested interests insisting on decimating public rainforest, after supporting, for decades, thousands of tonnes being incinerated as a waste by-product of the export woodchipping industry, should not be licenced to keep the destruction going.

My foundation and the volunteers who give so much to defend the Tarkine are the face of things to come for Tasmania. The destruction will end. The question is, after what further public upheaval?

I wrote to congratulate Mr Gutwein when he became premier, seeking a meeting to discuss Tasmania’s way forward. The letter awaits a response, but it would be good for him to hear creative ideas about our wonderful island state’s future than those based on last-century exploitation of all that nature has given us.

He needs to hear what world-class and sustainable economics really mean.

Environmentalist Bob Brown is a former leader of the state and Australian Greens.