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Tassie's forests: deal or no deal?

By Mark Poynter - posted Thursday, 6 December 2012


By now, anyone with an interest in Tasmania's forests will be aware that a so-called 'historic peace deal' (the Tasmanian Forests Agreement) has been agreed upon by representatives of the state's timber industry and its largest environment groups (ENGOs) after two-years of often fraught negotiations. Ostensibly, the deal allows a smaller timber industry to operate free from environmental activism in return for over 500,000 hectares of new national parks.

 

Already the associated Tasmanian Forests Agreement 2012 Bill has been rushed through the Tasmanian Parliament's Lower House in which the Labor-Green Minority Government has the numbers. The Independents and Liberals -dominated Upper House is due to consider the TFA next week.

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Virtually no-one with a forestry or timber industry background supports the Tasmanian Forests Agreement (the TFA) in their hearts, but pragmatic realism has seen several prominent industry figures lend their support to it as a way forward that may be preferable to the so-called 'forest wars' which have continued right through the negotiation process. While these industry supporters presumably view the TFA as a least worst option, their calls to 'give peace a chance' are predicated on the highly uncertain notion that the legislated agreement would provide stability for the industry when there is no guarantee and little evidence to suggest this will be case.

Indeed, the evidence points strongly the other way given that both Christine Milne and Bob Brown, the respective leader and spiritual leader of Australia's environmental movement, have both expressed disquiet with the deal because it doesn't protect enough forest. Furthermore, Brown, when pressed in a recent media interview, admitted that he aspires to all of Tasmania's public lands being ultimately contained in national parks. This, coupled with his recent appointment as a director of the ENGO, Markets for Change, which has been a key player in destroying the market reputation of Tasmanian wood products, is hardly indicative of an imminent outbreak of peace in the state's forests if the TFA passes through the Upper House.

Amongst the industry's rank and file there is disquiet about the undue haste with which the deal has been done. Indeed, the TFA legislation passed through the Lower House even before one of the signatory groups, Timber Communities Australia, had agreed to sign it.

There is also curiousity about how the position of the industry's negotiators dramatically changed almost overnight from walking away from the talks because of the intransigence of ENGO negotiators, to suddenly yielding for what appears to be little real gain to the industry.

In recent days, questions have been asked in parliament regarding speculation that industry negotiators were offered somewhere between $100 – 200 million of additional Federal Government funding to agree to sign the TFA. While this has yet to be clarified, it hints at grubby backroom deals to meet a politically expedient agenda. Previously, Federal Environment Minister, Tony Burke, has indicated that any addition monies needed to facilitate the agreement would come from other maninland environment programs suggesting that real conservation gains may well be sacrificed for political purposes.

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There is also concern at what has become of so-called 'durability provisions' that were mooted as a means of ensuring that ENGOs did not recommence campaigns against the remaining industry once new national parks are ratified. The only enforcable 'durability provision' of the TFA seems to be that over 100,000 hectares of the proposed new national parks will be held-over subject to a 2-year absence of anti-logging activism before being ratified. Fair enough, but what happens then?

Even if the ENGO signatories to the TFA desist from protesting for two years as required, there are several other ENGOs that are not bound by the TFA. Some of these have already pledged to continue their protests, while disquiet amongst the 'save-the-forests' rank and file of the signatory ENGOs is unlikely to be placated forever. On this basis the notion of an enduring 'forest peace' lasting beyond two years seems quite fanciful.

Other industry insiders believe that even if the TFA does secure peace, the reduced timber resource availability and its greater fragmentation will ultimately destroy the remaining industry due to higher costs of access and log delivery which will undermine efficiencies and competitiveness. For example, the highly valuable Special Timbers sector of the industry will have its resource availability cut by at least 70% and will shift from obtaining much of its resource from close forests, to having to get almost all of its reduced entitlements from remote and barely accessible areas in far western and north western Tasmania, hundreds of kilometers further away.

There is also speculation that a forced concentration of harvesting activity within the reduced areas of public timber production forests will condemn the industry to another process of 'reform' in as little as 5 to 10 years time. This is a legitimate concern given that it is partly responsible for ongoing ENGO anti-logging campaigns in mainland states despite statewide annual harvesting rates falling to historically low levels in the wake of similar national parks expansions at the expense of traditional timber production forests.

There are also doubts associated with some of the proposed benefits linked to the passing of the TFA legislation, such as the re-opening of the Triabunna woodchip mill. Recent reports suggest that re-opening the mill would require $ millions in government subsidies because the export woodchip market is the worst it has ever been. In addition, the mill's new owners and its manager, former Wilderness Society head, Alec Marr, have previously insisted that if re-opened, the mill would only accept FSC-certified wood. Rather conveniently, Tasmania's State forests are not FSC-certified suggesting that the mill's re-opening would provide no benefit to the native forests sector.

Similarly, the TFA's committment to pursue FSC-certification in the remaining wood production forests seems to be unduly hopeful given that FSC has only ever certified a few selective harvesting operations in Australia and has rejected clearfelling despite it being the most appropriate technique for harvesting Tasmania's most productive wet forests. The extent to which ENGOs have already created an errant market perception of FSC as the only indicator of environmentally-acceptable timber production will be problematic for the future of the industry unless ENGOs force FSC Australia to relax its standards to allow Forestry Tasmania to be certified. There is nothing in the TFA that guarantees that this will happen and even if it does, it would presumably take several years to achieve.

Despite all these reservations, it is understandable that elements of the industry are supportive of the TFA as it offers at least the possibility of a way forward. In particular, Ta Ann Tasmania, now the largest timber company in the state, faces the threat of being either closed-down by its Malaysian parent company or by CFMEU industrial action if the TFA is not legislated. While it arguably has little option but to support the TFA, in recent days it upped the ante by declaring an intention to build a third mill in the state if the TFA legislation is passed while reminding the Upper House that it would close its existing mills and leave if the legislation is rejected. This raises legitimate questions about one company attempting to dictate the outcome of public policy.

Others industry entities, such as the Tasmanian Forest Contractors Association, are understandably sick of being in the frontline of the conflict and desperate to grasp at any possible resolution.

Other commentators pushing the 'give peace a chance' line are making the point that it is simply untenable to go back to the 'forest wars' by rejecting the TFA. While this view presumes that the 'forest wars' will die if the TFA is legislated – which is by no means certain – it also ignores the departure of Gunns which means that the level of harvesting, even if the TFA is rejected, will be only around a half of what it was before the 'forest peace' negotiations began. This should be seen as a pretty good outcome for those opposed to timber production, but is admittedly unlikely to be acceptable to ENGOs now that they have an expectation of it coming with 500,000 hectares of new national parks.

Clearly, the Tasmanian Upper House has a tremendously difficult task in determing whether or not the TFA legislation is passed. However, irrespective of this, the 'elephant in the room' which seems to have been rarely considered is the process by which the TFA has been developed and its wider implications for public policy determinations.

The passing of the TFA legislation would effectively vindicate ENGO tactics that have targetted shareholders, investors, markets, and consumers to financially weaken an industry on the basis of ideology rather than real environmental concerns. The acknowledged benchmarks for serious forest-based environmental problems are poor or absent public land planning and regulation, poor or non-existent industry regulation, corruption, and political instability. Tasmania has none of these problems and in fact already had about two-thirds of its public native forests protected in conservation reserves prior to the 'peace talks' – an enviable position that developing countries struggling to control rampant illegal logging and deforestation can only dream of.

Contrary to the reality, ENGO activists have continually portrayed Tasmania as being akin to a Third World country harboring an environmental catastrophe driven by supposedly unconstrained forest exploitation. This deceitful portrayal has played a substantial role in precipating the timber industry's financial struggles which have forced it to sue for 'forest peace' under an extortion-like atmosphere where it has been effectively forced to bargain with ENGOs in return for them desisting from unfairly destroying its reputation.

This is hardly the basis for rational and balanced determinations of public policy and reinforces a perception that pressure to alter policies can be forced by manufacturing populist hystrionics that bear only a passing resemblance to the reality.

In this case, the response to this pressure of setting up an industry and ENGO committee, effectively shifted policy responsibility out of the hands of experienced government scientists, land managers and regulators and onto the shoulders of unelected and unaccountable representatives of just two narrow vested interests. Effectively, it mandated part-time medical doctors and expert bushwalkers representing ENGOs, to determine key environmental and land management policies on the basis of whims and wish lists that are notoriously averse to notions of proportionality and perspective, and are largely ignorant of critical influences such as fire.

It also sidelined the greater bulk of stakeholders amongst the Tasmanian community who stand to be affected by national park expansion, and seems set to substantially reduce the state's future wealth generation capacity. Of particular concern is that a full socio-economic assessment of the impact of the policy is scheduled after the legislation passes rather than before as has always been the case in previous forest policy determinations, such as the Regional Forest Agreements.

Presumably this means that the likely socio-economic impact of the new policy on bushfire management has yet to be seriously considered. Already, at the start of what promises to be a long hot summer, early bushfires are exposing gaps created by lost expertise and reduced suppression capability under the now considerably diluted forest management regime. Enshrining this in a new forest policy which did not meaningfully consider its implications before being legislated may well create opportunities for litigation if severe bushfires subsequently impact on life and property.

If the TFA process becomes a template for future public policy determinations, as seems a strong possibility in Tasmania's Tarkine mining dispute, one wonders where it will ultimately lead. Perhaps, health policy can be determined by patient and drug company representatives with medical professionals looking on from the sidelines. If that seems ridiculous, it is curious as to why allowing environmental activists to determine the extent of new national parks is not viewed in a similar vien.

Despite its obvious flaws, supporters of the TFA have noted that it deserves a chance because conventional government policy processes, such as the far more wide-ranging and comprehensive Regional Forest Agreement process, have always failed to deliver an enduring forest peace. This is true, but then no effort has ever been seriously directed towards making the primary antagonists of forest conflict (the ENGO activists) accountable for deceitful and unwarranted campaigns against reasonable and balanced resource use.

Unfortunately, the TFA largely continues this trend despite offering an opportunity to tie national park expansion to real advancements such as legally enforcable undertakings to stop ENGOs from trashing the reputations of Australian timber companies or the Australian Forestry Standard. This may well be problematic, particularly if extended beyond the signatory ENGOs to other antagonist groups such as Markets for Change, but without something of this nature there can be no confidence of any lasting peace.

The policies of ENGOs and the sentiments of their leaders and supporters suggest that, irrespective of the fate of the TFA legislation, there will never be peace in the forests until virtually all public forests are in reserves and timber production has been reduced to a cottage industry. If the legislation is passed, there is unlikely to be peace in the hearts and minds of most Tasmanians given the way the policy has been foistered upon the state, or at least until the decisions and political machinations which underlie the process become clear.

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About the Author

Mark Poynter is a professional forester with 40 years experience. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Foresters of Australia and his book Going Green: Forests, fire, and a flawed conservation culture, was published by Connor Court in July 2018.

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