Is there room for science in the Tasmanian World Heritage dispute?

Tasmania has over 1.4 million hectares of World Heritage-listed lands and forests. Last June, this area was expanded by a further 170,000 hectares when the United Nation's World Heritage Committee accepted a nomination by the then Federal Labor Government for a 'minor boundary modification'.

During the Federal Election campaign, the Coalition outlined its Tasmanian policy, including a pledge to undo this recent World Heritage extension because – in the words of Tasmanian Coalition Senator, Richard Colbeck – it was "rushed and political".

This is a valid criticism and the recent extension to Tasmania's Wilderness World Heritage Area (TWWHA) is yet another entry to a lengthy list of politically-expedient land and resource management decisions instituted by the Federal and State Labor Governments along Australia's southern and eastern seaboard since 2000. These include a swag of new national parks declared primarily to exclude demonised resource-use industries from areas with good environmental values despite a long history of resource use.

While these populist decisions have been rapturously received in the Labor/Greens' inner urban heartland, they have devastated those regional and rural communities which have had to live with the consequences. Unfortunately though, the anti-resource use sentiment that underpins almost all mainstream media reportage of Australian environmental issues has masked this obvious sidelining of science-based decision-making in favour of political agendas, and it has thus far received little public scrutiny.

Opposition to the Tasmanian World Heritage extension stems from both the politically deceptive manner of how it was achieved, and the fact that tens of thousands of hectares of multiple use production forest has been inappropriately listed as being of World Heritage quality without any independent scientific evaluation of its supposed values. This includes areas with an extensive history of recent human disturbance, including clearfall timber harvesting and regeneration within the past 30-years, and older logging regrowth and plantations in areas that are regularly criss-crossed by roads (including highways, local roads, and forestry tracks) and a power transmission line.

There is no doubt that the former Federal Government's nomination of this World Heritage extension was rushed for political purposes. This was confirmed by Greens Leader, Christine Milne, who admitted after the nomination was accepted that "In parallel with the IGA (ie. the 'forest peace deal') process, Bob Brown and I worked with Minister Tony Burke to develop this extension and get this World Heritage nomination in....... so that it could be decided ahead of the Federal Election."

The determination of the Australian and Tasmanian Governments to meet a political agenda was further exemplified by their nomination of the proposed extension as a 'minor boundary modification' to the existing TWWHA. However, as the 170,000 hectare addition represents a 12% increase to the TWWHA'S area, this contravened advice provided to the World Heritage Committee last year by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), that "A notional cut-off of 10% increase has generally been considered to be the absolute upper limit for a modification to be considered via the "minor modification" process,......."

Indeed, it has since come to light that the World Heritage Committee's cultural advisor recommended that the proposal be rejected as a 'minor boundary modification', but was overruled.

The political significance of this is that under World Heritage operational guidelines, a 'minor boundary modification' can be accepted for listing without any independent scientific evaluation of its claimed values and actual wilderness quality. Whereas a larger addition to a World Heritage Area requires a full evaluation of its nominated values which typically takes 18 months of investigation, consultation and documentation. Accordingly, only a nominated 'minor boundary modification' could have been listed before the Federal Election.

Tasmanian community groups and other stakeholders concerned about the nomination who would have formally alerted UNESCO that it was bigger than a 'minor boundary modification' were stymied by being unable to access detailed information about what was being nominated. Then Federal Environment Minister Tony Burke's Environment Department did not post the nomination's details to its website until several weeks after UNESCO's submission deadline had passed in early February.

At the time, the then Federal Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Fisheries and Forestry, Senator Richard Colbeck, noted with some justification that Federal Environment Minister Burke "put this up as a minor extension, which we know it is not (because) he was trying to avoid any meaningful analysis of the nominated area...." and that this was "symptomatic of the way Mr Burke operates – a sham process littered with broken promises to industry and favours to green groups"

What has largely been ignored in the public discourse over this issue is that although much of the State Forests that comprise the TWWHA extension were previously being managed for future timber production, they had recently been earmarked to become new national parks and reserves under the Tasmanian Forest Agreement (TFA) Act 2013. Accordingly, the need for them to be also World Heritage–listed is somewhat questionable.

The TFA Act has essentially enshrined into law the agreed outcomes of the contentious "forest peace deal" negotiated by timber industry and ENGO representatives over a two-and-a-half-year period. This is another example of Labor/Greens forest policy determined with minimal scientific or community input – being essentially a bartering process between two self-interested stakeholders (one under considerable duress) cajoled along by political interference from a Federal Minister promising several hundred $ million in return for a favourable outcome.

Despite its shortcomings, the TFA Act contains a clause which allows some special timber species to be harvested from within these new national parks and reserves in the event that – as now seems likely – insufficient volumes of these highly valuable timbers are available from the substantially reduced wood supply zones redefined by the Act.

It has become apparent that an additional motivation for World Heritage-listing these proposed new national parks and reserves was specifically to override this clause even though it had been formulated in good faith during the democratic process of legislating the TFA Act. Under the Environment and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, any activity with potential to adversely affect World Heritage values requires the approval of the Federal Environment Minister, and then Minister Tony Burke had advised that this would not be granted.

So, it seems that the World Heritage extension was designed to at least partly insure against the prospect of a new Liberal State Government being elected in March 2014 with a potential mandate to undo Labor/Greens plans to create extensive new forested national parks and reserves under the TFA Act. This further underscores its political motivation.

However, while the World Heritage extension includes areas of multiple use forests of inappropriate quality, it should also be acknowledged that around 50,000 hectares of its 170,000 hectares is comprised of pre-existing parks and reserves in which the tall forests and giant trees that are said to be the outstanding value of the extension are concentrated. Accordingly, the extension could be partly revoked to release these multiple use production forests, without significantly affecting its predominant World Heritage values.

There is strong opposition to this possibility, and already the Greens, some academics and media commentators are questioning the capability of the incoming Federal Coalition Government to revoke the World Heritage extension. It seems that it may well rest on legal arguments concerning the revoking of UN-sanctioned environmental protections, although these may apply to the whole listing, rather than a flawed 'minor boundary modification' as in this case.

However, at the very least, the Coaltion Government should be requesting that the UN's World Heritage Committee reconsider the TWWHA extension because it was demonstrably greater than a 'minor boundary modification' and therefore needed to be independently assessed to determine whether its values are of an appropriate quality. If this occurred, there is a prospect that a significant part of the extension could be revoked.

Regardless of how this turns out, it is a welcome sign that the incoming Federal Coalition Government is willing to reconsider a recent policy decision that has been so obviously shaped by a political agenda. Hopefully, this is indicative of the beginnings of a siesmic shift from the past 12 – 15 years under State and Federal Labor Governments, to a new era whereby science and due process are reinstated as the key drivers of environmental and resource use policies.

Few Australians openly condone environmental policies being based on politics rather than science, but Greens and many Labor voters are typically hypocritical in supporting science-based policy in relation to climate change while alternately dismissing science when it challenges pre-conceived ideologies in relation to natural resource use issues such as forestry and fisheries. On this basis, the Coalition Government will need to get used to copping truckloads of flak for taking an evidence-based policy path rather than pandering to poorly-informed populist views as its predecessor did.