By Glenn Phillips
and Kevin Verkerk
The Wilderness Society has concluded a peaceful blockade of forestry operations in compartment 1402 of the Nalbaugh State Forest. The blockade followed a denial by State Forests Inc (formerly the Forestry Commission of NSW) that logging of the area was occurring.
State Forests also claimed, wrongly, that photographs of the area, identified by the federal government as an area of high conservation value, were in fact from wilderness areas in Victoria. The photos showed stands of brown barrels up to 60 metres high and four metres wide, and with an estimated age of 400+ years.
Trees of this age form the habitat of many arboreal animals such as the rare and endangered yellow bellied glider and powerful owl, and are useless as sawlogs due to their age and soft cores and hollows; they are taken to Eden to be chipped or sent to Japan for pulping.
State Forests admits that 1402 is the preferred habitat of protected amphibians and reptiles, 60 protected birds and 16 protected mammals. As well there are seven endangered mammals likely to be found in 1402.
State Forests claims its management plan will not significantly impact on the ecosystem. This management plan involves the application for licences which allow the logging of habitat trees of endangered fauna. Special prescriptions would allow a maximum 50% canopy reduction, and require that at least five of these habitat trees be left per hectare.
However, nearby compartments 1405-7 along Mines Road, "harvested" early this year by the same contractor and part of the same prescription area, are now clear-felled.
Last November Prime Minister Keating and all state premiers except Tasmania signed the National Forest Policy Statement (NFPS). This document was intended to standardise the management of forests, which are administered by state government agencies. It states that "... until the assessments are completed, forest management agencies will avoid activities that will significantly affect those areas of old growth forest or wilderness that are likely to have high conservation value".
1402 is within the Coolangubra wilderness, but when the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service presented the area to state cabinet last year to have it formally recognised under the Wilderness Act of 1987, it was rejected.
The blockade by the Wilderness Society was intended to draw attention to the fact that logging is still occurring in old growth and wilderness forests.
On the first day of the action, despite the fact that protesters had not interfered with the logging operations, the area was declared prohibited under the Forestry Act of 1916. This means that members of the public can be charged with trespass. That afternoon, one police officer and four State Forests officials encircled the protesters end evicted them, threatening them with trespass.
After the presence of environmentalists in 1402 for two days, while trees were being felled dangerously close to members of the public and logging was halted intermittently, the police arrested six people involved in the peaceful blockade.
Rather than trespass, four of the activists were charged with intimidation, a criminal offence defined as preventing another person from carrying out their occupation. This charge denies the right to openly disagree with government policy, threatening protesters with a criminal record, large fines and even possible jail terms.
The following day, a logger arrived at the protesters' camp with copies of the private fact and charge sheets of the protesters. This is a blatant violation of the protesters' rights, and a complaint has been registered.
On the blockade's fourth day George Souris, NSW minister for land and water conservation, and Peter Cochrane, federal National Party member for Monaro, arrived to inspect the Nalbaugh special prescription area for possible breaches of the NFPS.
When Souris questioned environmentalists as to where he could find the stump of a 300-year-old tree, and was offered to be escorted into 1402 or neighbouring breaches of the special prescriptions along Mines Road, he declined, stating he had a tight schedule. Environmentalists alleged that Peter Cochrane did not even leave his 4WD during his drive in, drive out inspection.
Souris later claimed in an article in the Bombala Times of September 29, headlined "Wilderness Society again misleads the public": "There are no 400 year old giant eucalypts being logged in Compartment 1402. The photos the Wilderness Society use are not from 1402 ... The Logging operations are not for woodchips. The trees are being felled for sawlogs."
Random blockades of the road to the Daishowa woodchip mill at Eden (a separate road leads to the sawlog mill at Bombala) confirmed that logging was not a sawlog only or even sawlog-driven operation. One truck, stopped for nearly an hour, carried logs containing hollows, meaning not only would these logs be chewed up and sent to Japan for paper, but also the destruction of habitat that the living trees would have provided for animals in the area. These logs are obtained only by logging old growth and wilderness forests.
In Canberra, environment minister Ros Kelly had said in parliament that she would like to act to preserve old-growth and wilderness forests as defined in the NFPS, but that she is powerless to do so.
Yet environmentalists have been saying for years that the environment minister has the power to save these forests but cutting export woodchip licences, which create very few Australian jobs and are actually subsidised by the Australian government.
But when a group of Wilderness Society officials were asked to the Labor Caucus Committee for the Environment, they were offered action on these forests if the Wilderness Society condemned the Western Australian Greens senators for their delaying/preventing passage of the budget.
1402, once a dynamic forest ecosystem, is now only a muddy slope with few trees left standing, but it need not have died in vain. We can put pressure on Kelly and the government to uphold NFPS by cutting export woodchip licences, and encourage the NSW parliament to pass the South-East Forests Protection Bill. If you wish to get involved in actions for these forests, contact TWS Canberra on (06) 257 5122.