By Liam Mitchell
SYDNEY — Over the next few weeks, the NSW government will conclude the Interim assessment process to confirm which areas of native forest will be protected from logging.
This is the second stage of the government's forest management strategy. The first stage identified areas of forest to be considered for inclusion in a "world class reserve system". The third stage is supposed to gazette the reserve system, establish sustainable logging practices for non-reserve areas and guarantee resource security for the logging industry.
The government has promised to stop logging in the most environmentally significant native forests and to transfer the timber industry to regrowth forests and plantations. It is considering options to reduce wood supply to the industry by between 30% and 70% in order to create the reserve system. The timber industry, however, is pushing for quota reductions to be limited to the 30% already announced and demanding resource security guarantees before the assessment is completed.
Meanwhile, blockades by forest activists have started again in forests where logging is under way. In the Conjola State Forest, south of Jervis Bay, residents have halted work in one of two sectors being logged. For over a decade, successive NSW governments have promised that this forest would be declared a national park. The assessment, however, did not include the area in the reserve system currently under moratorium from logging, and it is likely that the logging now under way there will devastate enough of the forest to prevent it from being declared a national park in the future.
The timber industry has loudly protested that if the government goes ahead with its forest management strategy, many jobs will be lost. A report compiled by the Centre for Agricultural and Regional Economics for the government's Resource and Conservation Assessment Committee, and leaked to the media by the timber unions last week, claims that 30-40% of sawmills would close and thousands of jobs be lost in NSW if logging quotas are reduced by even 50%.
According to the executive officer of the Nature Conservation Council of NSW, Sid Walker, the report was focused on the "rather fatuous exercise in which timber millers were asked their reaction to various resource cut scenarios. Not surprisingly, most of them reacted negatively to the prospect of large reductions in timber supply.
"Since there are only a few thousand people directly employed in the native forest timber industry in the whole of NSW, and since the state and federal governments are funding a $120 million structural adjustment package to compensate where necessary and redevelop the industry onto a sustainable basis, the implication that thousands of workers will be hard done by is completely off track." The timber bosses, says Walker, "want their $120 million cake and they want to eat all the forests too".
In the meantime, the federal government has announced that it will go ahead with plans to raise the woodchip export quota by 3 million tonnes. The additional tonnage is supposed to come from cutting in regrowth areas and logging "waste" which accumulates on forest floors.
However, the Australian Conservation Foundation's biodiversity campaigner, Peter Wright, argues that the industry is "more likely to cut more trees and chip good sawlogs" to get the extra chips. "There is no adequate monitoring to stop this from happening", he says. "The Commonwealth Woodchip Monitoring Unit is just two under-resourced individuals who are supposed to keep an eye on 5, possibly 8 million tonnes of exports."