Regreening Australia

February 18, 1991
Issue 

By Sid Walker

There's a lot we know about Australia's forests — and a staggering amount we don't know.

We know they extend over some 5% of the continent and that our woodlands, with a lighter tree-cover, are rather more extensive.

As well as approximately 40 million hectares of native forest, there are nearly a million hectares of plantations. Almost all of these are pine monocultures, mainly radiata pine, established to provide softwood because the great majority of Australia's commercially useful native trees are hardwoods.

We know our native forests are extraordinarily diverse. In North America or Europe, a small handbook describes all the native species of trees. There's no such book in Australia, which has far too many species to describe in a single volume. Yet, at least we know our trees relatively well.

The same cannot be said for most of the other organisms which live in our forests. When it comes to herbaceous and non-vascular plants, invertebrates and especially insects, our ignorance is enormous.

It's estimated that Australia has upwards of 50,000 unknown insect species — more than double the number of species identified so far. Many live only in native forests. A recent study concluded that about 40% of Australia's plant extinctions occur in forests and woodlands — and although there is no comparable estimate for fauna, the figure is likely to be even higher.

Since we don't know their components, we're scarcely in a position to understand the forests as a whole. The complex interrelationships between forest-dwelling organisms and the conditions for the survival of forest associations and individual species over time are matters about which we are almost entirely ignorant.

Minimum interference

It's not surprising that our best ecologists and conservation biologists (who for the main part aren't in the pocket of the timber industry) say that, if we're genuinely concerned about the survival of our wide variety of forests and forest-dependent species in the long term, we must substantially reduce the scale of human interference.

This is not a hard concept to grasp. On the same principle, we tend to discourage children from dismembering butterflies and other small beasts, because their powers of reassembly are less than

their ability to destroy. It doesn't mean we should cease all interaction with the environment — an obvious impossibility. It does mean stopping massive disturbance of mainly natural ecosystems unless there are compelling reasons for doing so.

This notion of exercising restraint and living gently on the planet was not entirely absent in the past — even in post-invasion Australia.

The establishment of state-based forestry commissions in the early years after Federation represented a breakthough — recognition that the bush is not inexhaustible and that, if Australia's forests are not to be wiped out completely, they must be managed and protected from clearing.

By that time, close to half the forest cover of the continent had vanished. Forestry commissions were charged with managing the forests' wood resource to ensure perpetuity of wood supply and (as a lower priority) the conservation of wildlife and other non-timber values. For several decades, they carried out this job without significant controversy, allocating quotas to hundreds of small sawmills dotted around the bush. Overcutting was common but, compared with the wholescale deforestation of the 19th century, the situation was much improved.

A sharp increase in demand for sawlogs during the construction boom after the second world war led to yet more overcutting — and the standing crop of mature timber became very run down in many areas. Most wood was still being extracted for use as sawlogs, although there was some processing of eucalypts for pulp and paper production.

In areas such as the south-east forests on the NSW-Victorian border, it was becoming clear that many sawmills would eventually close — small family-owned mills were gradually being swallowed up by a few more efficient and capital-intensive corporations.

A major consequence of this was a progressive shedding of jobs. Between 1970 and 1985, forest industry employment declined by 23.5%, creating a widespread sense of insecurity in the bush, although annual log removals from native forests and plantations increased by 46%.

Postwar changes

Three main developments have dominated the postwar era. First, forestry commissions — and to a lesser extent private landowners — planted pines on a scale never witnessed before, either on cleared farmland or after clearing native forest for the purpose.

Because softwoods can substitute for hardwoods for many uses, and

extraction and processing of pines could be carried out with greater efficiency, pines would eventually pose a major competitive threat to the hardwood sawmill industry. In recent years, this has speeded up the closure of small sawmills, but the main effect may be yet to come: low-grade sawlogs from native forests will increasingly be priced out of the market.

The second major development was the emergence of a giant export woodchip industry. This began at Eden, in southern NSW, as recently as 1970. Today, some 6 million tonnes of woodchips are exported from five states each year.

The practically unlimited market for cheap, low-quality hardwood has become the driving force behind an unparalleled assault on native forests. Powerful new technology can quickly denude vast areas of forest, and the labour intensity of extraction and processing is very low. Thus, despite the rising volume of logs extracted, woodchipping has rarely compensated for the steady loss of jobs elsewhere in the industry.

Although the volume of exported wood has risen dramatically since woodchipping began, its dollar value has been very low. Forestry commissions have held pulpwood royalties extremely low, supposedly to enable exporters to be competitive on the world market.

Since the 1930s, commissions in every state have made huge losses (except for South Australia, where all forestry is plantation based). These losses have been underwritten by the taxpayer. On the other hand, export woodchipping companies have made truly extraordinary profits while paying very little tax.

Meanwhile, Australia's balance of trade has suffered a blow-out in the forest products sector, total exports amounting to $1.5 billion less than total imports. The reason is simple: although roughly self-sufficient in wood, we export largely unprocessed woodchips and import processed, high-value timber, pulp and paper.

The third major change in the last few decades has been the growth of a vocal opposition, challenging the policies pursued by the corporations which increasingly control the industry (and their apologists in client bureaucracies such as the forestry commissions). This conservation movement is determined to avoid the wanton destruction of biological values, but is also inspired by the beauty and wilderness qualities of our forests and their crucial role as water catchments in a dry continent with erratic rainfall.

Conservationists have increasingly identified the woodchip industry as the primary villain, although almost every aspect of the forest industry is run more for the superprofits of its dominant corporations than to benefit either the workforce or the public good.

The movement has had considerable success in generating community awareness of the issues at stake and mobilising public opinion. A national opinion poll commissioned by the Sydney Morning Herald last year showed that an astonishing 78% believed that native forests should be conserved wherever possible — and 70% thought that forest conservation should take precedence over timber workers' jobs.

'Resource security'

Predictably, the industry has responded with saturation advertising, peddling a few simplistic and misleading messages with all the spending power at its command.

Its most recent move is to lobby hard for "resource security" — a clever and reasonable-sounding term, which would mean in practice that vast areas of native forest would be subjected to once-only environmental assessment (controlled as always by the resources minister, not the environment minister), then designated as "permanent wood production zones".

The industry claims that unless it is given "resource security" it will move new investment offshore, and Australia will lose the opportunity to build several new "world scale" bleached kraft eucalypt pulp mills. These new mills will help rein in the balance of payments deficit, it argues, by adding value to exported pulpwood.

It is a superficially persuasive argument, and the leaders of the ALP and the Liberal-National parties both have fallen for it. True, these new mills will mean virtual clearfelling of more than half a million hectares of native forest in each case — and they expect the "greenies" to make a fuss. But the National Association of Forest Industries, with its highly professional and highly paid team of Canberra-based lobbyists, has so far been able to gain acceptance for its agenda among "decision makers" at federal level, and state governments have been almost totally compliant.

Alternative strategies

In its attempts to limit the environmental damage of this rogue industry, the conservation movement has been forced to come up with alternative strategies which can accommodate the interests of the existing workforce and the rural communities they support, as well as conservation requirements. Much remains to be done, but already the outlines of a viable alternative are clear.

Rather than vast new export-oriented projects, the Commonwealth should coordinate a program of systematic import replacement. Instead of giant, polluting pulp mills eating up our remaining unprotected wilderness, we need new, state-of-the-art small and

medium-sized pulp and paper mills, based on plantation-grown wood, recycled feedstock, annual fibre crops and agricultural waste.

Sawlogs should come mainly from softwood plantations, combined with new composite structural materials made from regrowth timber. In addition, there can be limited extraction of high quality sawlogs from native forests where the end use justifies the expense of sensitive extraction. For instance, Australia could lead the way in sustainably produced, high-value furniture, making effective use of our magnificent array of native hardwoods.

I believe the major barrier to a resolution of the conflict over our forests is the prevailing right-wing economic paradigm, which asserts that significant levels of new public expenditure are never justified (although there always seems to be enough for huge hidden subsidies to the corporate sector). In 1989-90, Commonwealth spending on forests represented a miserly 0.037% of total outlay and was projected to shrink to a tenth of this figure within four years. This is a scandal.

There are large numbers of young people who would love to find jobs in environmentally friendly occupations, yet are unable to find any kind of satisfying work — if they can find work at all. In the coming decades, if ecological sustainablity is to be anything more than a glib slogan, many of our industries will need to contract. But the forest industry — in the fullest sense — is not one of them, because we need a massive afforestation program, for environmental reasons and also to provide a new source of wood, which is potentially a renewable resource.

In a green-left Australia, we wouldn't be squabbling over a phoney choice between jobs and forests. We'd be getting on with the job of regreening the continent and providing ourselves — and our descendants — with an abundant supply of sustainable forest products. n

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