YVONNE FRANCIS attended the Australian Forest Conference, held on October 24-25 at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Here she presents her impressions.
After the first day, I reckoned that this was going to be the best holiday — great philosophies and great people. Networking in the best Canberra style, meeting people you had only heard about, feeling you had something in common and planning to change the world. But after the second day, I was disheartened. Is it all too much to expect from humble activists?
Robbie Thorpe of the Gunai Nation inspired me — the way to restore the Aboriginal Dreaming for the people in south-west Victoria in particular was to find the Land Council elders and negotiate with them. He said that the federal Labor government is hell-bent on getting rid of the radical Aboriginal struggle by the year 2000. Behind the talk of social justice and reconciliation is a lot of bullshit called native title. Aboriginal people want real title, he said.
Tim Cadman from Jackeys Marsh in Tasmania had a lot to say about how international market forces were constructing logging policies all over the world; stop them logging in one place and they move somewhere else. One third of the world's remaining old growth forests are in Siberia; US and Japanese companies are moving there. The Wesleyvale pulp mill might have been kicked out of Tasmania, but it simply went to Chile.
Business propaganda
I noticed in the Age that the National Association of Forest Industries, best known for its pro-logging classroom television commercial, had launched "a new $1.5 million 'feel good' campaign featuring a child swinging on a rocking chair. Since NAFI launched its commercial featuring the teacher in the classroom, public opinion on the forest industry had shifted towards its favour."
Cadman said that millions of dollars has been spent telling the public that there is no greenhouse effect, no ozone problem and that we are planting more trees than we are cutting.
I felt it was high time that our forests strategy focused on talking to the voting public and changing these potent media myths and the government policies that permitted them.
Tim Fisher, the natural resources campaign coordinator for the Australian Conservation Foundation, got right into the political realities of logging in water catchments. He said that it is easily proven that the value of the water lost is greater than the profit from the logging. Further, the timber industry takes large volumes of water and pays nothing for it.
I was sure our discussions on strategy would cover water policy.
Forest management
Loris Duclos of Friends of the Earth explained how in the present Wombat Forest debate, clear-felling has been shown to increase blue green algae in streams. It is a lie that the water catchments are protected for all values. The Victorian Association of Forests Industries advises the government on water policy although half of them have financial interest in Midways, the woodchipping consortium, Loris said.
Fenella Barry from the Wilderness Society dazzled the audience with her rapid-fire exposure of forest policy lies. Midways pays $7 per tonne for woodchips and we give it the roads and regeneration. Not one federal cent is spent on environmental impact statements or monitoring. Nothing is ecologically sustainable.
Logs are left to rot on mountains and waterways. The conservation department's audit showed that only 1% of the logs are checked. Timber workers are threatened if they do not downgrade logs to woodchip levels. The forest code is breached 30% of the time, and nobody has ever been punished.
Of the 600 areas put to Ros Kelly for protection, 16 were saved.
Barry said that we are subsidising an industry that pays royalties that are too low and is virtually self-regulating. If we do not stop the woodchipping industry now, the best of the last of our forests will go.
Colin Smith from the National Parks Association spoke about the Victorian rainforests. He used beautiful slides to show how logging altered the fire regime and disadvantaged the small pockets of rainforest. Increased human activity, particularly roads, caused 60% of fires in public land. Fires and timber harvesting increased the amount of flammable species over time.
A Malaysian woman wearing sunglasses for fear of family reprisal said that native farmers in Malaysia are blamed for destroying the forest by slash and burn agriculture when it is logging that is to blame. The Penan people depend entirely on rainforest and are being deprived of their whole culture.
Politics
By day two I was ready for the kill. An adviser to Greens (WA) Senator Christabel Chamarette said that there was no will in the Australian Labor government to care for the environment. We must find another way beside the electoral process to change this situation.
Pegg Putt of the Tasmanian Greens said that Australian forests policy was a direct result of the Canada-Malaysia axis decisions. Japanese people are thoroughly devastated to find out that their industry is causing such destruction in Australia. Japan can't profitably recycle paper when Australian companies sell woodchips so cheaply.
It seemed to me that our strategy would desperately need to address these major inconsistencies. No longer can we look upon the forest as something we compromise with the local loggers about. It is a political decision, and one currently made about meeting the demands of industry, not the demands of the population.
Dr Aila Keto, from the Queensland Rainforest Society, said that the rhetoric about sustainable yield means nothing. There really are no studies on the impact of logging on the environment.
I was excited when forestry officer David Cameron got up to speak. His proposition was that a new timber species called "hybrid Australia" would revolutionise the industry by creating much better profits. It astounded the audience. I couldn't help feeling that this was outside the forest debate; these companies would sell trees, sausages or steel — anything they could make a profit on.
Francis Grey, an economic consultant, proved beyond doubt that forests industries run at a loss to the taxpayer.
Unions
Michael O'Connor, assistant national secretary of the forestry division of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, said that the workers wrote the CFMEU policy on forests which supports continuing woodchipping and access to native forests.
I felt that I had plenty of respect for the workers but if they got up and took their employers' side in a forestry debate, there would be a problem with me.
Then the state forestry secretary of the CFMEU proclaimed that resource security for the mills was bullshit. They are using machinery from the 1940s. Pine is a mongrel product. Value adding just means buying other companies. The Forests Protection Society is a front for the employers and the ALP. It is the industry that puts people out of work.
There was no time for the bioregion reports. Surely our policy and strategies should come from the grassroots.
After seeing how clever business people were making pots of money out of plantations and that wood carvers can make beautiful bowls from native timber, I felt that the conference had lost the plot. I can see that we need these facts in our lobbying debates, but creating a strategy to stop woodchipping is a bigger problem.
The point is: Australian forest policy is unjust in every way, and as activists we have to develop a strategy for exposing this to the Australian people.