|
September 17, 2004
It has taken a long time to surface but it has finally happened. The environment is back on the election agenda, and in a big way. This issue has bubbled away, but it has been both overshadowed by national security, health and family packages and ignored by the policy commentators. Now both the major parties are making a pitch for votes on saving the environment. Saving the Tasmanian forests not the Murray is the dividing issue.
The Coalition has upped the ante by flagging the possibility of stopping the logging in old-growth forests with a forest transition package worth "hundreds of millions of dollars" to compensate for lost jobs in the Tasmanian timber industry. The Tasmanian timber industry (Forest Industries Association of Tasmania) is claiming $9 billion in compensation. They are dreaming.
This shift is a realization that the proposal to end old-growth logging in Tasmania has strong support across the urban electorates in the capital cities. Those mentioned are Sydney's Wentworth, Adelaide and Kingston in South Australia, Brisbane, and Dobell in NSW. Presumably the aim is prevent some social Liberals (eg., Liberals for the environment ) from voting for the Greens or Labor on the environment.
The response to this flagging of the Tasmanian forest issue is cynical:
Leak
It is only a flagging by the Coalition at this stage. It may not happen, due to the sensitivity of logging in such marginal regional seats as Richmond (NSW) Eden-Monaro (NSW), Page (NSW) Corangamite (Victoria) and Gippsland in Victoria.
Yet flagging the issue is enough to box the ALP into a corner. As expected the state Labor government in Tasmania is opposed to any reform. It's emotive language about the green assault on timber workers, placing them on the scrap and the sacrifice of the interests of the state, means that the logging of old growth forests has become a national issue. This knee-jerk reaction ignores that Tasmania as a world-renowned tourist state is a better future than Tasmania as a plantation economy.
And it appears that federal Labor has been wrong footed. It has come out saying that this is little more than a spending spree, and that it will oppose any Coalition plan to spend hundreds of millions of the federal budget surplus to phase out old-growth logging in Tasmania's forests.
The ALP now appears to be pro-logging and anti-the environment. Its forest policy is currently being run out of Hobart. Turning its back on saving the forests is an odd situaton to be in for a party that professes to care for the environment.
|
Gary, people in the Greens were predicting this Howard tactic would happen for some time. After all, it is a rather obvious wedge and a large section of membership of the Liberal party happens to also have a strongish conservation streak when it comes to lovely remote wilderness country. Even the Australian came out today again against old growth logging in Tasmania. It's not a "radical" issue anymore, thanks to the tireless efforts of the Greens and the wilderness groups to mainstream the issue over the past 10 years - a raging success that will one day be compared to the Franklin Dam (an issue in which Senator Brown also played an important role)