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July 24, 2007
How do you save the trees when working class jobs are at risk? Dr Judith Ajani , who has just written a book entitled The Forest Wars, recently had an op ed in The Australian where she wrote:
The union-dominated factional preselection system means that if, or when, Labor returns to office, its approach to forests is unlikely to be driven by an interest in building a healthy wood-processing industry generating jobs and caring for the environment. Raw power will prevent it.
Well, we have seen the implications in Rudd's me tooism forest policy when in Tasmania. The bare bones are a $20 million support package for the forestry industry, including a $9 million national fund to increase forestry exports and no more protection for Tasmanian old-growth forests outside the existing Regional Forests Agreement and Tasmanian Community Forest Agreement, if Labor won the next election.
This firmly severs any links to the Latham forest policy. In order to win back the two seats of Bass and Baddon in Tasmania the technocratic Rudd Labor Party has sacrificed conservation for the sake of propping up a woodchipping industry that Australia no longer needs; one poised to double the volume of native forest woodchip exports. Rudd's policy, like the Coalition's, is all about jobs. Is there any difference?
Rudd's policy was welcomed by the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union's forestry division, a key part of the ALP's Tasmanian power base. These redneck Luddites led by Michael O'Connor, the national secretary, have traditionally understood the issue in cartoon terms of trees versus jobs. They have traditionally spoken with the same voice as Gunns and Forestry Tasmania. So the forestry debate is simply framed as militant green protestors chained to trees on one side, angry loggers with chainsaws on the other.
Does jobs versus trees mean that the Florentine, the Weld and the Blue Tiers - will be open to logging? The Tasmanian old-growth forestry today is mostly about wood-chipping for export, not high-value timber.
What this jobs versus trees framing misses is that there is a real choice now between logging native forests and fully utilising Australia's considerable stands of plantation timber. We are now faced with the possibility that Australia's existing tree plantations can meet the nation's wood needs for paper and timber without having to log native forests.
That's Anji's argument. She argues that there is no irreconcilable conflict between development and environment when it comes to forests and that policy inaction is the result of silenced plantation interests, failing bureaucracies, destructive union behaviour and government-created super profits from native forest woodchipping.
Where is the voice of Peter Garrett? He's notable for his silence on Rudd's announcement of the Coalition's forest policy. Did the former Labor leader Mark Latham really lose two Tasmanian seats at the last federal election because of a conservationist forest policy? Or is that a myth created by the ALP in Tasmania and their union backers to ensure subsidies for a minority of people in a few marginal seats in order to win the next election?
As Anji points out they--especially O'Conner-- peddle the line that the environment movement's campaign against native forest chip exports for what it really is - a campaign to cripple the forest and forest products industry by denying it access to native forests and so jeopardise the survival of 60,000 workers and their families. O'Connor obscures that "this one industry" comprised two competing sectors, with plantations being the biggest, the fastest growing, the largest investing and highest employing.
Since 80 per cent of Australia's timber industry manufacturing depends on plantations the environmentalists' demands to stop logging old growth native forests would not "cripple the forest and forest products industry" or jeopardise the survival of 60,000 workers and their families.
Another core issue is that forestry is a battleground in Tasmania, between corporate & government interests intent on cleaving the land, and changing legistation to suit their purposes, and the local citizens whose livelihood and lifestyles are directly affected - fisherman, farmers, enviromentalists, local people whose water catchments are at stake.
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This is not a good sign. For Tasmanians already experiencing health problems associated with the industry, which can only get worse when the pulp mill starts, I hope it turns out to be a non-core promise.