By Lisa Macdonald
If more proof was needed of the falsity of the federal Coalition's claim that its proposal to privatise Telstra is motivated by a concern for the environment, its move to allow an expansion of woodchip exports provides it.
The Coalition has until June 17 to give notice of a motion to disallow regulations introduced by the Labor government in December which impose a ceiling of 5.2 million tonnes on the 1996 woodchip exports and set a range of conditions on the issuing of export licences.
The ALP regulations impose a mere 0.8 million tonne reduction in the export quota from 1995. Nevertheless, with the market for woodchips up at the moment, the timber companies are pulling out all stops to prevent even this small reduction in their potential profits. Woodchipping accounts for almost 75% of the forest industry's export earnings.
The National Association of Forest Industries is lobbying the government to almost double the export quota. It argues that 3-4 million extra tonnes of woodchips can be gleaned from sawmill residue, forest regrowth and the clearing of forests for plantations. This claim is denied by forest environment experts.
The corporate push is being backed by both the National Farmers Federation and officials of the forestry division of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU). In a statement issued on May 13, the division's national secretary, Trevor Smith, said, "Jobs being lost now need to be saved with changes to the export licence arrangements".
The assistant national secretary of the division, Michael O'Connor, went further. He is quoted in the May 21 Financial Review as saying that another loggers' blockade of federal parliament, like the one organised by the timber companies 15 months ago, was likely if the government "does not see reason".
Woodchipping employs only 2% of the timber work force, and a woodchipping-driven restructuring of the industry over the last 25 years has resulted in a 40% decline in jobs (while the timber extracted actually increased by 40%). These facts are ignored by the union leadership.
The minister for primary industries and energy, and deputy National Party leader, John Anderson, has supported calls to lift the export quota. He has already announced a review of "anomalies" in the licence conditions and directed his department to draw up options to present to cabinet. After they were recently made public Anderson's wife promised to sell her significant shareholdings in Boral Ltd.
Under federal Labor, the setting of woodchip export quotas was tied to the deferred forest assessment (DFA) process implemented in 1995 with the supposed aim of protecting all major areas of old growth and high conservation forest from logging.
While the DFA process was, to a large extent, a concession forced on the Labor government by looming elections and a partly mobilised environment movement during 1994-95, the resulting system of recommended reserves announced on December 1 was far from a victory for the movement. The package guarantees resource security for the woodchip industry and fails to protect the most ecologically important forests. Further, once state governments sign regional forest agreements on the basis of the DFAs, the power to determine woodchip export quotas devolves to them.
State governments' failure to sign an agreement was supposed to result in a 20% cut to their woodchip export quota. However, except in NSW, where the federal DFA areas have been reworked and new forest moratorium zones are to be released shortly, all state governments have managed to defer signing agreements, holding out for even greater forestry access than Labor's DFAs would have allowed.
Campaign coordinator with the Wilderness Society Felicity Wade told Green Left, "Lifting the woodchip export quotas now, when we are in the middle of setting up a reserve system, pre-empts and makes a complete mockery of that whole DFA process".
The Australian Conservation Foundation's Peter Wright agrees: "Lifting the lid on woodchipping without fixing the moratorium areas will take pressure off the states to reform their native forest industries".
The peak environment bodies, which have not been consulted by the government about these changes, are not yet clear as to how the changes will be implemented. According to Wade, any changes to the licence conditions would probably have to pass through the Senate and may therefore be stopped by combined ALP, Democrat and Green opposition.
Both the Democrats and the Greens have repeatedly stated their opposition to logging in high conservation value forests. However, the ALP in government did nothing to indicate such a commitment. To rely on it to do o now would be foolish.
Despite this, none of the national environment peak bodies have yet formulated a campaign plan beyond continuing to lobby at the bureaucratic and parliamentary levels. While the timber corporations and their allies crank up their campaign to turn our native forests into private profits, a national forests summit held in Canberra on May 18-19, which brought together a range of conservation groups, failed to produce agreement on how best to affect government policy and strengthen the movement.
The summit revealed some agreement about shifting the campaign focus from the politicians to the logging companies directly, but it seems that the lessons of the largely unsuccessful battle to save the forests in 1994-95 have still not been learnt.
With public opposition to export woodchipping exceeding 80% (AB McNair, December 1994), the potential to mobilise large numbers of people in defence of the forests was and still is significant. It was the peak bodies' failure to do this (indeed, their active demobilisation of the movement) during the 1995 campaign that allowed the disastrous DFA outcomes. Now the new government is moving to capitalise on those outcomes and further consolidate the timber companies' gains.
Had the leaders of the environment movement not shackled the fortunes of the forests to those of the ALP, but instead put resources into building a broad, high-profile, uncompromising and consistently mobilised mass movement, we could have won more ground last year; we would have been in a much stronger position today. Nevertheless, for the moment at least, the public sentiment to save our precious old growth and native forests remains. It simply still has to be activated.