By Francesca Davis
In 1995, the environment movement had the Keating Labor government on the run when it mobilised thousands of people around the country to demand an end to woodchipping in Australia's native forests. The potential existed to establish an environmentally and economically sustainable timber industry and phase out woodchipping by the year 2000.
In the past three years, however, Labor and Coalition governments have succeeded in diverting the campaign into a series of "regional forest agreements" (RFAs). The RFAs were publicly presented as the historic conclusion to years of forest destruction and confrontations between greens and loggers. In reality, they have been disastrous, delivering neither conservation nor jobs, but shoring up big business's access to native forests.
In 1992, the federal and state governments drew up the National Forest Policy Statement. The statement included a commitment to protect old growth and wilderness forests until a reserve system was put in place.
After large street protests against the renewal of timber companies' woodchip export licences at the end of 1994, a rapid assessment of forest areas took place to determine "deferred forest areas" (DFAs) that would be protected from logging until the RFAs were signed.
The RFAs were to be based on the DFAs agreed to by the federal Labor government. However, environmental criteria had little to do with the decisions about which areas were deferred. At the time, executive officer of the NSW Nature Conservation Council Sid Walker commented, "They've allowed the forestry commission to pick first, and called the rest DFAs".
Areas protected included areas not useful for logging, some already logged out and some pine plantations. In NSW, the Whian Whian state forest near Murwillumbah in northern NSW, which contains at least 23 endangered plants and at least one endangered animal, was excluded while a new mill had to be shut down because its pine plantation was protected. Walker says the final DFA in NSW failed to protect the most ecologically important forests.
While 15% of all forest types that existed prior to European settlement and 60% of old growth forest were to have been protected by the DFAs and later the RFAs, the number of forest types considered for protection was often well under the number scientifically recognised. In the Tasmanian RFA, only 50 out of 130 types were considered and the 15% target was whittled down to 10% in some cases.
While states which did not cooperate with the development of a reserve system were to have been penalised by having their woodchip export quotas reduced by 20% each year, they successfully delayed the process without being penalised. Meanwhile, logging continued and the woodchip export quotas and licences were increased when the Coalition won federal government.
The RFA disaster
The overall response of environmentalists to the DFA process was, at the time, very critical. Wilderness Society campaigner James Day commented in 1995 that, "States like WA and Victoria have been an utter and complete disaster, while NSW has been 99% disaster". Dailan Pugh from the North East Forest Alliance (NEFA) regarded it as a "sham". Nevertheless, the main forest protection organisations chose to stay with the process.
RFAs have now been signed for Victoria's East Gippsland and central highlands, Tasmania and WA, and activists are now waiting for the conclusion to negotiations over Eden in NSW. Described by the Greens' Bob Brown as "a conservation sham", all the RFAs have been almost universally condemned by environmentalists.
In East Gippsland, only an extra 0.0023% of forests were secured in reserves and areas of high conservation value were eliminated from the reserve system. This prompted forest activists to blockade the Goolengook old growth forest area.
In Tasmania, the RFA failed to protect the area defined as Mother Cummings coupe HU307, which included virgin forest in Kooparoona Niara and part of a proposed national park in the Great Western Tiers. It did, however, reserve areas along roads, which cannot be logged anyway, and gave the logging companies access 790,000 cubic metres more of forest and $110 million in compensation for the forests they "lost" to reserves.
In WA, where the RFA came to be known as the "Rigged and Fraudulent Assessment", government guidelines ruled out the possibility of protecting all old growth forests before any research was even done.
More recently, in NSW, Wilderness Society media releases on the conservation option released by the government for the Eden RFA describe it as the "worst conservation outcome so far", even by the government's own criteria. Despite this criticism, the option was endorsed by the NSW environment movement.
Overall, the environment has lost more than it has gained out of the RFA process.
An RFA is not legally binding on the signatories, but its existence allows for 20-year woodchip licences with no ceiling on export volumes and no environment conditions attached.
Logging and no-logging zones are set by the RFA, but if new findings are made, the no-logging zones can be changed — if "there is no net deterioration in timber production capacity".
The existence of an RFA also releases the government from its usual obligation to perform an environmental impact statement before approving large logging operations. It also formalises state (rather than federal) governments' responsibility for issuing woodchip export licences.
Although there are three stages for public input in the RFA process, governments are not obliged to change anything during the process. In fact, the Nyungar Land Council withdrew from the RFA negotiations in WA because the Department of Conservation and Land Management persistently ignored Nyungar knowledge of forest ecology.
Sustainability
In the development of a basis for shifting to a sustainable forestry industry, the RFAs have failed. The possibilities for meeting Australia's timber and export needs through plantation softwood, while also providing secure job expansion in the industry, has been completely ignored.
For example, WA's south-west forest RFA operated within government guidelines which explicitly ruled out conversion to a plantation-based industry.
Similarly, the environment movement's submission to the Eden RFA in NSW pointed out that the government did not do its economic modelling for the softwood sector in the same manner as it did for the hardwood sector so the existing (and potentially much greater) contribution of softwood to timber production and employment was overlooked.
Nor has the federal government shown any interest in providing timber workers with a secure future. While environmentalists are keen to point out the benefits of processing wood in Australia, rather than exporting whole logs, the Howard government has removed controls on the export of unprocessed wood from plantations, discouraging any moves towards downstream processing.
According to Matt Hines in Green Left Weekly on May 28, 1997, Tasmania alone could create more than 3000 jobs by investing in saw and pulp mills to process wood from the 140,000 hectares of pine and eucalypt plantations grown over the last 30 years.
In the Eden submission, the NSW Forest Alliance argued that in the NSW market, up to 80% of hardwood production could be replaced with softwood by 2005, simultaneously creating one and a half jobs for every job lost in the hardwood sector.
Governments' failure to act on any of these proposals leaves the future of timber workers up in the air, and has consolidated timber workers' hostility towards environmentalism. This hostility is despite the fact that the 40% drop in employment in the industry over the last 25 years has been due to industry restructuring, not forest conservation.
As Kelly Livingstone from the NSW forestry division of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Engineering Union is quick to point out, most of the jobs now being offered to former loggers on plantations are three- to six-month jobs, often on a work for the dole basis.
Some of the 150 loggers who have lost their jobs in the Eden area have been taken on by National Parks on two-year contracts, Livingstone told Green Left Weekly, but many do not have the skills to get more permanent jobs there or in the tourism industry.
Proper retraining for timber workers and full-time, secure jobs in the plantation-based sector could be more than adequately funded simply by redirecting the huge government subsidies currently given to the timber corporations.
In NSW in late 1995, for example, the commonwealth government handed over $120 million to the industry for a structural adjustment package. A committee comprising industry heads and union representatives, but not environmentalists, decided that $60 million would go to workers' redundancy payouts, retraining and relocation, and the other $60 million would be given to the bosses for road construction and "business assistance".
Lessons for the movement
Meanwhile, large sections of the industry remain intransigent, despite a slump in the world pulp market. The extra export licences issued for East Gippsland have not resulted in increased exports and softwood from New Zealand and Asia is now entering the world market.
Greg Hall from NEFA told Green Left Weekly he thinks splits may emerge among the industry bosses as it becomes clear that the industry has to change. This may, however, be too late for Australia's old growth forests.
The RFAs testify to the dangers of environmentalists participating in "negotiations" with governments and big business without the weight of an active mass movement behind them.