Alex Bainbridge, Hobart
Tasmanian Labor Premier Paul Lennon shook hands and was seen to thoroughly support Coalition Prime Minister John Howard on May 13. The two were jointly announcing the dishonestly named Tasmanian Community Forest Agreement.
The TCFA is the result of Howard's pre-election pledge to guarantee timber industry profits (dressed up as a jobs guarantee) while allegedly saving 170,000 hectares of native forests in Tasmania.
The most positive aspect of the TCFA is the extensive reserve announced in the Tarkine forest — almost 90% of the Tarkine will be protected under the agreement. Other areas to be saved include parts of the Styx Valley.
These areas have been the focus of energetic campaigns that have forced the federal and state governments to make concessions to the environment movement.
Despite this, the TCFA is a pro-industry deal, dressed up to look as "green" as possible. This is revealed by the reality that it does not end clear-felling, even though a majority want it to end; most of the reserves are not "formal reserves", making it easy for the government to back-peddle in the future; and large areas of reserved forests would never have been logged anyway. None of the reserved areas, including the Tarkine, are protected from mining and none have national park or world heritage status.
The Greens are reported to have described the package as "two parts poison to one part champagne".
Tasmanian Greens MP Peg Putt pointed out in the May 16 Greenweek newsletter that the informal reserves "are a con because they represent scraps and slivers inside logging areas like streamside reserves and isolated clumps of threatened forest types which adherence to forest practices laws already meant would not be cut."
The May 14 Hobart Mercury reported that a state government expert agreed that some reserves were areas that were never going to be logged.
The Weld Valley and other high conservation-value southern forests have not been protected and there has been only minimal protection around the Blue Tier in the north of the state.
The pro-industry character of the agreement is also revealed by the enthusiastic support it has received from Timber Communities Australia and by the fact that no environmental organisations were invited to be present at the launch.
Federal Labor leader Kim Beazley has also endorsed Howard's package. He claims this was his predecessor's policy all along. In fact, Mark Latham created the impression that he was promising a lot more — and would therefore have been under pressure to deliver — but Beazley's comments reveal the limited nature of Labor's pre-election promise.
One aspect of environmental criticism of the package is that it will cost $220 million of state and federal money (up from $50 million promised by Howard), yet according to peak environment groups only $250 million would be required to protect all old-growth and high conservation-value forests and completely end clear-felling. Putt said that the money "could have been used to achieve a much better outcome".
Lennon is reported to have said that he "hoped the agreement would end the debate over Tasmanian forests".
Socialist Alliance spokesperson Kamala Emanuel told Green Left Weekly this stance is "a propaganda device to attempt to win ground from the environment movement", adding that "Lennon himself knows this is not true, he knows he is siding with the timber industry yet again and he just wants to disarm the opposition".
Similarly, the Wilderness Society described the agreement as "a missed opportunity to protect old-growth forests", stating that the plan "won't end [the] old-growth logging conflict in Tasmania".
From Green Left Weekly, May 25, 2005.
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