Comment by Marcel Cameron
PERTH — Now that the regional forest agreement (RFA) has been signed, the Western Australian Forest Alliance (WAFA) and the Greens (WA) have launched a campaign to convince people to vote against Liberal candidates in marginal seats in the next state election. This is a thinly disguised attempt to channel public outrage at the RFA into a campaign to vote Labor.
The Greens, by refusing to condemn Labor's new forest policy as a capitulation to the same corporate interests that dictated the outcome of the RFA, have endorsed this policy. If Labor is elected, its "promise" to end old-growth logging only after December 2003 will allow timber companies to clear-fell most or all of the high conservation value forest outside reserves during Labor's first term.
Can Labor be trusted to implement even this? During the 1993 federal election campaign, Labor "promised" to end the export of woodchips from native forests by the year 2000. Yet in 1995, the Labor federal government signed export licences allowing an increase in the export of woodchips from native forests.
Labor introduced federal "resource security" legislation to secure the profits of the timber and mining companies, as well as initiating the RFA process — a deliberate strategy to fragment the national campaign against woodchipping.
Instead of exposing Labor's betrayal of environmental promises and building an alternative to Labor, the Greens appear content to play parliamentary games while the forests disappear.
It seems the Greens now believe rallies do not work any more, and that saving the environment can be left to a handful of professional lobbyists and green politicians.
In the 12 months before the signing of the RFA, there were only two large protest rallies called. Both demonstrated the willingness of people to take to the streets to save our forests.
In the naive belief that the government is more likely to listen to "respectable" people, environment groups staged a suits-only "mobile-phone protest" outside the premier's office.
The only way to stop the RFA now is through a campaign of sustained mass protest actions, industrial action and civil disobedience, like the mass movement that prevented the Tasmanian Hydro-Electric Commission from flooding the Franklin River wilderness in 1983. We have to take the fight to save our forests out of the parliament and the corporate boardrooms and into the schools, campuses, workplaces and streets.
In the absence of a mass alternative party with sufficient support to pose a real threat to the Liberal and Labor parties, a "marginal seats campaign" will simply deliver votes to a Labor Party ready to sell out at the drop of a hat.
Only a mass protest movement can halt the destruction of our old-growth forests. But even then, it will not be a permanent victory until we create a system that puts people — and forests — before profits. To win such a system also requires a mass political movement committed to the nationalisation of the timber industry under democratic control.