Logging industry propaganda
By Yvonne Francis
National Australian Forests Industries has a budget for promotion of $4 million derived from a levy on members for each cubic metre of wood produced. With those promotion funds — and I suspect that $4 million is only a part of it — NAFI has mounted a devastating lobbying campaign to reconstruct public opinion.
It has been assisted in no small measure by the state forestry departments who do the housework (fix roads, repair and replant the forests, manage the timber regrowth, massage public opinion) and build their own empires based upon the expansion of this industry.
"First get your facts right", says a teacher in the classroom in a NAFI TV ad. It resulted in 600 schools wanting speakers from the industry, huge correspondence and 40% of Australians being able to recall seeing it. An all-time success, according to the Forests Industries, stopping further erosion of the industry.
NAFI admits that the only curb to this media machine deception of the public has been the bar on political ads during elections.
NAFI lobbies not only departmental ministers, the public and school children but also the bureaucrats working on resource security legislation, sustainable development and bio-diversity, and the ACTU. It seeks to protect future multimillion dollar industries by getting directly involved with the policy process "in the more traditional departmental consultation sense".
I can swallow the bitter pill that industries may spend millions lobbying in the public arena, but I object to them meddling about with my children in school and the public servants writing public policies. This is allowing industry to sneak into areas already underfunded and squeezed by the recession, offering money and propaganda without any public scrutiny at all.
Just how the timber industry is squeezing our natural and human resources is never analysed because the economic side effects are never aggregated. No-one measures the actual financial disadvantages to the taxpayers of ripping into the last of our forests — and even forests like the Otways in south-west Victoria, upon whose water resources the city of Geelong is dependent.
The bureaucratic silence is deafening. I would imagine sustainable development and resource security policies would somehow mention the shattered integrity of our forests and the truth behind NAFI propaganda — not the reverse.
[Yvonne Francis has been active in the movement to save Victoria's Otways forests.]