By Marcel Cameron
MELBOURNE — On February 21, the longest running blockade of logging operations in East Gippsland was brutally attacked by 50 men wielding axes, sawn timber and iron bars. The camp at Goolengook was destroyed and 13 environmentalists were injured.
The Victorian campaigns coordinator for the Wilderness Society (TWS), Gavin McFadzean, is pursuing legal action against the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU) over a separate incident involving timber workers and environmentalists at a logging coup in the Otways.
Violent confrontations between environmentalists and timber workers have escalated as the Victorian and federal governments prepare to sign a regional forest agreement (RFA) on March 30. The 20-year RFA, covering the Otways and Wombat forests in Victoria's west, will determine which areas of high conservation value are to be protected in reserves and which are to be available for logging.
According to the conservation umbrella group Environment Victoria, the RFA process "has been a disaster from start to finish. It has been a quick, dirty, unscientific fix designed to give resource security to corporate woodchippers. The Bracks [state Labor] government has failed to appreciate that this useless process is leaving all sides angry and frustrated."
A March 2 rally in Melbourne against the RFA was attended by 150 people. Many of the protesters called on Labor environment minister Sheryl Garbutt to resign.
The Friday Breakfast Show on Community Radio 3CR on March 2 was dedicated to exploring relations between trade unions and the environment movement and the prospects for an alliance between workers and environmentalists to protect forests and jobs.
Friday Breakfast spoke to Jane Calvert, secretary of the forestry division of the CFMEU, Gavin McFadzean from the Wilderness Society, Cam Walker from Friends of the Earth, and Dave Kerin, an organiser with the Electrical Trades Union and a convenor of Earthworker.
McFadzean defended the litigation against the CFMEU as "necessary", claiming it would "provide a forum in which environmentalists can say, 'We will no longer tolerate this kind of aggression and violence by timber workers'."
But Kerin criticised "people who are prepared to take unionists and workers to the bosses' courts to seek their solutions, rather than to find those solutions within our own movement.
"The fact is it's both a forest and a workplace. You can't blame workers for what's happening in this industry."
Walker, however, was critical of Calvert and her union for "continuing to equate non-violent direct action, which is generally disciplined, clear and focused, with mob violence of the kind we've seen in East Gippsland recently".
McFadzean also raised the CFMEU's attitude to RFA negotiations: "Despite the fact that these RFAs have been shown to be job destroyers, the CFMEU has continued to support these agreements. The only support the government has for this RFA is from the union and from major multinational export woodchippers."
Calvert rejected this, claiming, "It's nonsense that any part of the CFMEU is held hostage to the timber industry's agenda".
Calvert also had plenty to say about building alliances between environmentalists and timber workers. "For as long as this debate is fought out on the front line of our workplaces, then there's going to be real difficulties in finding those alliances. You're attacking workers. You can't have it both ways. You can't have a desire for an alliance with the trade union that protects and organises those workers, and at the same time [be] right in their face disrupting their safety and disrupting their right to a living income."
McFadzean pointed out in response: "By continuing to support regional forest agreements the CFMEU continues to support unemployment in the timber industry in regional Victoria. While the CFMEU maintains that policy, it's very hard for organisations such as TWS to work with it."
Kerin is worried, commenting, "The trenches are being dug so deep they can't even bayonet each other". Walker, too, believes that an alliance will be difficult to forge. "There will be no broad movement-to-movement alliance. That's because there's such diversity within the green movement; there are more progressive and more conservative elements", he said.
He continued: "When the [federal] Coalition government was elected, some green groups decided it was in their interest to be seen to be mixing with the conservative government. They supported the sale of Telstra.
"There are a number of mainstream groups that are working very closely with corporations. The sense of environmental movement solidarity, the internal cohesion, often stops us from developing alliances with progressive sectors outside of our own movement."
However painful and difficult, Walker believes there must be steps forward. "The progressive elements of the environment movement will need to seek formal alliances with trade unions and with other progressive sectors, and more and more we're going to have to disengage ourselves from the more conservative elements of the movement.
"We're witnessing the development of an environmental justice movement: people who are left, who are progressive, who are concerned about ecological sustainability and social justice."