By Tyrion Perkins
SYDNEY — "Resource Security Sucks" read the banner over a demonstration against the state government's proposed Timber Industry (Interim Protection) Amendment Bill. About 200 people attended the demonstration, organised by the Wilderness Society, at Parliament House on April 19.
Environmentalists, a NSW Green candidate and independent MPs spoke about the increased damage and destruction this bill would bring to the NSW forests, and how private companies would profit from the extinction of ecosystems for woodchips.
Speakers emphasised that plantations are an option that is available right now; 270,000 ha of plantations already exist, with 30,000 ha ready to be cut. Companies prefer logging in native forests because they do not have to pay for the trees to be grown in the first place. And the government gives them what they want.
Speakers also contradicted the claim that the logging industry is an important source of jobs. Nine out of ten trees are used for woodchipping which employs very few people. Independent MP Peter Macdonald said, "There is a lot made of timber job losses, yet the government gives no consideration to the jobs lost through public service restructuring". Sid Walker from the NSW Conservation Council compared the logging industry to the now defunct whaling industry.
On April 21, the bill passed through the Legislative Assembly with Labor Party support. It permits logging over three years in 60,000 ha of native forests. 10,000 hectares of this are in the National Estate. It guarantees logging without environmental impact statements in 40,000 ha, and fast tracking of inadequate environmental assessments in the remainder.
While the bill puts a temporary ban on logging in 200,000 ha, about 120,000 of this is already logged and not sought by the timber industry.
The government claims that the bill is aimed at protecting jobs such as those at Duncan's sawmill at Eden. Yet Boral, which owns the mill, is trying to sell up because the operation is uneconomical. The 28 jobs there will go anyway.
The rally called for restructuring of the industry, so that plantations are used instead of native forests, and an end to woodchip exports by 1996.