Forests become an election issue
By Simon Kenny
On February 16, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that the wood supply guaranteed by the National Parks and Forestry Estate Act (1998) for the next 20 years is to be reviewed by the NSW Audit Office. The NSW Labor government has been forced to permit the inquiry due to an independent analysis which found that the timber supplies guaranteed to loggers do not exist.
Environmentalists Dailan Pugh and Susie Russel pointed out that in around five years, when existing timber supplies are gone, companies such as Boral and North Ltd will demand public compensation for the failure to maintain supply or will be given extra forests to log.
These forests would come from few areas that have been protected or made national parks under the Forestry and National Park Estate Act.
Activists must pressure the Labor government to respond in favour of the forests should the audit prove that State Forests has over-committed NSW's forest resources.
While NSW Labor's record on forest issues has been poor, the situation will be worse if the Liberals are elected. The Liberals' forest policies were directed towards providing support and resource security to the logging industry to the exclusion of all other interests.
While Bob Carr's Labor government came to power on a platform specifically opposed to this, the Forestry and National Park Estate Act's aims are to promote the mutually incompatible aims of conserving native forests and ensuring resource security. This legislation received bipartisan support.
Carr will paint his government as "green", pointing to the large number of national parks established — 151 at last count. Although this deserves some praise, the gains are limited. Only a third of the new parks are in forest areas, and many are very small and isolated. They could end up as islands surrounded by heavily logged or cleared forests. The larger parks are all in arid and semi-arid regions.
In the remaining weeks of the election campaign, forests are one of the issues that progressive and left activists need to emphasise.