By Tony Hastings
NSW native forests are currently facing an unnecessary crisis. Logging areas are to be extended without proper environmental studies.
According to Tom McLoughlin of the Wilderness Society, there are 250,000 hectares of available plantation resource and a shortage of public forest to log. He says it is this shortage which threatens workers' jobs. "Owners are hanging on to their capital asset, while flogging off the native forest while there is still a market."
NSW minister for land and water conservation George Souris is proposing to amend the Timber Industry (Interim Protection) Act to include the south-east forests around Eden, and to extend the duration 12 months, to December 1995.
This extension amendment is still in preparation and probably won't get up this session.
Further proposed amendments to the act will include "resource security", which guarantees a quota of timber to mills, and provides for long-term contracts, which are to be honoured or compensated by government. This is yet to go before cabinet, so details are sketchy, but the amendments are likely to follow the Inter-Government Agreement on the South East Forests, providing "secure access" for the woodchip industry to 59,000 cubic metres of sawlogs and 504,000 tonnes of pulpwood annually.
According to Wendy Seckold, adviser to the minister on forest issues, Eden should have been included in the act in the first place. Asked her views of long-term contracts with mills, she said they were fine, "so long as appropriate environmental studies are carried out first".
When asked if the act allows logging to go ahead without completing environmental assessments, she claimed that it "sets aside high conservation areas, and allows industry to continue in less sensitive areas".
According to Ron Herring, from the NSW Forestry Commission, the EIS currently being done for Eden will be finished this year. There are also two or three already finished for other areas, but it is unlikely that all will be completed until 1996. This means that the act will allow logging to continue before EIS are completed in all threatened forests.
Tom McLoughlin claims that "the proposal, if allowed, will set a precedent for widespread destruction". The Wilderness Society and other groups will hold a demonstration to "Say No to Resource Security", in front of Parliament House, Macquarie St, Tuesday, April 19, from 11.45am to 2pm. Speakers will include MPs and prominent environmentalists.