Jude Deland & Jill Redwood
The East Gippsland region is a hot-spot of biodiversity. It covers only 4% of the Victoria, yet is home to more than 300 rare and endangered species, half of the state's 3000 native vascular plant species and 43 different types of eucalyptus. The preservation of this region and its forests is critically important.
What drives the annihilation of these forests is the woodchip industry. Victorian Premier Steve Bracks' state Labor government is betraying the Australian people — the owners of these forests — in order to provide cheap woodchips to Japanese paper companies. The trees are sold for as little as 11 cents per tonne in royalties — a truckload for the price of a loaf of bread.
Ironically, in 1987 it was the Victorian government that first officially proposed East Gippsland for World Heritage listing, but this was not supported by the federal government. Several studies since have confirmed that East Gippsland has World Heritage value.
The clear-fell logging practices used in this area are among the world's worst. They also strip the old-growth forests of their chance to recover after being logged. Areas of up to 120 hectares are almost completely levelled and then the area is subjected to intense incineration, resulting in a wasteland of wattle and bracken regrowth. Apart from the loss of the magnificent, centuries-old trees, there is the loss of the under-storey and the original species mix of these areas. Tree ferns that are up to a thousand years old are being destroyed, along with thousands of other species, some of which haven't even yet been scientifically classified. The government's agenda is now absolutely clear. It wants to convert publicly-owned native forests into a single-species industrial tree crop on highly productive soils with good rainfall — all for the Asian pulp and paper industry.
While the Mountain Ash forests are fire-adapted and can recover from a wildfire — and less well from clear-felling and sterilisation burning — the wetter mixed ages and species of East Gippsland's forests are not as fire-tolerant. They can adapt to fire, but not to having their entire green "cloak" stripped clean and the soil bludgeoned by 40-tonne bulldozers and then torched. This can not be called "mimicking nature", as foresters and industry try to claim.
The logging companies have a rapacious and shameless attitude toward the forests. During bushfires in 2003, for example, almost 60 kilometres of the Snowy River National Park was logged under the guise of a "control line", and in direct contravention of orders. For years, such breaches have gone unnoticed and have not been penalised. But in early 2004, the Environmental Protection Agency slammed the government's logging practices in East Gippsland. The EPA logging audit found that East Gippsland had the worst compliance with the voluntary code of forest practices in Victoria and that rainforest protection was particularly bad.
Existing national parks in East Gippsland are too small and scattered to ensure the preservation of the region's biodiversity. The parks are like islands stranded in a landscape of biologically impoverished industrial pulpwood crops.
The threat of job losses is often used to justify the pillage of forests. The truth is, however, that woodchipping is not a great employment-generating industry. It takes seven seconds for a tree to disappear up the conveyor belt and through the chipper. Between May 1995 and May 2000, Australia's forestry and logging jobs declined by 60%, but woodchip exports rose by 25%. Not only is the economic benefit that Victoria receives from woodchipping East Gippsland's old-growth forests pitiful, it actually costs taxpayers to prop up this destructive industry with ongoing subsidies and industry assistance grants and packages. Only about 3% of the forests' biomass ends up as sawn timber. The rest is woodchipped or burned as useless.
Victoria has enough mature plantations in the ground right now to easily meet existing needs and provide jobs, so the question must be asked, why are East Gippsland's forests being pillaged in this manner?
Clear-felling and woodchipping of old-growth forests in East Gippsland began 30 years ago — at the very same time that the Japanese woodchip giant Daishowa set up its export business nearby at Eden. This partly answers the question.
East Gippsland's forests are in grave danger and it would be a tragedy for Australia and the world if these magnificent and unique forests are lost to feed the packaging and paper industry.
No other Victorian premier has ever had the guts to stop this obscenity. We are hopeful that Bracks has the backbone to finally bring this destruction to an end.
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From 91×ÔÅÄÂÛ̳ Weekly, June 29, 2005.
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