ABC Fact Check Unit loses its way in the Tasmanian wilderness

Last week the ABC Fact Check Unit released its report and findings on whether the Abbott Government was being truthful by claiming that 74,000 ha of forest added last year to Tasmania's Wilderness World Heritage Area (TWWHA) had inappropriate values and should be delisted.

Their Fact Check report of this issue appeared with a head and shoulders photo of Tony Abbott and the words 'Doesn't check out' emblazoned across it, thereby suggesting that this topic pandered to twin sensibilities of the ABC's inner urban Green-Left audience to both save the environment, and embarass the hated new Prime Minister.

The inordinate focus on Prime Minister Abbott was precipitated by his recent speech to a large forestry sector gathering in Canberra several weeks earlier in which he articulated the Government's intention to delist this area from the TWWHA because it contained 'degraded' and 'not pristine' forests.

In particular, the Coalition Government's regular use of the term 'degraded' in relation to these areas has piqued the ire of ENGOs and those on the Green-Left side of politics with an insatiable thirst for reserving ever more trees but on whom the nuances of forest values are somewhat lost.

However, rather than being an abject description of the ecological value of all of these forests, their 'degraded' description refers specifically to their 'wilderness values' given that they have been added to a Wilderness World Heritage Area property despite, what Tasmanian foresters say, is a lengthy and fragmented history of human use for timber production since European settlement.

No-one, including the ENGOs, dispute that parts of the 74,000 ha have been used for timber production and are now regenerating. This includes a significant number of recently harvested coupes that are now covered in very young regrowth not much more than a few metres tall. However, it has been somewhat bemusing to observe the hypocrisy of ENGOs now desperately justifying these just-harvested, regenerating areas being within a World Heritage Area despite decades of deriding them as unnatural 'plantation monocultures' with no biodiversity values.

Like the ENGOs, the ABC Fact Checking Unit has misunderstood the context of the term 'degraded' and, perhaps because of an overwhelming determination to embarrass the Prime Minister, have assumed (either deliberately or inadvertently) that it relates only to past disturbance from timber harvesting. By presuming such a narrow definition, they've reasoned that they only need prove that much of the area hasn't been disturbed to expose Mr Abbott and his Coalition Goverment as liars pursuing an agenda of environmental vandalism.

However, if they'd understood that this was about wilderness values and consulted the various definitions of 'wilderness', they would have found it to be a landscape-scale concept which encompasses features such as being 'untramelled by man' (the USA Wilderness Act, 1964), being 'not developed with roads.... or other industrial infrastructure' (The WILD Foundation), and 'remote from the influences of European settlement' (Commonwealth of Australia, 1998). These factors are regarded as being equally as important to the concept of wilderness as is being 'intact, and undisturbed', and 'truly wild' (The WILD Foundation).

Accordingly, it is entirely possible for healthy, good quality forest to have 'degraded' wilderness values if it is easily accessible or not remote, and contains evidence of recent or current human use. This is the case with the 74,000 hectares of Tasmanian forest that is currently in dispute.

According to Forestry Tasmania, the area contains nearly 21,000 ha (or 28% of the total area) of regrowth or mixed age forest that has been previously harvested for timber stretching back in some places to pre-1900 times. As this past disturbance is widely scattered, it is has been serviced by a network of forestry roads and tracks that are either still maintained or are now overgrown, but still evident. In addition, a major highway and a powerline and associated cleared easement pass through other parts of the area, and there were also several small plantations included within it. Accordingly, it doesn't meet the definition of 'wilderness' and is quite understandably regarded as an inappropriate addition to a Wilderness World Heritage Area property.

Not only has the ABC's Fact Checking Unit ignored the landscape notion of what constitutes 'wilderness', but their narrow focus on past disturbance by timber harvesting has also been highly flawed.

Undeniably, Forestry Tasmania, as the state's forest management agency, is the primary source of knowledge about the past history of its public forests. Keeping records of past operations and other disturbances, such as bushfire, is a primary function of a forest management agency.

Yet, the ABC Fact Check report on this issue was initially released last Wednesday (26/3) without any input from Forestry Tasmania, apparently because they'd failed to meet a deadline to supply information to the fact checkers. This suggests that, to the ABC's Fact Check Unit, publishing their report as quickly as possible was more important than having all the facts.

Given that a Senate Inquiry is currently examining this issue, their unseemly haste in publishing despite lacking arguably the most important facts, gives rise to speculation that this exercise has been undertaken at the behest of ENGOs and their political allies.

Releasing a report and claiming it to be the final arbiter on a question of public interest, without including information from the primary knowledge source, is at best misleading and at worst unethical behaviour from the public broadcaster. Unfortunately, the resource-use sector has long had to put-up with this sort of misbehaviour in relation to environmental issues and it has undoubtedly played a significant role in skewing the conventional wisdom amongst the politically influential, inner urban Green-Left demographic which compromises a significant slice of the ABC's audience.

Arguably just as damning was the Fact Check Unit's deliverance of a 'verdict' based substantially on the views of three 'experts' with either personal involvement in forest activist campaigns or strong links to the ENGOs who conduct those campaigns which have traditionally sought to reserve all Tasmania's public forests with a view to largely destroying the state's native timber industry. While several of these commentators are highly qualified academics with some knowledge of the topic, they are unlikely to be objective experts providing unbiased advice.

These three 'experts' (Professor Brendan Mackey, Peter Hitchcock, and Sean Cadman) were intimately involved in the previous Labor Government's nomination to extend the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area last year, and so it almost goes without saying that they would strongly oppose the new Coalition Government's plan to delist 74,000 hectares (or 40%) of that extension.

Professor Mackey was a founding member of the Wilderness Society's Wild Country Panel and was also lead author of the controversialANU 'Green Carbon' paper which was part-funded by the Wilderness Society and recommended ending Australia's native forest timber production to lock-up all forests for carbon. His association with Tasmanian forestry lies in being appointed by the former Labor Goverment to lead the Independent Verification Group charged with verifying the supposed 'high conservation values' of ENGO-proposed reserves during the recent Tasmanian forest peace deal process.

In turn, Professor Mackey appointed Peter Hitchcock (a consultant who formerly worked for ENGOs in trying to get these same areas of forests added to the TWWHA in 2008, and was the dissenting Commissioner on the Helsham Inquiry into Tasmania's forests in the late 1980s) to assess the World and National Heritage values of the ENGO's proposed 'high conservation value' forest reserves. In this task, Hitchcock was assisted by Sean Cadman.

The ABC describes Cadman as an 'environmental consultant' thereby neatly obscuring his several decades as a career forest activist with the Wilderness Society, including his prominent former role as its National Forest Campaign Coordinator. He is regarded as the person who instigated the recent Tasmanian "forest peace talks" process which was essentially based on trading-off most of the native forest timber industry in return for ENGO support for the proposed Tamar Valley pulp mill; and he is also thought to have authored its initial Statement of Principles.

The collective view of these 'experts' was that just 14% of the 74,000 ha of 'degraded' forest had in fact been disturbed by timber production since 1960, and on this basis the ABC Fact Checkers delivered a 'verdict' that, as "more than 85% of the area has not been logged", Mr Abbott's claim that the area should be delisted from the TWWHA "doesn't check out".

Several days later, the office of Senator Richard Colbeck delivered Forestry Tasmania's analysis of past disturbance within the contentious 74,000 hectare area to the ABC Fact Check Unit. Without drawing an arbitrary line through 1960, they showed that in fact around 28% of the area (or double what the 'experts' had claimed) had been subject to various levels of timber harvesting since European settlement. In fact, some areas have been harvested several times after regrowing from earlier harvests.

To their credit, the ABC Fact Checking Unit then updated their report (on 28/3) with this new information. Unfortunately, by initially publishing their report without this information they had already misinformed the interested public and this was unlikely to be undone by the later publishing of an updated version. In any event, despite being updated, the report didn't include Forestry Tasmania amongst its 'experts'. Nor did it alter its 'verdict' which continues to be based on the advice provided by compromised commentators supporting a particular agenda.

This episode highlights the short-comings of the ABC's fact checking concept which can be readily skewed by agendas that dictate which facts are used or omitted, and which 'experts' are used to justify 'the verdict'. In addition, its typically narrow focus on a particular statement or sentence uttered by a politician or public figure can easily lead it to ignore key contextual information that should be considered in any supposedly definitive evaluation of a complex issue.

For example in this case, the ABC Fact Check report is purporting to be the final word on whether the Federal Coalition Government should or shouldn't delist a 40% proportion of last year's extension to Tasmania's Wilderness World Heritage Area (TWWHA) despite not even considering the fundamental question of what constitutes wilderness. It also doesn't consider whether the extension should have occurred in the first place given that it was nominated without any assessment of its actual wilderness values; that it was misrepresented by the previous Labor Government as a 'minor boundary amendment' to the World Heritage Committee so as to avoid any independent scrutiny of its values by UNESCO; or that UNESCO had previously examined these areas in 2008 and found that they didn't warrant being added to the TWWHA.

Until, the ABC's Fact Checking Unit considers issues more broadly and with demonstrably more balance, many will continue to perceive it as largely a tool of Green-Left politics. This perception is unlikely to diminish until the same fervour for examining the utterances of conservative politicians, is directed towards the myriad of errant claims being regularly made by Green-Left luminaries such as Bob Brown, or ENGOs opposing Australia's resource use sector.