Just how green are The Greens?

Australian forest management is regarded as world’s best practice because, unlike many developing countries, we have a strong political and regulatory environment, a multi-layered system of land use planning, and an absence of corruption. Again, unlike many developing countries, harvested Australian forests are immediately regenerated to regrow into new forests and so our timber production is not associated with deforestation.

Unfortunately, these positive features of Australian forest management are either ignored or actively misrepresented by ENGO “save-the-forest” campaigns. They typically portray timber harvesting as a total carbon emission thereby ignoring the storage of carbon in wood and paper products, and the recapture of atmospheric carbon by post-harvest forest regeneration.

The Greens’ position on native timber production is also rooted in misrepresentations such as were recently articulated by David Jones, a Greens candidate in the upcoming Victorian state election. In the Weekly Times, he described timber production as the “wood chipping of our shared resources” in which “millions of tonnes of high-quality timber sent as low value woodschip boosts the profits of a few multi-nationals”.

While woodchips are indeed produced from small, crooked, and defective logs, as well as sawmill off-cuts, the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics’ latest forest and wood product statistics report that 2.6 million cubic metres of sawlog and veneer logs were harvested from Australian native forests during the 2008-09 financial year. From these logs, about 1 million cubic metres of hardwood sawn timber was produced.

If Australia stops producing this timber from its own forests it will down-size it’s only significant net carbon-positive industry - a course that is hardly likely to reduce emissions. In addition, it will turn thousands of taxpayers into social welfare recipients receiving unemployment benefits or taxpayer-funded compensation.

The recent political decisions to substantially close the NSW and Victorian red gum timber industries were accompanied by a $100 million compensation package. In terms of effective climate change action, this makes no sense. A far better course would have been to allow timber production to continue, while directing the same amount of money towards a large scale reafforestation program on degraded agricultural lands. Sadly though, political imperatives rarely equate with common sense.

Still, from the perspective of someone unfamiliar with the depth of opposition to Australian forest management, Canadian architect, Michael Green, remains hopeful. He believes that it is essential “… to get those who are opposed to forestry to the table to talk about the overall big picture we are facing from global climate change. People need to be open-minded about how we can move from steel and concrete to wood. Environmental groups need to support the greater use of wood in construction. Old assumptions have to be revised by those who want to protect the environment.”’

Unfortunately, ENGO’s opposed to forestry are already at the table and neither they nor their political arm, the Greens, are showing any signs of re-considering their ultimate demand that Australian native timber production be ended. Their determination to pursue this ideological ambition in the face of knowledge that it will actually be counter-productive to reducing carbon emissions, entitles the wider community to ask: just how “green” are our Greens?