Tasmania's forests: GetUp! and the media versus a Legislative Council Inquiry

Undoubtedly, GetUp's form of democratic participation has become very popular, particularly amongst tech-savvy younger generations whose lives seem to increasingly revolve around remote forms of communication or social media. It enables them to have a say without having to spend time researching and understanding issues. All that is required is for them to suspend their own curiosity and trust GetUp! to accurately portray issues and guide them in what's needed to address them – and therein lies the problem.

With regard to Tasmania's forests, GetUp! fails to provide its members with even the most basic facts. It would be surprising if any of its subscribers knew that the current 'peace deal' process is concerned with only the 25% portion of the 2.4 million hectares of Tasmanian state-owned forest that is not already contained in some form of park or reserve which excludes logging; or that over 1 million hectares of Tasmania's 'old growth' forest (or over 80% of its total area) is already contained in reserves where logging is excluded. Or, for that matter, that Tasmanian forestry practices were found to be the equal of or better than those in most OECD countries in a recent report by Benjamin Cashore, Professor of Environmental Governance & Political Science at Yale University.

Clearly, this sort of knowledge is vital to any informed understanding of whether or not Tasmanian forests need to be 'saved' from logging. The growth of 'save-the-forest' populism in ignorance of such fundamental knowledge even though it is readily available in the public domain, should be a grave concern to anyone interested in ensuring evidence-based political decision-making.

Aside from that, there is a crying need to examine the sheer common sense of spending a huge amount of taxpayer's money to permanently close an industry that operates in just a minor slice of the forest and could be resurrected given a return to better economic conditions and the development of some alternate markets for sawmilling waste, perhaps including biomass energy which is a 'green' renewable form of power generation.

Tasmanian Senator, Richard Colbeck, the Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Fisheries and Forestry, has estimated that the implementation of the 'peace deal' proposal as it currently stands would wipe $800 million per year from Tasmania's Gross Domestic Product at a time when the state government is already battling to reduce public expenditure and considering measures such as closing up to 20 schools to save $24 million, and reducing expenditure on public health and policing.

While no-one decries the need for contractors and businesses to be appropriately compensated for surrendering their livelihoods, the mooted $800 million in forest industry compensation is being portrayed by ENGOs as expenditure to achieve a significant conservation outcome. However, the closure of the Tasmanian timber industry would actually have negligible environment benefit given the already existing extent of forest reservation, and the fact that sustainably harvesting and regenerating forests over a lengthy time frame has few long-term impacts. This is highlighted by the many areas of Tasmanian forest classified by ENGOs as 'High Conservation Value' even though they have been logged and regenerated in the past.

The Federal Government has already flagged that if required, compensation money will be drawn from existing environmental programs. It will therefore directly reduce programs delivering real conservation gains such as LandCare, where it could fund revegetation works on at least 100,000 hectares of land. The same amount of money could also deliver tremendous environmental benefits if used as foreign aid to help improve the management of hundreds of thousands of hectares of at-risk tropical forests. It could also generate huge savings on greenhouse gas emissions if directed to urban infrastructure projects such as building the proposed truck by-pass in western Melbourne which is estimated to save in the order of 20,000-40,000 litres of diesel per day; or to bury power infrastructure in Victoria to reduce the potential for electricity-caused wildfires which are infinitely more damaging to forests and their environmental values.

Given the pressing need to improve environmental outcomes, we have a real problem if governments are influenced by GetUp! campaigns and unbalanced media reporting over and above detailed processes which study all aspects of issues and engage with all stakeholders.