Tasmania’s broken ‘forests peace talks’ expose the ugly face of eco-extortion

Opponents, for example, initially portrayed Gunns’ proposed pulp mill project as the ultimate destructer of Tasmania’s ‘old growth’ forests, which would wreck the pristine Tamar valley. In reality, the pulp mill was to be built in the Tamar valley’s industrial precinct next to existing woodchip export facilities, a nearby power station and other industrial infrastructure, and it was planned to use an initial mix of native regrowth and plantation wood while fully transitioning to be plantation-fed within five years.

As a whole, Tasmania’s native hardwood industry has similarly been attacked for years through deliberate misrepresentations of the type that are exemplified by Getup!’s current campaign.

Contrary to the convential wisdom being fostered by these campaigns, Tasmania is under no threat of losing its forests. In fact, the public state forests being managed for long-term timber supply (which was the subject of the ‘peace talks’) comprises just 23 per cent of the state’s native forest area, with the remaining 77 per cent comprised of extensive areas of national parks and conservation reserves where no timber harvesting is permitted, as well as privately-owned forests which are only partially accessible to the industry.

Similarly, on the supposed threat to Tasmania’s old growth forests, 92 per cent of the more than 1.23 million hectares of it are either already reserved or are otherwise unavailable for timber harvesting.  Within the eight per cent being managed for long term timber supply, harvesting occurs on a proportionally small scale. Forestry Tasmania’s reports show that in the decade up to 2011, just 0.74 per cent of the state’s total old growth forest area was harvested and regenerated.

Such inconvenient truths make a mockery of the environmental lobby’s routine claims of catastrophic Tasmanian forest loss. The fact that such truths remain generally unknown amongst the wider community is testament to the environmental lobby’s talent for inventing and promoting misrepresentations of reality. 

Unfortunately, it is this talent for misrepresentation that is the major flaw of the 2010 Competition and Consumer Act’s ‘environmental protection’ exemption. The exemption’s integrity and utility is utterly reliant on the environmental lobby exhibiting reasonable perspective and honesty in determining what constitutes real environmental threat. Unfortunately there is little to suggest that they can be objective with regard to activities such as native forest timber production, where opposition is largely rooted in a long-held and simplistic ideology that it should not occur, regardless of how much harvesting there is and how well it may be managed.

Whether the environmental lobby’s boycott campaigns succeed because the community actually believes the errant environmental claims that they make is somewhat uncertain. But at least with respect to banks, markets, and institutional shareholders with capacity for due diligence, there is much to suggest that the discomfort of being associated with an incessant controversy (rather than any belief in the errant claims) is the major rationale for any withdrawal of support from targetted companies.

On the other hand, company shareholders and retail customers may be more likely to believe that targetted companies are involved in ‘environmental armegeddon’ simply because those companies lack the resources to adequately defend themselves and do not receive fair coverage in mainstream media which mostly reports environmental issues from a Green-Left perspective.  

It is hardly surprising that intensive environmental activism continues despite theoften-dubious nature of their causes. The environmental lobby has itself become a big industry by trading in the highly marketable commodity of environmental protection. This enables it to generate large incomes from well-meaning, but largely unknowing donors and philanthropists.

Forests are central to this, as the former CEO of the Australian Conservation Foundation, Tricia Caswell, acknowledged in 1995: “Forest issues are the best weapon to generate membership and donations, the Green movement’s lifeblood”. Indeed, the irresistible attraction of forests to the environmental lobby is evident in continuing campaigns against timber harvesting in W.A. and Victoria despite massive national park expansions and historically low harvesting rates.

However, while forests have been the environmental industy’s most lucrative cash cow, the important forestry battles were won long ago. Accordingly, today’s campaigns focus on forests that are largely far removed from being wilderness, such as the Murray-Darling’s floodplain forests which are amongst the most degraded landscapes in Australia but are now being bestowed with national parks status; or the scientifically-undefined ‘high conservation value’ forests of Tasmania that include almost any forest regardless of type or structure, including regrowth from past logging.

In 2009, the combined expenditure of Australia’s four largest environmental groups was reportedly $70 million per annum, of which 60 per cent (or $42 million) was used for political lobbying, fundraising, membership drives and office expenses. Given the money involved, it is somewhat optimistic to expect these groups to willingly give up the hundreds of well paid careers that are now staked on finding and sensationalising the next issue regardless of how environmentally significant it may be. In many cases these are careers which involve going to work each day specifically to design and implement strategies to thwart, hobble or bring down their own nation’s resource use industries.