Is there room for science in the Tasmanian World Heritage dispute?

The TFA Act has essentially enshrined into law the agreed outcomes of the contentious "forest peace deal" negotiated by timber industry and ENGO representatives over a two-and-a-half-year period. This is another example of Labor/Greens forest policy determined with minimal scientific or community input – being essentially a bartering process between two self-interested stakeholders (one under considerable duress) cajoled along by political interference from a Federal Minister promising several hundred $ million in return for a favourable outcome.

Despite its shortcomings, the TFA Act contains a clause which allows some special timber species to be harvested from within these new national parks and reserves in the event that – as now seems likely – insufficient volumes of these highly valuable timbers are available from the substantially reduced wood supply zones redefined by the Act.

It has become apparent that an additional motivation for World Heritage-listing these proposed new national parks and reserves was specifically to override this clause even though it had been formulated in good faith during the democratic process of legislating the TFA Act. Under the Environment and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999, any activity with potential to adversely affect World Heritage values requires the approval of the Federal Environment Minister, and then Minister Tony Burke had advised that this would not be granted.

So, it seems that the World Heritage extension was designed to at least partly insure against the prospect of a new Liberal State Government being elected in March 2014 with a potential mandate to undo Labor/Greens plans to create extensive new forested national parks and reserves under the TFA Act. This further underscores its political motivation.

However, while the World Heritage extension includes areas of multiple use forests of inappropriate quality, it should also be acknowledged that around 50,000 hectares of its 170,000 hectares is comprised of pre-existing parks and reserves in which the tall forests and giant trees that are said to be the outstanding value of the extension are concentrated. Accordingly, the extension could be partly revoked to release these multiple use production forests, without significantly affecting its predominant World Heritage values.

There is strong opposition to this possibility, and already the Greens, some academics and media commentators are questioning the capability of the incoming Federal Coalition Government to revoke the World Heritage extension. It seems that it may well rest on legal arguments concerning the revoking of UN-sanctioned environmental protections, although these may apply to the whole listing, rather than a flawed 'minor boundary modification' as in this case.

However, at the very least, the Coaltion Government should be requesting that the UN's World Heritage Committee reconsider the TWWHA extension because it was demonstrably greater than a 'minor boundary modification' and therefore needed to be independently assessed to determine whether its values are of an appropriate quality. If this occurred, there is a prospect that a significant part of the extension could be revoked.

Regardless of how this turns out, it is a welcome sign that the incoming Federal Coalition Government is willing to reconsider a recent policy decision that has been so obviously shaped by a political agenda. Hopefully, this is indicative of the beginnings of a siesmic shift from the past 12 – 15 years under State and Federal Labor Governments, to a new era whereby science and due process are reinstated as the key drivers of environmental and resource use policies.

Few Australians openly condone environmental policies being based on politics rather than science, but Greens and many Labor voters are typically hypocritical in supporting science-based policy in relation to climate change while alternately dismissing science when it challenges pre-conceived ideologies in relation to natural resource use issues such as forestry and fisheries. On this basis, the Coalition Government will need to get used to copping truckloads of flak for taking an evidence-based policy path rather than pandering to poorly-informed populist views as its predecessor did.