Will forest lock ups affect the Tasmanian election?

These two IUCN principles and Article 2 are central to the debate on the extent of the nomination. 

Firstly, consumptive use of natural resources is a fundamental right for communities in serving human needs and secondly, such use must be balanced between community needs and the conservation, not preservation, of natural resources.  Thirdly, either the area nominated is of outstanding universal value or it is not.

The unspoken heresy in this debate is that much of the conservation movement has long ago lost sight of its original mandate to advocate the ‘wise-use’ principle of natural resource use, balancing the needs of man and the environment, to instead advocating the preservation principle more bluntly articulated as the 'lock it up' mentality, where human needs are not equal to the needs of the environment, but a distant second.

This convenient erosion of principle incrementally over several decades which favours the needs of the professional hierarchy of the environment movement ultimately discredits environmentalism to the extent it has less than five per cent support from the community.  

For most participants the dispute is not over whether there should be a nomination of additional World Heritage Area, but the extent and the integrity of all the areas nominated. 

Clearly, substantial areas included in the nomination that consist of areas recently harvested for timber, regrowth areas from previous harvesting and existing native and non-native plantations are not areas of outstanding universal value as claimed by some.

These same areas that were the subject of confected outrage by environmental groups who decried their utilisation saying, untruthfully, they were despoiled for all time are now promoted by the same groups as worthy of inclusion in a WHA site.

While the Australian Environment Foundation has no doubt the harvested areas will regenerate in time to be barely distinguishable from undisturbed forest areas, as has occurred for a century and half in Tasmanian forests, these areas do not qualify as of outstanding universal value, as can be seen in the photos included in the AEF report  on the nomination process.

The area nominated by the Gillard government in 2013 as a ‘minor boundary’ extension (172,000 hectares) was more than seven times larger than that agreed to by the Rudd government in 2010  (23,783 hectares) when they said “Australia restates that it does not propose to extend the boundary of the TWWHA further.”  Then environment minister Peter Garrett rejected calls for further extensions to the World Heritage Area.

Classifying the nomination as a ‘minor boundary’ extension did however bring the dubious benefit for the Gillard government nomination of not requiring an independent scientific assessment of the nominated area, thereby avoiding scrutiny of the highly contentious conservation values of many areas subjected to timber harvesting for decades.

Perhaps the most pernicious aspect of the ‘minor boundary’ nomination and its automatic acceptance as a WHA, if unchallenged, is that the previous promise under the Tasmanian Forest Agreement for access to valuable specialty timbers located within the new nominated area is negated without consultation.  This effectively creates a timeline for the demise of the specialty timbers craftsmen through ever diminishing supply of the specialist species they require.

If it is accepted that this process is about maintaining environmental values and upholding globally accepted International Union for Conservation of Nature principles, rather than condoning politically expedient advocacy, the current federal government’s amended nomination based on observed evidence needs to be accepted by the World Heritage Convention.

Whether many Tasmanian voters are aware of implications of the egregious flaws in the nomination process, which if approved will affect the balance of resource use and conservation for all time in Tasmania is unknown.  Certainly much of the media reporting has not highlighted adequately how the flaws undermine the veracity of the nomination.

What does appear certain is that voters know enough about the Labor Greens alliance and its outcomes for Tasmanians to want to vote for change.