Crime, fiction and political intrigue

The timber industry: a history of alleged sabotage, corruption and collusion

The year was 1996 and everything seemed to be quiet in the sleepy forest hamlets. Then, on a Saturday morning someone noticed there was a vehicle parked on one of the main streets with the letter “A” stuck to the rear window. Some of the locals could be seen examining the car, trying to fathom what this “A” meant.

Soon there was more than one vehicle displaying this sign and the number grew over time.

Then all was revealed; the small towns were buzzing with rumours of a secret army of spies that had come to destroy the green groups. Of course no one believed it was anything more than a fantasy but they were wrong! It was no fantasy. A more insidious side of the timber industry began to emerge.

The anti-environment army was known as the A-Team (“A” standing for Amcor; the giant Australian paper company). The A-Team vehicles started appearing outside environment meetings. At this stage environmentalists and townsfolk could only speculate on the extent of what was happening. It wasn’t until 2006 that the ABCs Four Corners program revealed documents which clearly indicated how the A-Team was set up to take on the green groups and shape public opinion on logging and wood chipping.

The effectiveness of these clandestine operations (opinion shaping) lasted for more than a decade and still serves to cloud sections of local opinion.

The A-Team began its work by systematically discrediting conservation and environment groups with tactics such as infiltrating events and spying on individuals. The team founder Derek Amos admitted to Four Corners that:

Up until that time the Greens were getting the major newspaper coverage. And they were winning the hearts and minds battle. And it was necessary to take over that ground, and that could only be done by, if you like, discrediting what was being claimed by the Greens.

As the ABC’s Sally Neighbour discovered in 2006, the activities of the A-Team began in 1989 after the State Government announced plans for a pipeline to pump industrial waste into the ocean off Gippsland’s pristine Ninety Mile Beach.

Locals set up a campaign in opposition to the government’s decision. The government were then forced to halt the work and call for a review. The major stakeholder here was Amcor; owner of the Maryvale pulp mill in Gippsland’s Latrobe Valley. The mill needed some means of eliminating the waste from its Latrobe Valley facility. The local protests put Amcor’s plans at risk so they employed Derek Amos as a political consultant to work on changing public opinion.

Amos was a “former state Labor member”. He was employed by the company and by the union the CFMEU. The aim was to offset any ongoing protests by the environment groups as the logging in the forests increased. Those conservationists who remembered the days of Jack Mundey’s “green bans” and a union commitment to protect the environment were left dumbfounded. The CFMEU seemingly did nothing to intervene in these surreptitious arrangements to spy on greens groups, nor did the ALP appear to condemn the practice.

The Maryvale mill flourished until the 1990s when the market was flooded with overseas paper imports. The A-Team lobbied on behalf of Amcor as the company turned its attention to a recycling ploy (green-washing) which eventually found its way into schools.

Amcor spent millions attempting to look clean and respectable; it made all attempts to conceal its alleged sinister activities. According to Four Corners during the 1990s the A-Team succeeded in splitting the local environment groups and isolating them from their city counterparts. In Gippsland the movement appears not to have fully recovered.