In this bulletin:

1. Court Win - What does it mean?
2. Will the government change the laws to avoid protecting forests?
3. Feast for Forests Yarraville Sunday 29th August 2010

Greg Barber On the steps of Parliament House 12th August 2010

1. They’ll alter the laws in a sneaky underhanded way after the election and cop the media flack for a day or so. To help make this impossible, we – AND YOU - have to keep asking them at every possible opportunity to promise to not alter the regulations that would favour logging.
   Please if you get a chance to call a state pollie on talkback or at a candidates forum (not the Fed pollies), please do so, to get it right out there on the public record. Or you could ask a federal wanna-be pollie if they think the RFA’s are working given the legal cases that have shown the States have been in contempt of the env laws bestowed upon them under the RFAs. If so, will the Federal Govt take back control of the management and protection of Aust’s rare and endangered species/wildlife?
2. They will now have to survey every coupe before they log them – in the right season for those species (for flowering plants, calling frogs etc) which could mean no logging for the next 12 months while they do surveys.
3. They will have to survey only the more likely areas which could have rare and threatened species in them.
4. Either VicForests and DSE will be setting up a much bigger biodiversity unit or regional units to deal with these surveys, or they will be employing consultants to do the work.
5. Surveys done throughout the seasons by professionals will cost a fortune – adding to the already uneconomic nature of logging public forests.
6. VicForests and DSE will argue over who is responsible for these surveys but even if DSE is, they would have to pass on those costs to VicForests as part of the costs of managing the forests for logging, and VicForests would have to pass these costs onto the logging companies
7. Forests in other regions will also have to be surveyed before logging – like koala habitat in Sth Gippy, the Leadbeaters Possum forests in the Central Highlands and possibly the forests of the North East and Tambo areas.
8. A moratorium could be put on all Old Growth and HCV forests meanwhile.
9. If more surveys show up threatened species in non-old growth and High Conservation Value forests, there could be an argument to have to survey ALL public native forests.
10. The implications for logging privately owned forests is unknown as yet.
11. If the survey team continues to survey with the cameras and other gear we have, DSE and VicForests will look very stupid if they didn’t find something that the enviro groups did.