Just what is going on lately? Woodchippers are hopping into the sack with other sectors of the logging industry all over the country. Midways, the big export woodchipper near Geelong, is planning to merge with Forest Enterprises Australia (FEA), a plantation company operating out of Tasmania since 1985, which sells whole plantation logs and wood-chips …
Premier Steve Bracks’ new proposed law would make forest destruction invisible to the public. It would be illegal for anyone to witness or gather information on the logging. The law would ensure clearfelling was done in secret. One of the basic skills of forest campaigning is to learn to “read between the lines” of Government …
Federal assistance to help dairy farmers and regions affected by dairy deregulation has been given to a Noojee sawmill. $350,000 of public money was handed to the mill which is planning to install kilns and produce veneer laminates. They claim they might create 10 jobs from the money.
We’ve all tried to digest and analyse what happened and why – tried to make sense of the senseless results to the point of depression. Despite our species priding itself on being a complex and intelligent creature, we’re still an animal that has two basic drivers – fear and greed. Those in power know this …
In early November, the logging industry launched a new self-certified standard of logging in Australia. It claims its practices are now acceptable on a global scale. Australian Forestry Standard Their self-certification scheme (invented by the industry for the industry) is called the Australian Forestry Standard (AFS). An equally dubious international group called the Program for …
Our dogged pursuit of the crooks involved in the opportunistic logging of a large strip of the Snowy National Park during the January ’03 fires is starting to pay off. Auditor General to scrutinise DSE. Firstly, in mid-July we received a response from the Auditor General’s Office confirming that they had decided to investigate the …
For the logging industry’s movers and shakers at the Australian Forestry Conference in Melbourne in late July, one of the few hopes touted in an otherwise gloomy political landscape was the prospect of co-operating with the World Wide Fund for Nature to divide and conquer the Australian environment movement.Bob Burton reports. “The idea of the …
The World Wide Fund for Nature (Australia) is already under fire for being too close to the Howard government. The Australia Institute in its report ‘Taming the Panda’ notes WWF have received over $13 million in grants from them since 1998 and in return, ” .can usually be relied upon to praise the Howard Government’s …
Another ex-ACF President, Philip Toyne, has moved on from being a consultant to the industry to becoming a board member of Australia’s second-largest sawmilling and plantation company. Toyne’s past employer, Neville Smiths Timber at Heyfield in Gippsland, paid him for two years to sell their native forest wood as eco-friendly and convince government officials with …
Trish Caswell has had been well briefed since she joined the Victorian Association of Forest Industries in April. In an interview on ABC radio (30th July) she parroted the exact same industry rhetoric we’ve heard for decades: the need for ‘sustainability’, no job losses, that it’s better to log our forests than poorer countries’ forests, …
