What underlies the Minister’s lies?
Minister Jaala Pulford is responsible for VicForests. She’s been caught with her pants on fire again trying to cover for it in reply to a question from Greens MP Sam Dunn in early September.
She asked about VicForests’ self-allocation of an additional 316 new stands of forest in Victoria to be clearfelled. The Minister said it was OK because the same number of hectares was also removed off logging maps. What she didn’t say was that most of those coupes VicForests had already clearfelled and were now handing back to DELWP to manage!
She said in Parliament:
I indicate to Ms Dunn that there are an additional 10,300 hectares and a reduction of 10,300 hectares. This is not all harvested (she means logged). VicForests harvests (logs) around 3,000 hectares a year …
VicForests already has around 1,000 stands of forest on its East Gippsland chopping block, but it added another 127 in August (the others are in the Central Highlands). It suffers an insatiable greed – a chainsaw habit that costs us all $5.5M a year to feed.
The red shapes on the above Google Earth image are proposed forest stands to be clear-felled in the next 3 years, most of them valuable mature and old growth forest.
Minister Pulford also said thousands of Victorian jobs were created by clearfelling our forests, when it was in fact about 500 or 1/20th of her claimed number. She has also claimed that no logs were being exported whole to China.
Is she deliberately lying or naïvely parroting the lies the industry feeds her?