VicForest foresters and PR men always like to present their ‘facts’ as unquestionable science and anyone who dares question them are blasphemers.Well – get a load of their latest ‘home brand’ fact sheet on logging. VicForests are proudly peddling this small two page glossy on their homepage and it’s a truly amazing mishmash of statistics …
As $45 million of your taxes is about to be divvied up for broke loggers, a worrying precedent has come to light that raises serious questions about this bailout of a struggling industry. Attempts by successive federal governments to pay businesses out of the native forest industry in Tasmania have failed to meet basic benchmarks …
This one is a ripper if you take a moment to read it. Andrew Darby, an Age journo based in Hobart, revealed in early January that the $45 million of our taxes about to be handed to Tasmanian loggers could be money down the drain. One exit program of the Howard era was supposed to …
Australia’s forest conflict gets easier to solve as every day passes. In reality, the conflict will solve itself if the government can just resist reviving the environmentally and economically inferior native forest part of Australia’s “forest” industry. The government must not open native forest wood to the energy market. Some are proposing that Australia’s forest …
Baillieu seems to have handed his government over to miners and loggers to run. Its latest Timber Industry Action Plan which was released on 13th December could have been written by the logging industry at a bucks party. What this plan does is try to squeeze every last tree from every last corner. Here’s what …
The largest destroyer of our endangered forest species could be made exempt from the law that protects them! Victoria’s Baillieu led National Party government plans to rewrite the environmental Code for logging so that the DSE Secretary can flick his pen over a piece of paper to exempt logging from abiding by the Flora and …
This one simple graph tells the story; the orange line shows the declining level of sawn timber coming from native forests – down down down it goes. At the same time the export of native forests has skyrocketed – only dropping slightly due to the slump in the overseas market. This is for a number …
If you get confused by all the talk of carbon trading, prices, international negotiations and Kyoto rules, you’re not alone. But here’s an attempt to simplify a part of it. Sadly, forests are still being done over by the latest wheeling and dealing. Late last year there was the Durban Climate Conference. Countries worked on …
LOGGERS can seek exemptions from state environment laws protecting endangered species under proposed changes quietly released by the state government. The proposed amendments to the code for timber production – outlined in a document posted on a government website – hands power to the Secretary of the Department of Sustainability and Environment. The secretary would …
Logging the forests of south east Australia releases three per cent of our carbon dioxide emissions, and destroys precious biodiversity. Yet this activity is subsidised by our governments. FORTY YEARS AGO, the NSW Government agreed to supply 5,000 tons of waste from saw logs to the newly established export woodchip mill at Eden. A Japanese …
