The industry that gave us the National Park Logs Swindle now brings us the Residual Logs Rip-off. Over the past few years, the CSIRO has been checking low grade logs delivered to East Gippsland mills – so called ‘residual logs’ that nearly all end up as piles of woodchips. The industry is always whingeing about …
Whistle blower exposes corruption in Tasmania A greying Tasmanian forester of 32 years experience has spilt the beans on broad-scale illegal destruction of the state’s public forests. He claims corruption and collusion by and between the logging industry and Tasmanian Government has been rampant since the signing of the RFA five years ago. Bill Manning …
The Bracks government is set to usher one of Victoria’s most globally significant and threatened species into extinction. The Baw Baw frog is set to be carefully experimented upon with D4s! With less than 250 Baw Baw frogs remaining in the wild, this species’ extinction is imminent. It is only one of many species dependent …
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.
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 …
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, …
