After a long battle, NRE has finally coughed up their last detailed audit report on compliance with the Code of Forest Practice (CFP – an environmental code that’s a bit of a joke in itself). I can see why they were reluctant to release this report, even though they were obliged to release all the internal CFP audit reports and supporting documents for East Gippsland.
Under the current arrangements, the NRE’s checks to see if the CFP is being followed are ...
NRE is currently trying to produce estimates of how much forest and log volumes are available that don’t leave everybody rolling around the floor with fits of laughter. The Statewide Forest Resource Inventory (SFRI) aims to replace the old system of estimates on “log volumes” (read “forests”).
NRE has produced quite a little PR campaign surrounding the SFRI project including CDs with detailed maps showing where they expect to find most of the trees. You could almost believe that NRE has ...
It’s not guns and hunting like it was with the Thylacine, but the Spot-tailed (Tiger) Quoll is knowingly being annihilated by logging, poisoning and NRE’s latest “protection” plans.
Spot-tailed Quolls, the largest meat-eating marsupials surviving on the mainland, are on a slippery slide to extinction. They have gone >from rare to vulnerable to endangered in Victoria in just the last 10 years! However, the Victorian government’s measures to protect the Spot-tailed Quoll have been weakened in a draft rewriting of the ...
he February WA election saw Labor promise to end 99% of old growth logging immediately and phase out export woodchipping by 2003. However, their commitment to the logging companies to supply huge volumes of logs until the end of 2003 has seen an increase in destruction of other important forests to account for protected old growth. These important conservation areas are being converted mostly to woodchips (90%).
To make up the shortfall in quota from old growth, logging of Jarrah in ...
Victoria’s logging industry has received yet another massive tax-payer funded gift – a $2.5 million grant to build new facilities at the Creswick Forest Science Centre. A new office, laboratory and lecture theatre will ultimately accommodate a further 25 scientists and amenities for up to 100 people.
Creswick conducts research and development into logging and tree growing and seems to give budding young forestry students some form of frontal lobotomy that transforms them into tree counters and graders when they finally ...
The Federal Productivity Commission recently condemned the subsidised underpricing of logs by governments as illegal and called for a complete overhaul of the system nationally. A 61 page statement from the Competition Complaints Office, entitled Competitive Neutrality in Forestry, finds that none of the country’s state forest managers operate a commercial rate of return on public forests.
One logger = 500 doles
“Almost 100 new jobs will be created in the timber (logging) industry throughout rural Victoria as a direct result of ...
