The NSW Government has finally made a decision on the Pilliga-Goonoo forests and the decision is likely to decimate local timber communities.
Click here (jpg 136kb) to see a picture of 24 Pilliga West State forest, one of the WCA so-called iconic areas.
The decision to ban logging over a further 350,000 hectares will have implications for biodiversity. While the government has described the decision as achieving ‘permanent conservation’ of the iconic forests, the reality is that without active management there can be no conservation.
150 years ago, areas now thick with cypress were grassland or open box woodland with cypress controlled by local aboriginals through the use of fire.
The forests that the government now wants to ‘conserve’ are a recent phenomenon and have developed with the local timber industry – koala and barking owls habitat enhanced through responsible forestry practices.
The Government has announced that workers who lose their jobs will be offered either new jobs or receive redundancy payments of $72,000.
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The picture at the above link is from Ted Haymen. He sent it to me with the following explaination, “This is compartment 24 Pilliga West State Forest, one of the WCA so called icon areas. It would have once been open box woodland but has been invaded by cypress and bull oak regrowth. Although they still look attractive, the large Box trees in this photo are at the end of their life, decaying, with many in a state of collapse. Competition from the dense regrowth has prevented the regeneration of replacements. There was a thinning operation in this block but it was stopped due to the moratorium. If left unmanaged, in perhaps fifty years few box trees will remain.”
Background information can be found at my blog post of April 21, 2005 titled ‘Timber Communities and National Parks (Part 1)‘ (scroll down to find it).
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
I have no intimate knowledge of the Pilliga-Goonoo forests, but I imagine its residents, ratepayers and business-owners and employees know as little about the administrative and political sabotage of my community’s viability, in the heart of the Daintree rainforest in far north Queensland.
Nor do any Australians know, specifically, what is being done elsewhere, in the name of popular environmentalism, to rob community sustainability, so that others of bureaucratic and metropolitan privilege may profit from undisclosed pecuniary interest.
I have had the “precautionary principle” shoved down my throat in justification of official intervention almost as frequently as intergenerational equity and conservation of biological diversity and ecological integrity.
These environmental policy principles are etched into Australia’s statutory landscape within the Intergovernmental Agreement on the Environment 1992 and are binding upon all States and Territories, and yet the fourth and equally important policy principle; “improved valuation, pricing and incentive mechanisms”, is invariably ignored and yet it states:
1. Environmental factors should be included in the valuation of assets and services,
2. Polluter pays i.e. those who generate pollution and waste should bear the cost of containment, avoidance or abatement,
3. The users of goods and services should pay prices based on the full life cycle costs of providing goods and services, including the use of natural resources and assets and the ultimate disposal of any wastes, and
4. Environmental goals, having been established, should be pursued in the most cost effective way, by establishing incentive structures, including market mechanisms, which enable those best placed to maximize benefits and/or minimize costs to develop their own solutions and responses to environmental problems.
If it is the intention of the NSW government to achieve ‘permanent conservation’ of the Pilliga-Goonoo forests, national environmental policy requires that the local community, that is those whose livelihoods and landholdings are inextricably linked to the natural values identified for conservation, maximize benefits and minimize costs, in the development of their own solutions and responses to environmental problems.
In the Daintree rainforest, the local community must implement its own solutions to the problems of habitat loss though increased settlement; not the politically more powerful communities of Port Douglas, Mossman or Cairns, nor state and national interests as claimed by Parliaments and the lobby groups funded through their respective budgetary capabilties.
Little by little and community after community, an unethical alliance between government-funded lobby groups and bureaucracy severs Australians from their viability through democratic bully-boy tactics in contradiction to Australia’s environmental obligations under its own legislation.
It is as unethical as a guardian removing a heart from a foster child for profit and the greater good of international wellbeing.
I know precisely how the people of the Pilliga-Goonoo forests feel: betrayed by their own country!
Jennifer
Since the announcement our phones well all communications in to our home have been in melt down. We hope we still have a farm business out there some where.
We have just had a phone call from an elderly farmer who has country on the edge of the Pilliga and will have trouble with access to some of his farming country and will lose his grazing leases rendering his operation unviable. This is just the start of it.There are approximately 40 of these type of operations throughout the bioregion.
It is obvious that the green bureaucrats and their green mates are running this State not the politicians.
I will send you the decision map that we hear yesterday has been with drawn. We suspect that Government will fiddle with a forest compartment or two in an effort to encourage the mills to hang in.
The three mills that will close are the one’s at Bingaara Narrabri and the Hardwood mill at Baradine this mill is the one that exports fence droppers for electric fencing to some 27 countries including game parks in Africa.
There is a real possibility that two more mills if not all will close as there is a question to the amount of resource available.
At the end of 2002 the sustainable allocation was some 70,000cubic meters the BRUS Option reduced it to 68,000 cu m with the forest area left to the industry the millers estimate there is only 25,000 cu m available to them.
To sum it up from one forester. Forestry has lost over 60% of it gross estate and will now have to supply 66% of industry (3mills that have gone)from less than 40% of resource
The loss to the communities in the bioregion has not yet been realised. Towns like Gwabegar Baradine Bingara Could end up as ghost towns or dole havens. As people move away schools will be downgraded or close and so the list will go on.
This decision by the Carr Government is just another slap in the face for rural NSW
Jennifer
In last week’s The Land newspaper you spoke about studies relating to areas locked away into National Parks. I am a great believer in the saying “once an area is lost to National Parks it is lost to conservation forever”.
In our region many areas were also preotected from logging due to the Hastings River Mouse (HRM). In one area they found a lactating HRM and because it was in an area of State Forest and they had never found a lactating HRM before they fenced off the area so those “evil” cattle would not harm or disturb Mum and the kids.
Returning to check on Mum and her family they foung they were no longer in the fenced off area, they had moved into the disturbed area with the cattle! So much for locking areas up.
Jennifer I feel one of the things under the greatest threat is the woodland bird family as we are seeing the demise of this type of forest to over timbered regrowth areas with rubbish and weed understorey.
The open woodland is being destroyed through the lack of management and the ideology to lock it up and it will look after itself.
jennifer , i see nothing wrong with locking big business out of national parks and other fragile eco systems -they are rare and getting rarer while big business feeds on whatever it can get its grubby paws on .
livestock and machinery can and do damage these areas . poor management by under resourced government departments can do the same thing – however local people must be at the least, be employed by governments as compensation for negative social and economic effects due to their decisions .
I wonder how many Australians are aware of the devastation that Bob Carr’s decision on the Brigalow will mean to the small towns and the timberworkers around the Goonoo and Pilliga forests – or if they care.
On reading the press release one would be led to believe that a fair compromise has been reach.
As a hardwood timber cutter from the Goonoo, the amount of timber left to harvestresponsibly as we do will be hard pressed to last us till Christmas, let alone the twenty year guarantee of timber supply promised in the infamous press release . There are only four of us cutting in the whole forest and between us we cut approximately a cricket pitch squared of timber a year.
One of the four contractors from Dubbo has been told his business if gone and the other three are apparently being left to die a lingering death as the timber supply quickly dwindles over the next few months. Our flourishing business and income has been swept out from under our feet. What hurts us so much is the broken promises that if we could find a compromise solution it would be utilised. We did this with the BRUS option. I was involved in the Brigalow Belt South Bioregion assessment process since 1999 . What a waste of time, money and energy and so much for listening to community consultation. 80% of the community endorsed the BRUS option and were involved in its creation.
The timber mills in the region too are being squeezed out of business as the areas left for harvesting do not contain sufficient levels of timber to make the mills viable. Precious export markets are to be lost. These mills and their workers are to be given exit pay outs but the contractors are apparently not going to be offered the option
The statements regarding the conservation state of the region is not accurate and is based on a flawed survey conducted over a weekend by the Western Conservation Alliance (Greens) in one small area of the Pilliga. Conservationists studying in the region paint a vastly different picture. State Forests ensure that timber workers harvest responsibly.
There are angry and disillusioned hard working people who are trying to make sense of such a devastating decision when it was not necessary. Similar conservation results could have been achieved, leaving the timber industry intact. It seems there is an obviously hidden agenda involved.
Christine Lord
Jennifer – are you aware of the apparent mismanagement of the Brigalow Timber Industry Development Assistance Fund by the NSW Forest Structural Adjustment Unit in its attitude to the NSW Cypress Industry and the communities that depend on it? The Minister, Ian Macdonald, seems to fail to have a grasp on the situation that was created by previous Premier Bob Carr. The people of Baradine, Gwabegar, Gulargambone and so on are once again victimised and have a total lack of confidence in the NSW Gvernment’s handling of the IDA issue.