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The occasion was the launch of the $27.6million Victorian Forest Industry Structural Adjustment Package, or VISAP. With the industry losing the bulk construction market to plantation pine, it was intended to help sawmills move into value-adding such as feature flooring and develop markets for the new products.
The ministers were effusive. The more labor-intensive direction would guarantee existing jobs and create much-needed new ones. "Exit" packages had been scrapped because mill closures and redundancies were a thing of the past, they said. The only way the industry was going was up, with the helping hand of government.
They are bitter words to recall for sawmillers and logging contractors in western Victoria and Gippsland. In mid-January, the Department of Natural Resources and Environment revealed hundreds of job losses were on the cards because there was less high-grade timber in the forests than the industry had been led to believe. The ramifications for rural communities are devastating.
Shock was quickly replaced by outrage. For months the department's Forest Service had dismissed warnings from conservationists and community groups that the rate of felling was too high to maintain even commercial supplies, much less the ecosystem. Instead, the department repeatedly assured the industry its calculations were correct.
The warnings came to a head last June, around the time of the VISAP announcement, when the Wombat Forest Society released an analysis of the situation in the Midlands forests, which include the Wombat, Cobaw and Enfield State Forests around Daylesford and Ballarat.
The analysis, based on the department's own figures, warned that high-grade commercial timber would be exhausted within 15 years, leaving more than 200 local timber jobs at risk. It came only months after sawmillers and conservationists had jointly written to Tehan expressing concern about the rate of logging in the Midlands.
Tehan stood by her senior forest bureaucrats and dismissed calls for an independent inquiry. The Forest Service's executive director, Gerard O'Neill, said in an Age report that his division "had a very robust methodology for setting sustainable yields".
In August, Tehan again backed her department's performance and roundly abused Tuckey for ordering an independent review of the Wombat analysis as the Commonwealth-state regional forest agreement process for western Victoria got under way. It was, she said, an unwarranted interference in a state matter.
The Victorian Association of Forest Industries resources director, Jon Drohan, said that on the strength of the assurances from Tehan and the department, timber companies borrowed millions of dollars to invest in the new value-adding plant and equipment.
"I think they have a lot of explaining to do," Drohan now says.
The cuts in timber yield were revealed in two consul-tation papers released by federal and state bureau-crats preparing the last two of Victoria's five regional forest agree-ments, covering western Victoria and Gippsland.
These 20year agreements are sup-posed to set sustainable rates of timber felling and provide the indus-try with security of supply, balanced against other forest values and com-mercial uses such as beekeeping, conservation, water catchments, tourism and recreation. Once signed, unlimited woodchip exports are allowed from the forests they cover.
In the consultation papers, the department has changed its tune. It now says the annual volume of sawlogs taken from the Midlands forest will need to be reduced by 31per cent, at a cost of 28 sawmill jobs, to be sustainable. Less than a quarter of the reduction is attributed to timber being "locked up" in new conservation reserves.
The Otways face a 38per cent cut in sawlogs and the loss of 26 fulltime sawmill jobs. Gippsland faces cuts ranging from 9 to 28 per cent in different regions, with 51 sawmill jobs on the line. Flowon job losses among logging contractors and ser-vice businesses are not identified, but are likely to run into hundreds.
O'Neill says the cuts are due to "new data" becoming available in recent months. He says satellite imaging means the department is better able to identify what type of vegetation is where, so rainforests, soil and water catchments can be properly protected with buffers and other measures under the industry code of forests practice.
Asked why the department has taken months to arrive at more or less the same conclusion as com-munity groups working off old data, O'Neill replies: "We are approaching this from the point of view of making a responsible assessment of all avail-able information at the time and we have not stepped away from calling the outcomes in areas as it is. This is what we believe would put the industry on a sustainable footing."
The Environment and Conser-vation Minister, Sherryl Garbutt, appears to have accepted the depart-ment's explanation and has no plans to hold anyone to account, despite the trouble the debacle spells for a new Labor Government elected on a platform of promoting regional jobs and environmental responsibility.
"I want accurate figures out there for the public to be working with and the industry to be working with," she says. "So it is timely that the information is there and accurate for everyone to work on ... My under-standing is that the technology has been improving rapidly with satellite information."
Conservationists and community activists are equally unhappy with the regional forest agreements proposed in the consultation papers. They don't want their communities devastated by job losses either, especially for what they believe is next to no environmental gain.
Groups ranging from the Portland Field Naturalists Club to the Otway Ranges Environment Network have criticised the new conservation reserves as too fragmented to be much good as habitat. They are also sceptical about the selection criteria, saying most of the reserves happen to be either unsuitable for logging due to terrain or vegetation types, or places such as the Cobaw State Forest near Gisborne, which is still recovering from past logging.
Furthermore, many of the reserves are classed as special protection zones, which means they can be reclassified and logged at any time.
The reductions in "sustainable yield" also tell only half the story. Sustainable yield refers only to highgrade trees classed as sawlogs; "residual" trees destined for the woodchipper are not counted. Regardless of the ratio of sawlogs to residual trees in a given area - and the ratio can vary from onetoone right up to onetonine or more - the whole lot will be clearfelled.
Tim Anderson, the author of the Wombat Forest Society's analysis, says industry must wear part of the blame because research and market development has invested in the topquality logs even though native forests produce relatively few of these compared with midgrade and woodchip timber.
The industry has had to start thinking laterally about solutions. The alternative is to accept the department's suggestion that a few mills and workers be paid to leave the industry and ease the pressure on a dwindling sawlog resource.
Groups such as the Cobaw and Wombat Forest Action Group have long advocated relieving the pres-sure on native forests by phasing the industry into mixedspecies plan-tations. It is a fine line between such plantations and current departmen-tal practice in which areas outside reserves are switched to an intensive, rotational regime of clearfelling, regeneration and periodic thinning.
Having initially resisted the idea of plantations, the industry now talks about "expanding the forest area" as part of a package of measures it wants the Government to consider. For perhaps the first time, the goals of the timber industry and conser-vationists appear to be running parallel, if not quite converging.
Behind closed doors, conser-vationists, industry and the unions have been comparing notes on where to go next. In a consensus about where resistance to change is entrenched, the stakeholders have bypassed Garbutt and the depart-ment to lobby the Regional Develop-ment Minister, John Brumby.
The Victorian Association of For-est Industries' executive director, Graeme Gooding, said the sector wanted to preserve jobs rather than funding being directed to paying people out.
He was angriest that the bomb-shell was dropped a mere 10 weeks before the 31March deadline for the Commonwealth and state to sign off on the regional forest agreements. Without an agreement, woodchip exports from western Victoria and Gippsland will cease.
"The whole thing is very shoddy," he says. "Basically we are rejecting
the quality of the socioeconomic analysis and the consultation pro-cess
which has gone wrong. With just five minutes to midnight, they announce
these major reductions that weren't anticipated."
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