The federal Environment Minister, Senator Robert Hill, has sought advice on whether the Australian Heritage Commission's failure to monitor logging in East Gippsland's forests is a breach of the Federal Government's legal responsibilities. Senator Hill admitted during Senate estimates hearings late last week that he was unsure of the commission's obligations under law, following allegations by the Australian Greens that the commission was required to act as a watchdog over logging in East Gippsland but had failed to do so.
"I think we should take some further advice," Senator Hill had said. The Age reported in March that Tasmanian Greens' Senator Bob Brown had legal advice that the commission may have acted unlawfully by failing to properly list those mapped sites deemed to have national estate values. Without formal listing, the sites are not officially on the register of the national estate. During last week's estimates hearings, Senator Brown alleged arbitrary policy choices were being made on logging some sections of national estate forest.
Asked if this meant national estate forest values were "expendable", Senator Hill replied: "If you want to put it that way. The Australian Heritage Commission has declined to take any further role in forest protection in the sensitive Gippsland region, arguing that a regional forest agreement signed in February with Victoria removes its responsibility. But one section of the East Gippsland regional forest agreement requires that "the advice of the commission will. be sought in relation to proposed actions which might adversely affect national estate values". In a letter to a Victorian environment group after the signing, the chairwoman of the commission, Ms Wendy McCarthy, said timber harvesting in some specific areas of East Gippsland would "result in some loss of national estate values".
She also said the agreement itself represented a change in the way the commission usually operated. After the estimates hearings, Senator Brown said he believed the commission retained all of the interventionary powers it had before the forest agreement had been signed. "The regional forest agreement is a process of them trying to get out of the vexatious and difficult forestry debate and they can't," he said.
Nine protesters have been arrested in the past week in confrontations
with loggers in the Goolengook forest, which has national estate values
and is being logged. During the hearings, Senator Brown also criticised
the Government for failing in what he argued was its moral responsibility
to protect both the forests and the protesters. He said protesters had
been left to do the commission's work and a contractor there had already
been twice convicted of assault against them.