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The Trades Hall Council is due to decide its position at a meeting tomorrow morning but it is believed the State Government will be called on to take the falls off the logging schedule.
The meeting follows confirmation this week by Conservation and Environment Minister Sherryl Garbutt that 77 hectares of forest by the 130-metre Sabine Falls will be clear-felled this summer. Communities along the Great Ocean Road, bushwalking clubs and conservationists have vowed to blockade the area.
The Sabine Falls was on a list of contentious logging blocks that conservation and community groups wanted taken off the schedule in return for a commitment not to blockade the Otways this summer. The Otways have been the scene of violent clashes over the past two seasons.
Government negotiations with the groups were suspended in September before the fate of the Sabine Falls was decided. Other contentious spots such as Riley's Ridge, a narrow neck that connects the east and west Otways forests, were replaced with blocks elsewhere.
Trades Hall Council industrial officer Brian Boyd said the fate of the Sabine Falls was discussed yesterday at a meeting of the council and the unions' green arm, Earthworker. He said tomorrow's council meeting would consider what might happen in the Otways this summer. It is believed Mr Boyd told yesterday's meeting he wanted unionists out of the Sabine Falls.
The Trades Hall president and secretary of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union's forestry division, Jane Calvert, did not return calls.
The union movement is looking to rebuild relations with the conservation movement, which were strained by a five-day stand-off in the Otways in January, 1999.
Sixteen protesters are suing the CFMEU forestry division for false imprisonment, alleging they were held against their will in the forest and subjected to physical and psychological harassment and injury by about 70 timber workers.
The campaigners had set up camp beside a public road in a bid to stop
clear-felling in a nearby area. The loggers refused to allow them to leave
the camp unless they signed an agreement to stop blockading in the Otways.
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