Parliament as crude charade

John Hayward

It’s called the “Forest Practices Amendment (Threatened Native Vegetation Communities) Bill 2006”. The aim of the bill seems to be to KO as far as possible a persistent nuisance to the logging industry, namely threatened native vegetation communities.

If anyone thought the pulp mill approval process might tempt the industry to temporarily adopt the guise of decent folks, a couple of bills currently before Parliament put that idea to rest.

Alerted by a passing mention in the Cheshire article, (The “Hydro’s” not for sale, but FT?) I went searching for a bill in Parliament shifting yet more power to the Forest Practices Authority, the more regally titled successor to the Forest Practices Board.

It’s called the “Forest Practices Amendment (Threatened Native Vegetation Communities) Bill 2006”. The aim of the bill seems to be to KO as far as possible a persistent nuisance to the logging industry, namely threatened native vegetation communities.

The bill starts off with a series of legal haymakers, the insertions in Section 3 “interpretations” (definitions) of the Forest Practices Act, of some new terms. One is the “clearance and conversion” of threatened native vegetation communities (TNVC), which is followed by a number of reasonable definitions. But it is followed by a whopper of a Catch -22: “For the avoidance of doubt ‘ says Section 3A(2) “clearance and conversion” of TNVC is not constituted when the FPA decides that the TNVC is ” reasonably unlikely to be permanently altered by the management practice”. The loggers and the FPA, therefore, can rely on the FPA’s discretion, and wait on eternity to prove them wrong. The TNVC, by the way, is not just one colony of a vegetation type, but all of them together.

Not content with having cut the legs off a major portion of the Nature Conservation Act, this Bill goes for the arms with the inserted definition of “exceptional circumstances” which may “justify” the “clearance and conversion” of TNVCs. These circumstances are to:
(a) ensure the physical safety of an owner or the owner’s relatives or employees
(b) remove or reduce a bushfire risk
(c) respond to a threat to the State’s biosecurity
(d) protect a rare, vulnerable or endangered species of flora or fauna
(e) discharge a statutory obligation or comply with an order of the court

Bearing in mind that “clearance and conversion” has already been rendered all but extinct by the discretion granted the FPA to exclude all but indisputably terminal situations from this definition, can anyone think of a situation where the FPA that we know would rule that none of the nebulous conditions (a)-(e) apply?

The bill proceeds to use the above insertions to gut the FPA’s powers to refuse Forest Practices Plans on the grounds of protecting TNVCs (s.19(1AA), if:

(a) the clearance and conversion is justified by exceptional circumstances;
(b) the activities authorised by the FPP are likely to have an overall environmental benefit; (!)
(c) the clearance and conversion is unlikely detract substantially from the TNVC
(d) the clearance and conversion is unlikely to detract substantially from the conservation values in the vicinity of the threatened of the TNVC.(?)

Again, can anyone imagine a TNVC surviving these loopholes as interpreted by the FPA?

The bill also neatly disposes of the FPA’s powers or obligations to prosecute illegal destruction of threatened vegetation, or to prevent the profiting from such activities.

There is a parallel bill amending the Nature Conservation Act, the Nature Conservation Amendment (Threatened Native Vegetation Communities) Bill, which subordinates it to the travesty described above by blocking the payment of compensation for conservation on private land where the FP Act or Code would not protect the vegetation. As I interpret it, the effect is likely to be that no vegetation will be conserved that the loggers don’t want conserved.

It seems that both bills could be combined into one that simply says “Gunns rules, OK?'” and defines ” Tasmanian Parliament” as “a kind of crude charade”.

John Hayward