Bob Burton
After Bill Manning blew the whistle on Tasmanian logging practices in 2003, the Forest Practices Authority turned to a PR consultancy for advice. Bob Burton investigates.
Stakeholder logging
Bill Manning was an unlikely whistleblower. After working for 32 years with the government forestry agency, Forestry Tasmania, and its predecessor, and then with the logging practices regulator, the Forest Practices Board (FPB), there wasn’t much he didn’t know about the Tasmanian logging industry.
After media reports circulated, such as on Channel Nine’s Sunday program, that he had sought to blow the whistle on the lack of enforcement of logging standards, he was subpoenaed to appear before a Senate inquiry into plantation forests. In opening what was to be more than two hours of evidence, Manning launched a blistering attack on the mismanagement of the state’s forests. FPB, he stated, was ‘a rubber stamp to be used by industry and government’ and then ‘doubly abused as the mouthpiece for defending the most appalling forest practices’.
The federal government’s Regional Forest Agreement (RFA), Manning argued, had simply weakened the Forest Practices Code and led to the ‘corruption of forest management in Tasmania such that there is no enforcement of this weakened code of forest practice’. He added that the RFA had led to the ‘decimation’ of vital habitat of Tasmanian endangered species, and had also created ‘a culture within the Tasmanian forestry industry of bullying, cronyism, secrecy and lies’. Manning’s evidence created a crisis of legitimacy for the FPB.
The following year, the FPB, which was later rebadged and reorganised as the Forest Practices Authority (FPA), turned to the PR consultant, Katherine Teh-White, who runs her own Melbourne-based consultancy company, Futureye. The FPA, Futureye explained on its website, had been ‘widely recognised as a best-practice example of the contemporary regulatory theory of “co-regulation”‘. The only concession to the nature of the problem was that public controversy ‘had led to calls for higher levels of independence and transparency in forest regulation’.
Documents obtained by the author under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that Teh-White’s pitch to the FPA board in February 2004 was far blunter, stating that the agency was seen as ‘ineffective, corrupt and controlled by friends of the forest industry’. While the board wanted to be seen as an independent and tough regulator, and therefore ease pressure on the forest industry for more substantial reforms, it was constrained by a lack of funding, a reliance on companies self-policing their own logging operations, and its own timid approach to enforcement. Futureye noted that the board didn’t have provision for substantial fines nor did it ‘often prosecute breaches of the Code unless they are “serious”‘.
In a September 2004 proposal to develop a communications plan, Futureye’s Vickie Burkinshaw, who had worked as the PR person for the Body Shop in Australia, suggested that the board needed a ‘pro-active media relations strategy’. For $29 000, she proposed Futureye would conduct half a dozen interviews with selected stakeholders, run a one day workshop, and spend a week preparing a communications plan. The pitch proposed that one-day media training workshops would cost $3500 for Teh-White and $3000 for Burkinshaw. In case the FPB thought the cost of the workshops was a bit steep, Futureye noted that after six workshops, they would throw in another one for ‘free’.
Even though the organisation’s crisis originated from the criticism of an internal whistleblower and a wide range of individuals and groups, the consultants determined that only those who would ‘want to be involved in a Community Advisory Panel and directly negotiate with senior managers, ministerial advisers or Ministers’ would be canvassed for their views. Nonetheless, the FPB liked the proposal and signed up for the initial workshop, interviews with eight selected stakeholders, and a one-and-a-half day workshop for its newly-appointed directors.
Which stakeholders were consulted remains a mystery, as the FPA refuses to disclose details, but The Wilderness Society wasn’t one that Futureye and the board were interested in talking to.
In a summary of the December 2005 workshop with the board members, Futureye suggested that the highest priority issues to address included ‘self-regulation—conflict of interest and cynicism of system’ and ‘breaches compliance with code’. Those consulted in the review felt that there should be strict enforcement of any breaches of the code. ‘They believe the regulator is pro-forestry’, Futureye noted, and that the agency was ‘viewed as spin doctors and misleading the public’. To help rectify this, the consultants suggested that they needed to acknowledge their prior sins to indicate that ‘you are clearly taking into account past (eg Manning allegations)’. They also suggested that an immediate priority was to set about building a positive relationship with the media and ‘hear their concerns’. In their eyes, media that were more receptive to the FPA would help reduce the chances of community ‘outrage’.
Futureeye noted that forest industry representatives thought of the forest practices code ‘not as a cage within which it should sit, but a set of guidelines some of which are more serious than others’. Instead, the logging industry wanted there to be plenty of flexibility when it came to enforcing code standards, proposing that there should be some provisions that were deemed standards that they were ‘able to collaborate on’.
If the industry were inflexible, it was an issue that the agency would have to confront if it were to avoid a repeat of the crisis that led to Futureye’s consultancy. Instead, the agency acquiesced to the intransigent logging industry, agreeing to consider which elements of the code were to be in the regulatory ‘cage’ to be enforced, and which were to be subject to ‘collaboration’.
Despite an expensive consultancy, little had changed. Nor did those outside the authority see that the PR contract had much impact. ‘I can’t tell the difference’, said The Wilderness Society’s Tasmanian Campaign Coordinator, Geoff Law. Even one of the stakeholders who provided confidential input into the review is uncertain if it made any significant difference. ‘It is true that they are easier to talk with but has it made any difference on the ground yet? Not that I can see’, said the Tasmanian Conservation Trust’s Alistair Graham.
This is a slightly abridged extract from Bob Burton’s book, Inside Spin: The dark underbelly of the PR industry, published by Allen & Unwin, $24.95, ISBN 9781741752175. Inside Spin is available from booksellers or Allen & Unwin. It is also available as an ebook.
