JOHN HAYWARD
I’ve recently been in a legal battle which likewise involved the logging industry and the Judicial Review Act, though not the PMAA…
… All of these silver bullets bounced off for reasons I cannot logically articulate. As a lay person, I can only speculate that Tasmanian forestry enjoys some of the traditional powers of the King.
Forestry on the throne
Though an atrocious affront to jurisprudence, the PMAA is just another symptom of a much broader malignancy in the body politic.
I’ve recently been in a legal battle which likewise involved the logging industry and the Judicial Review Act, though not the PMAA. The loggers got the same win.
There were multiple JRA issues in the case, meaning dodgy administrative decisions, which I hoped would be silver bullets for us.
There was the “permitted” forestry use in the planning scheme, which opened up all the municipality’s rural land to logging despite having been imposed without public notice, as was required by the LUPA Act Land Use Planning and Approvals Act 1993.
The planning commission had also changed the forestry use on 2 blocks in a rural residential zone where forestry was prohibited to an effective “permitted”use, potentially opening the entire Rural Residential zone to the same change. The Forest Practices Board had demanded this change with a threat of legal action, but which inexplicably applied only to two landowners who wanted plantations.
The local council had approved logging on high sensitivity karst despite receiving expert advice that it shouldn’t be approved without expert advice. The council passed over the acknowledged expert on Tasmanian karst in favour of a geologist working for the engineering firm doing the council’s draft planning scheme, but even he advised that it shouldn’t be approved without professional investigation of the karst system. The council approved the logging nonetheless on the grounds that investigating whether it might pollute of damage the karst system would be too expensive. The judge denied the leading karst expert the right to present evidence at trial on the grounds that the council had not asked the expert for advice.
The council approving the logging included a logger whose mother admittedly stood to benefit directly from the logging approval. The council ignored objections about his participation in the vote. The Local Government Board had sat on a complaint about this until it was out of time, then claimed the DPP had advised them that a prosecution was unlikely to be successful, but declined to provide any reasons.
All of these silver bullets bounced off for reasons I cannot logically articulate. As a lay person, I can only speculate that Tasmanian forestry enjoys some of the traditional powers of the King.
