In the week beginning on the 19 June the State Government will likely introduce its IGA enabling legislation into the Parliament in order to make a deadline of 30 June 2012 to capture the extra $100 million Commonwealth funds for regional development. Last week in Estimates hearings we were told that even if the signatories to the peace deal hadn’t agreed on the detail, the legislation will be tabled ‘without the numbers in it’ – i.e. the defined areas for forest protection and changes to any wood supply agreements. These secret roundtable talks are ongoing and include the so called ‘durability clauses’ that will compel forest activists groups to stop protesting in forests and in international markets.
The legislation will require passage through both Houses of Parliament.
Despite the 2,500 pages of the Independent Verification Group reports the final haggling is concentrated on the existing wood supply contracts to supply peeler billets and sawlogs through Forestry Tasmania and the basic realisation that the MIS-plantations is useless timber for transiting the forestry industry out of mature-age native forests. The majority of these plantations were planted with one end use envisaged – the Tamar Valley Pulp Mill. Tasmania’s monoculture plantations – predominantly of Eucalyptus nitens – were destined for short-rotation harvesting for pulp and have virtually no value as structural lumber, or even as fire wood!
The reality now dawning on the ENGOs is that any transition out of State Public Forests with current contracts in place and insufficient hard wood plantations for structural timber, will require that native forest logging continues. Grubbing out the useless pulp trees and starting to replant these plantations with long-rotation trees for structural timber may still require a 30-50 year transition plan.
It is unlikely that the forestry signatories will agree to statutory protection of 570,000 hectares of ‘high conservation value’ forest on Crown Land; around200,000 ha might be their upper limit. Any higher allocation would require the annual Ta Ann wood supply contract to be reduced substantially and that means more compensation pay outs. In addition, demand for quality hardwood sawlogs would likely increase logging in forests on free-hold land in eastern and northern Tasmania. (Conversation of private forests was completely left out of the IGA framework.)
Someone has to begin a discussion on these difficult issues because currently the ENGOs just won’t engage.
