Media release – Guy Barnett, Minister for Resources, 6 July 2022
Expanding Tasmania’s sustainable forestry industry through ActivAcre
Tasmania has the ideal environment and a world-class reputation for our sustainable forestry industry and this has been further strengthened with the launch of ActivAcre.
ActivAcre is a new and exciting initiative for Tasmania, which will involve future-focused land management by integrating forestry into farmland that is unsuitable for traditional agricultural production.
ActivAcre will work with Tasmanian farmers to lease farmland to plant the right trees in the right place for the right purpose.
Tasmanian farmers, through ActivAcre, will have the opportunity to lease their less productive farmland into a reliable source of income that will be unique and meet the needs of individual landowners.
This investment, by New Forests and delivered by one of Tasmania’s forestry leaders SFM, will strengthen our state’s ecology and economy by improving environmental outcomes, increasing the state’s ultimate renewable resource, and creating as well as securing regional and rural jobs.
Through purposeful planting, farmers can improve their productivity and resilience, positive environmental outcomes can continue to be achieved, and when harvested the wood product will replace carbon intensive materials and plastics with natural, recyclable and renewable products.
Sustainable forestry helps to store carbon and clean up the world’s atmosphere and the Tasmanian Government is proud support this innovative approach which will help achieve both goals and also help Tasmanian farmers.
Media release – Bob Brown Foundation, 6 July 2022
OUTRAGE AT ROCKLIFF’S EXPANSION OF FOREST DESTRUCTION
Bob Brown Foundation has expressed outrage at Forestry Tasmania’s newly released three-year logging plans. Logging is planned for the World Heritage value ancient rainforests in Tasmania’s takayna / Tarkine, 500-year-old eucalyptus trees, habitat for the critically endangered swift parrots, and some of the oldest forests in the central highlands, near Tasmania’s popular Cradle Mountain and Lake St Clair World Heritage Areas, are targeted.
“Tasmania’s new three-year logging plan is the worst we have ever seen. Logging plans have been released for native forests that should be left standing in this climate emergency. Logging in habitat for rare and critically endangered wildlife habitat, rainforests and vital carbon storehouses are in the latest logging plans,” Bob Brown Foundation’s Campaign Manager Jenny Weber said.
“Flattening and incinerating native forests is Tasmania’s worst source of polluting greenhouse gases. Many of the woodchips and logs being ripped out are going to China and Malaysia for a pittance. While the Rockliff government is destroying our ancient forests and wildlife, it is legislating draconian anti-protest laws to jail Tasmanians who peacefully defend them. Anti-protest laws will not silence our actions to defend native forests,” Jenny Weber said.
“By signing off on this logging plan, Premier Rockliff is wilfully ignoring the unfolding climate and biodiversity crises. This Premier is responsible for a taxpayer-funded industry that costs the state millions of dollars each year, removal of habitat for wildlife that have nowhere else to go and increased fire risk in our communities,” Bob Brown Foundation’s Campaigner Erik Hayward said.
Forestry Tasmania’s new three-year plan includes:
• More than 15,534 hectares of native forests slated for logging in the next 3 years.
• 59 km of new roads across Tasmania’s native forests to be built using taxpayer money.
• Areas of giant old-growth eucalypts, the tallest flowering plants in the world, in the Huon and Styx valleys.
• Old forests surrounding the World Heritage areas in Wentworth Hills, Lake St Clair and between Walls of Jerusalem and Great Western Tiers, forests that have been carved out of wild places to suit the loggers.
• Logging areas of the glacial refugia forests in the Blue Tier.
“Being hit hard are areas in the far south of Tasmania where swift parrot breeding grounds have been subject to relentless and indiscriminate clear-felling, pushing the fastest parrot on Earth to the brink of extinction. Swift parrot habitat remains in future logging plans and habitat is being logged in the Eastern Tiers right now. When the parrots return in the coming months, they will be searching out the last remaining hollows and feeding areas among logged habitat. Logging is the critical threat to its fragile existence,” Bob Brown Foundation’s Campaigner Erik Hayward said.
“Tasmania is still losing vast ecosystems to logging in state forests that are kilometres behind Forestry Tasmania locked gates. Logging that is defended by an industry defying all science and logic and ignorant of the critical need for conservation of all remaining native forests,” Erik Hayward said.
Ben Marshall
July 6, 2022 at 16:01
As a fellow writer, I’d like to congratulate Guy Barnett’s PR hack, clearly on secondment from the corporate forestry sector, on a brilliant piece of spin.
The often unsustainable forestry practices occurring across most of Tasmania, especially that which is removing whatever remaining ‘native forest’ STT and corporate investors can get their hands on, isn’t enough for a government focused on the needs of corporate shareholders, so a new branding exercise – “activacre” – is launched to encourage farmers to clear any annoying and ‘unproductive’ remnants of native forest on their lands, and replacing it with sterile plantation timber.
In the fantasy world in which this is ‘sustainable land use’ and ‘improving environmental outcomes’, the Minister’s PR hack has crafted a narrative that will have the gullible believing black is white and night is day.
In the real world, in which remnants of former forests form ever more tenuous and shrinking patches for our native birds, animals, insects and flora to exist in, any bit of ‘bush’ becomes a valuable haven and refuge.
Clearing forests and replanting with commercial plantation is the opposite of ‘storing carbon’, though our current State government, in lock-step with forestry’s fiction writers, are claiming ‘new’ forest stores carbon quicker. The science says otherwise, but our government, still paying lip-service to action on climate, pays no mind to what a few greenie boffins reckon.
When (Un)Sustainable Timbers Tasmania clears regenerating rainforest and ‘valueless’ native forests, they’re not just cutting down trees and replacing them – they’re destroying a working system that supports myriads of species, and which also supports us. Plantation timber supports only its investors.
We need a sustainable forestry industry, one that works and plans and is regulated according to the primary needs of action on climate and biodiversity. With politicians replacing policy with corporate PR, we’ll get nothing.
Rather than paying farmers to clear more bush, we need to support farmers practicing regenerative planting on hilltops, along fence-lines, and especially along waterways. The farmers will benefit from the pollinators while retaining more moisture in the soil, less run-off, and shelter for crops and livestock. Commercial timbers will drive out almost every species and dry out the land, and encourage weeds.
From a Minister for Water who refuses to even read the report on the dire state of our rivers, and who instead wants to extract and pollute them even more, this new ‘initiative’ on behalf of the forestry industry is just par for the course.