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24th July 2007

The following article was originally published by City News ( www.citynews.com.au) on the 18th of July, and is reproduced here with the permission of the author and of City news, which we both thank.

Growing public concern along the forest path by Tanya Davies

GUNNS’ proposed pulp mill near George Town, Tasmania, has the potential to become a replay of WA’s "pressure cooker", according to Dr Judith Ajani, from the Fenner School of Environment and Society at ANU.
At the end of the ’90s public consciousness clashed with native logging and turned to violence when Wattle Camp, a female protestors’ site in WA, was raided by balaclava-clad forest workers brandishing baseball bats, sledgehammers and axes.
Dr Ajani warns: "There has been a shift in peoples’ attitude. Climate change is now of great concern to ordinary people, not just so-called environmentalists."
Forests have made the election shortlist in two of the last four Federal elections. "Australia’s long-unresolved forest conflict has been the make-or-break factor in Federal elections for the last few decades, with both parties often arguing that the four-decade-old forest conflict has no practical solution," she says. "They are wrong."
Greens’ Senator Bob Brown agrees. Speaking of Gunns’ proposal to build the $1.4bn pulp mill he said: "The mill’s direct impact will revolt voters not just in Bass, but elsewhere across the nation."
Gunns is Tasmania’s largest hardwood (native) producer, operating three veneer factories, (in Tasmania and NZ), five sawmills and four woodchip export ports in Tasmania. It exports eucalyptus woodchips produced from sawmilling residues and residual pulpwood, "a small amount" of which comes from old-growth forests.
Executive chairman John Gay says: "We have worked with the world’s top engineers to design the mill, we contracted Australia’s best toxicologists to analyse any environmental effects, we engaged a leading university to model economic impacts and we have employed international pulp experts to join the Gunns team on a permanent basis."
Gunns owns 185,000 hectares of freehold land and manages in excess of 110,000 hectares of plantations. It employs about 1700 people and has a turnover around $700 million a year.
Forest ecologists advocate 200-year rotations of native trees to ensure the self-regenerating capacity of native forests for biodiversity conservation. The same time disparity exists between woodchips and water and woodchips and carbon sinks. However, eucalypts take just 10-15 years to provide logs that can be woodchipped.
Gunns argue that the ability to dispose of residues is a responsible use of a resource and an effective means of adding greater value to the timber harvested from Tasmania’s forests claiming: "If not used for this purpose these residues would be burnt as a waste product from sawmilling."
But native forest woodchipping accounts for 80-85 per cent of the log cut in Tasmania. In Eden, NSW, another primary site of native logging, 90 per cent of saw cut goes to woodchipping.
The profits on exported woodchips are big. According to Dr Ajani, sawmilling props up the woodchipping industry with policy being driven to do so for decades.
Native forest woodchip exporters rarely report their profits, instead integrating the information with other business activities such as sawmilling and pulp production. Dr Ajani reports that Eden’s South East Fibre Exports, almost entirely a woodchipping exporter, has averaged a 34 per cent profit over the past 30 years. Most businesses, she explains, enjoy only 10 or 15 per cent. "I see no fundamental reason why native forest chip-exporters in other Australian States have not enjoyed similar returns," she says.
Their reasons for keeping quiet about profits are open to interpretation. Dr Ajani suggests an eagerness to keep new competitors out of the market as well as avoiding more bad publicity in an already unpopular business.
But what of the future?
"Ministers need to take public concern seriously," she says. "Queensland’s [Premier] Peter Beattie and WA’s [former Premier] Richard Court have nicely positioned their States for this future. They did not follow a formula: there is none for long and deeply entrenched political problems where each State has its own historically based character and style.
"Once political leaders decide to face their forest problem truly, they quickly cut through layers of misperceptions and excuses for non-actions and package up multilayered problem-solving strategies with great deftness. Australia’s three south-eastern states all have this path to travel."
Tanya Davies is a local freelance writer who specialises in writing about the environment, and health and wellbeing.


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