After a decade or more of acrimonious and increasingly divisive debate, conservation groups and the forest industry now have something in common … a lack of credibility among the bulk of Australian people. That has been very helpful for the Government. Having received opprobrium from sides, the Government says it must have struck the right balance.
That is yet to be shown, but it is at least clear that the Government’s forestry strategy this year is an improvement on the fiasco last year which was almost an open slather for wood-chipping. Now there is greater emphasis on plantations and value-adding through encouragement of paper production in Australia to replace imports.
Australia’s forest industries have not been very cleverly managed in the past. The trend has been away from saw logs to woodchip. The woodchip industry has not been a high-value added industry and has had to compete with other nations who have been even sillier than Australia in under-pricing or misusing a major natural resource. In some of those countries there has been an absence of management and extensive corruption, unlike in Australia, making the competition more difficult (at least in the short-term until their resource is squandered). In short, we have sold some of our forest too cheaply and sold some of our forest that should not have been sold at all. We have sought short-term gain and ignored long-term interests … like a profligate youth blowing the family fortune.
Naturally enough, those hangers-on who profit from the profligate youth resist any move to mend his ways, even if it may be in their long term interests. Thus the forestry workers and companies who supply the woodchip companies oppose any reform to sustainability. Tragically, the forest workers are the ones who will suffer most. Having been lured into unsustainable activities, some will inevitably lose their jobs … sooner or later.
That being the case, it is better that the move to a more sustainable industry happens sooner and in a managed way. The Government’s latest proposals seem to take that approach … certainly they are closer to it than earlier efforts which pandered one extreme and then the other according to what the Government or a key minister saw as the political imperative at the time.
On the other side of the debate, extreme elements of the conservation movement appear to want the cessation of logging and woodchipping. But there is room for both industries in the Australia in a managed way. Woodchipping can be a worthwhile adjunct to the saw-log industry and has a place with both plantation forest and on rotation in some native forests, provide a significant and representative amount of native forest is preserved. Once again, the Government’s latest statement appears to be going in that direction.
It appears that the Government has recognised that there is nothing to be gained by appeasing either side. Whatever it does, one side or perhaps both will engage in campaigns in marginal seats to punish it for not meeting its demands. There is a poetic justice in seeing a strategy devised by Labor in earlier elections being turned upon it in the next, because if the Government had taken a long-term more balanced view earlier it would not have happened.