The Victorian state government is going to start handing out long term 20 year logging licences, and we all shake our collective heads. What a madness and why? Because the minister Peter Walsh is from the Nationals and apparently his spin is that what he wants to do with this will provide “greater resource certainty” for the timber industry. As if that matters at all.
The five year plans had the timber industry cutting down trees with the same certainty they did when longer contracts were available, and 20 year contracts will only cause grief for the people of the state when they decide, as they must, that this malevolent harvest must cease before any contracts have run their allocated term. The current minister, reading from the Liberal sheet of excuses, that the previous Brumby government neglected the industry, and stifled investment is quite incorrect.
According to the Department of Primary industry figures here [http://www.dpi.vic.gov.au/forestry/about-forestry/victorias-native-timber-industry-2011]:
[quote]The gross value of log production of the Victorian native timber industry in 2008-09 was $131 million, accounting for around 23 per cent of Australia’s native timber industry.[end quote]
That hardly appears like a stifling amount, especially when we see that this was 23% of the native timber harvested in Australia. That looks rather bad enough, and this from 5 year contracts and labelled as a sustainable timber industry?
So what does a sustainable timber industry really mean:
- that the amount of timber taken in a year is replaced in that same year in another location one presumes. By allocating more land to be retained as forest
- that the forest is replenished as it was and no more areas are denuded than are increased elsewhere
- that the understorey that helps to maintain and sustain the forests is also replaced at the same rate that it's destroyed
- •that the native animals dispossessed and killed are also replaced and replenished elsewhere, [because they are not transported to new country where there is no competition from humans or other animals, birds and reptiles]
- that the native animal habitat is replaced in another location is just as fecund and fruitful as the area where the latest years harvest and destruction was perpetrated?
If this is correct then we have nothing to worry about. It does seem fanciful and its certain this is not happening.
A long term timber harvesting contract is pretty precarious at the moment. Because if the trend continues as it seems to be heading, to try to make the environment receive as much consideration even if not action as it should, or even more than it has in the past. The Victorian government and the minister administrating and pushing for this, is going to have to live up to their promise of considering compensating the industry if their licences are cancelled, as they will be, with tax payers money.
The madness of this government is well known. They are all for the icing on the cake and care not how thick that might be even if the cake beneath it cannot support the lavish destruction they pile onto it.
