For the past decade, Australian governments have hidden behind Regional Forest Agreements (RFAs) to avoid having to make decisions about forests and the wood products industry. It would be hard to find a worse example of policy failure, political cowardice, mismanagement and waste.

But the times are changing, forcing forests back onto the national agenda however much the old parties wish it away. Here are just a few of the converging crises surrounding the issue.

1. Forest activists are defending some of the most beautiful forests in the country. In Tasmania, Premier Bartlett ordered the bulldozers into the Upper Florentine, a magnificent old growth forest that even notorious pro-logger Premier Lennon didn’t touch. In Victoria, Premier Brumby is destroying forests at Brown Mountain that have been conservation icons since the 1970s – he was forced to declare a two-week moratorium by the discovery of four threatened species. In NSW, Premier Rees presided over logging of koala habitat near Bermagui in the state’s south-east and has more planned. In WA, the line in the sand is Chester forest, not far from Margaret River. In each case, blockades have been established and community support has rallied behind the forest defenders. Across the country, scores of people have been arrested.

2. Legal action is intensifying. The last five years have seen Senator Bob Brown’s landmark Wielangta Forest case challenging the Tasmanian RFA (www.on-trial.info) and major actions by the Wilderness Society and Lawyers for Forests against Gunns’ proposed pulpmill. In December 2004, Gunns sued 20 environmental organisations and citizens with a $6.4 million writ, just one day before they applied for approval to build their pulp mill (www.gunns20.org). In January 2009, Gunns sued another 13 environmentalists who have in turn lodged a counter claim alleging that Gunns made misleading representations when it claimed that no old growth forest and no old growth logs would be used in its pulp mill.

3. Pressure to protect threatened species like the Swift Parrot is growing. This migratory bird breeds only in Tasmania, preferring extensive areas of old growth forest close to abundantly flowering bluegums. Forestry Tasmania’s RFA logging is the single most important threat to the survival of the species and there is strong evidence that it is already sliding from ‘endangered’ to ‘critically endangered’ (www.greeninstitute.com.au). The RFA is protecting the logging, not the parrot – an unsustainable situation, replicated around the country wherever RFA logging and threatened species are in conflict.

4. In the mid-1990s, the looming glut of softwood sawlogs presented the opportunity for governments to solve the conflict over native forest logging by moving into plantations. It was rejected. Today, 80% of our sawn timber and wood panels are made using plantations and 80-95% of the cut from Australia’s main native forest logging regions is woodchipped.

Now the looming glut of hardwood plantation pulplogs again offers governments a choice. According to the government’s own figures, the pulplog supply from Australia’s hardwood plantations will leap from the current cut of around four million cubic metres per year to 14 million within the next year: more than double the volume woodchipped from Australia’s native forests each year. This is the result of flawed policy, supporting tree-planting through managed investment schemes attracting over $2 billion in public funding via tax deductions. Now the managed investment companies are in severe financial difficulty, with wood they can’t sell. Australia’s existing plantations can supply virtually all of our wood needs – the only barrier to an economically superior and lower conflict industry is native forest logging.

5. As markets for native forest woodchips decline, the industry is getting set to move into fuelwood and biomass. In WA, Griffin Bluwaters has won a tender for 250,000 tonnes per year of native forest wood to burn in its Collie coal-fired power station. Forest furnaces are on the drawing board in Tasmania, including one as part of Gunns’ proposed pulpmill; and southern NSW at SEFE (the Eden woodchip mill). Forestry Tasmania has exported native forest logs as fuelwood and has committed to supply up to 600,000 tonnes per year to Gunns subject to a trial finishing in mid-2009. NSW conservationists have already succeeded in persuading Country Energy to reject ‘dead koala’ electricity; electricity retailers around the country will be asked to follow suit.

6. Native forest logging and the establishment of vast plantation monocultures both result in a dried up landscape as young rapidly growing trees suck up water. Old forests use relatively little water and play a role in promoting rainfall. Unlike other water users, plantation growers and native forest loggers do not have to pay for the water they intercept – an unsustainable situation in a drying climate.

The climate crisis

Overlaying all is the climate crisis. Again, government has got it wrong, allocating native forests for wood production and plantations for carbon storage instead of the other way around. Under the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme – now rejected by most of the conservation movement – growers of plantations established since 1990 on previously cleared land could choose to join the scheme and claim carbon credits. It turns out that, at quite low carbon prices, it would be more economic for a plantation-owner to grow carbon than wood. Meanwhile, native forest logging and clearing can continue as a major source of greenhouse gas emissions without penalty.

The climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis, the water crisis, and the looming plantation wood glut all lead to the same conclusion: it’s time for governments to throw out last century’s failed policies and apply some fresh thinking. Keep native forests intact for carbon storage, biodiversity and water. Encourage revegetation where it will be permanent and enhance landscape resilience without compromising food production. Grow trees for wood supply, preferably with domestic processing for regional investment and jobs, and preferably integrated into a sustainable agricultural land management regime once the existing monocultures are logged. Get rid of tax breaks for plantations, whether for wood production or carbon storage (so-called ‘carbon sinks’). Establish a large fund to look after native forests and other natural ecosystems in perpetuity (another regional employment generator) and to pay for the transition out of native forest logging and clearing.

It’s not hard!

Margaret Blakers is Director of the Green Institute. <www.greeninstitute.com.au>, <margaret.blakers@bigpond.com>.

More reading: The Forest Wars, Judith Ajani, MUP, 2007.