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  Tasmanian Fire Sale February 9, 2003 Reporter :Graham Davis Producer : Nick Rushworth  Reporter: Graham DavisProducer: Nick Rushworth A new species of green activist has joined the long-running battle to save Tasmania's majestic native trees. Erika Ford’s favoured weapon isn’t the sit-in but her stockbroker -- using her shares in Australia’s biggest logging company to press for better forestry practices. Ford’s first corporate foray was against the Jabiluka uranium mine in the Northern Territory. Now her sights are turned on Gunns, the hugely profitable Tasmanian monopoly converting vast areas of native forests into tax-effective plantations. "They’re saying on the one hand, oh yes this is something that we should be protecting that’s very special, but in practical terms they’re doing bugger all," she says. Already Ford’s holding in Gunn’s has produced more than just a handsome financial dividend – sparing a brace of trees as tall as lighthouses. It is – she says – just the start. "I love to make money, I really do," she says, "but not at any cost." To many Tasmanians, what’s at issue in this debate isn’t new – the wisdom of the state staking its future on a billion dollar industry employing just eight thousand people. But what will startle many mainlanders is the scale of it all… just how much of the state’s native forests has been cleared for plantations – more than 60,000 hectares in the past five years alone, much of it old growth dating back long before white settlement. The vast bulk - more than 90 percent - winds up as woodchip. Thousands of tonnes an hour are shredded into little pieces 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Then it is shipped offshore to make paper. But this is not a story about whether the forests should be logged nor about the scale of the woodchip trade. Whether you’re for or against forestry in Tasmania, all of the parties have signed on to codes of practice to ensure that the state’s trees remain a renewable resource. The nation has entrusted this precious resource to a state that allows that loggers to regulate themselves. And what passes for regulation is essentially no regulation at all. What’s happened at Reedy Marsh in recent weeks raises serious questions not just about the conduct of Gunns but about the conduct of the statutory body that’s meant to regulate forestry in Tasmania – the state’s Forest Practices Board. It was a plan submitted by Forest Practices Officers employed by Gunns to send the bulldozers in to fell native trees at Reedy Marsh and establish a plantation. The problem is they’re rare and endangered forest communities. Gunns had been told so by the Board’s botanist - but its two officers didn’t mention them in the application to log. As local activist Andrew Ricketts puts it: "If you had self regulation on the highways and you were driving down the road at 120 kilometres per hour would you pull yourself over and stop and write yourself out a ticket?" Click here for the full transcript. |
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