* First and foremost, the bill needs to be adjourned. Locals are still not happy about the land which was included in the Eastern Strzeleckis in 1993. They were not informed then and since have only been shown a VPC map (displayed at the Foster Agricultural Show) which colours in the entire 40,000 hectares of the Strzelecki State Forest vested in them as either softwood or hardwood plantation. Locals know that this is clearly false.
These 1998 updated maps haven't been in circulation long enough for the public to gain access to them and put forward their comments. Local grievances regarding the inclusion of 20,000 hectares of native forest have so far been ignored by Forestry and politicians. Responses to letters have been misleading and irrelevant. The new amendment Bill adds extra land to the VPC's estate and divests 45 tiny areas which are mostly roads. No public forest has been divested; there has been no compromise.
* The Government's original intention was to create the Victorian Softwoods Corporation (Hansard: Coleman, 7/5/93). The inclusion of hardwood plantation and native bush has cast a shadow over the spirit of the act and will continue to create ongoing problems.
* The amendment bill contains no mention of the actual amount of hectares in question and never mentions the possibility of non-plantation land being included in the VPC package. It is quite possible that most politicians have no idea that so much native bush is in VPC hands, and that the VPC deal with anything more than pine trees.
* Non-plantation forest, unsuccessful plantation and inappropriately placed plantations should also be divested immediately.
Failing this, any public native bush that is not divested from the VPC must not be logged.
Failing this, any public native bush that is not divested from the VPC must be managed under the Public section of the Forest Code of Practice, not the private section.
* New plantations must only be established on cleared, private farm land. Forest, regardless of vegetation type or land status, must not be sacrificed to establish plantation.
* Public native bush must remain subject to the Forests Act, the CALP Act, the Water Act, the C,F&L Act.
* There are dozens of levels of protection that can be placed on public forests, from numerous types of reserves through to special management zones, through to the Public section of the Forest Code of Practice. The least stringent and least enforceable level of all is the Private section of the Forest code of practice VPC land is all managed under this Private section of the Forest code of practice even though they are on PUBLIC LAND. Local Shire Councils are now expected to police the code, even though they have no experience or extra funding to do so.
* Section 27A(b) The definition of "plantation purposes" is highly dubious, as it includes the "taking and conversion of forest produce" - not necessarily plantation produce.
* It is easier to build in safeguards to protect the integrity of public land. Once it becomes private, that control is lost. We believe that public forests are better kept in the public realm. The clause in the amended Bill which gives the Government the ability to confer freehold on the licensed land must be repealed.
* Myth: that there is one single Code of Forest Practice - in fact there are two separate codes - one relates to public land, while the other relates to private land. The VPC is allowed to operate under the private section of the code - perhaps because the State was mistaken in thinking that all VPC land is plantation. (This is enshrined in the proposed Part 2, Clause 8, 27E)
* Sale of so much public land needs to be fully justified to the current owners - the Victorian public. The mooted 168,000 ha. amounts to nearly 1% of Victoria's total land mass.
* 27I falsely talks about all the vested land as plantation. It suggests that licencees will be penalised for not using the land as plantation. This will not protect native bush.
* Definition of Native Forest The VPC announced last year that as of July 1 1997, they would cease to log in native bush. This is a very deceptive statement. The VPC's definition of native forest is different to everyone else's. DM Evans (Hansard,26/5/93) quite rightly stated, "Victoria has two classes of forest, native and plantation". In essence this means that if a forest isn't plantation, it has to be native bush no matter how old it is, or what vegetation type it may carry. The VPC, however, do not recognise regrowth or scrub as native forest. Needless to say, the VPC define most of their non- plantation forest as either regrowth or scrub.
* There are many references in Parliament to the New Zealand plantation role model, which Australia should supposedly emulate. So much for the role model. After privatisation, NZ's plantations moved from a state monopoly to a corporate monopoly, and the fortunes of the country's entire plantation estate rides the whims of speculators with no specific forestry knowledge, traded in cities like stocks and shares - and like shares are subject to potential booms and busts, which have little to do with the actual value of the wood.
* Local input has been carefully avoided as if it would be to the detriment of the timber industry. On the contrary, if the vesting of land in the VPC had been carried out transparently, locals input would have helped alleviate the conflict.
*Plantation forestry may be in conflict with other land uses and goals - chemical use may not be welcome or advisable; harvest rates of less than 80 years may conflict with the new catchment authorities obligations to water production and quality and their biodiversity brief and local Shires' commitment to the environment, tourism and recreation.
*This bill allows for "the direct granting of freehold title" to the licensee, (Explanatory memorandum, 27G) - This clause must be scrapped. The bill also provides for "perpetual licences" (Part 1 Preliminary 1. (ii), and the cessation of "all rights, easements and privileges" held by the public [p.4, Part 2, 8E 1(b)]) This heavy handed language must be rejected.
*All the existing plans and the hundreds of new 1998 plans need to be scrutinised carefully for as long as it takes - this may take years. The bill should not be voted on before all these plans are fully understood by all stakeholders. The Central Plan Office displays black and white copies of colour coded maps, making them impossible to understand.
*Removal of reservations. A total of 51 crown allotments across the state will lose their reserve status. When this happened to two allotments in 1993 it resulted in a heated exchange between VNPA and the State Government. The VNPA were eventually placated with reassurances that these two allotments were not going to set a precedent.
* 8H(2) calls for the State to disregard the 'subject to divestment' clause in VPC map notations, tying up land that was previously only provisionally vested, and making it even more difficult for public and Commonwealth Government input in the RFA process for these areas. This has a direct bearing on the future of the Strzelecki State Forest. Much of the VPC land in the Strzeleckis was made "subject to divestment" for a good reason - it isnt plantation. In this clause, the word "disregarded" must be replaced with the phrase "divested immediately"
* In 1997, the VPC applied to the Government to build a woodchip mill. Local newspapers suggested that it was to be located here at Port Welshpool. We acknowledge that logging in native bush is still necessary as an albeit primitive way to meet our wood needs, but strongly feel that while 12,000 ha. of Victorian public native bush is clearfelled annually, we should not even consider exporting wood.
* Licensed land ceases to be subject to all or part of: the Water Act; the CALP Act; CF&L Act; the Forest Act; avoids the public section of the Forest Code of Practice; sidesteps the Crown Lands Act; Extractive Industries Act; amends the Local Government Act and the Mineral Resources Development Act, the Petroleum Act, the CFA Act and the Pipelines Act etc.. See pages 5-6 of the Explanatory Memorandum of the Amendment Bill. These changes need to be scrutinised for the public good and their effects on land management.
* Removal of roads: There is an 8 page list of roads to be closed on VPC vested land. In South Gippsland (1.5 pages of the list), these roads are true heritage pieces, examples of a completely different earlier style of narrow, winding forest dirt road. However, where it suits the VPC reserve the right to make new roads.
* This entire situation seems to us to be the result of resource security paranoia: Conservation has never been an impediment to resource security. Increases in reserves and the growth of the conservation movement has coincided with an ever increasing annual timber harvest. The real threat to the industry has always been lack of profitability and cuts to the workforce by centralisation and mechanisation and the ease and efficiency of the export woodchip trade. Despite record levels of harvest, the sawmill workforce has dwindled to half that of 25 years ago. Plenty of resources will (God willing) always remain available for the timber and pulp . The focus should be on better land management, not a tug of war between 'greenies' and 'loggers'. A system of reserves, plantations, carefully controlled access to native bush and low impact management practices - that conservationists, the general public and the timber industry can agree upon - should be implemented, .
* Neither the VPC Act nor the Amendment Bill contain environmental objectives: ie. sustainability objectives nor provisions about managing the potential environmental impacts of establishing, managing or harvesting plantations. There are no regulations governing harvest rates, thus allowing the logging of forest of any age. As the VPC are custodians of public land, the Bill and Act should provide for a separate new Code of Practice that is specifically formulated for public plantations, with the provision for local input into special management prescriptions relevant to each area. Restrictions governing the steepness of slopes should be enforced and not allowed to remain mere recommendations as they presently are under the private section of the Forest Code of Practice.
* Whoever considers buying these licences needs certainty, not controversy. If controversial land is not divested, the value of VPC assets that are to be privatised will decrease. Potential buyers also must be made fully aware that resource security must be accompanied by environmental security and all the responsibilities that this entails.
* The Bill says that licensed land must be used for plantation purposes. Failure to comply can result in a cancellation of a licence with no compensation. In effect the land, once signed, sealed and delivered is being condemned to grow plantations in perpetuity.
This is just absolutely stupid! No scientist we have read believes that this is even possible. Plantations are capable of producing triple the amount of wood as native bush within a similar time frame. Likewise, they use triple the amount of nutrients and water to do so. This cannot be sustained in perpetuity. It is widely acknowledged that a second plantation will be inferior in size and growth rate to the first and so on, and that the effect of regular clearing on understorey species is very serious.
*Short rotation plantations (for the pulp market) exploit the phenomenal growth spurt that young eucalypts put on to establish themselves as the overstorey species. During this phase, a great deal of the water and nutrient in soil is used up. Once established, eucalypts change to become very sparing and well adapted for not-so-rich Australian soils. Continually repeating the Growth-Spurt phase is unsustainable as it is too demanding on soil nutrient and water.
2. REGARDING THE Strzelecki State Forest IN PARTICULAR:
* Exactly a century ago, much of this area was opened up for selection. The steepness and wetness of the terrain proved unsuitable for farming, and the environment was severely damaged in the process. For the last 70 years, the Government, realising its mistake, has been repurchasing the land bit by bit. The decision to sell it again, this time to private timber companies for plantation forestry, is history repeating itself. Intensive tree farming on this land which has already proved unsuitable for agriculture, will inevitably fail and the Government will once again have to repurchase the land.
* No one really knows the long term effect of plantation forestry on soil quality and stability. How many plantations can land produce? How sustainable is it? The regular churning up of the soil will break down its substructure, leach out the nutrients, and cause erosion and changes to hydrology and water quality. In the Eastern Strzeleckis, the effect of high rotation plantation forestry will have serious effects on water production. (Dr John Dargavel has made comments on this) The effect of clearfelling once per century is yet to be fully assessed. The effect of 3 or more clearfellings per century is totally unknown.
* The entire deferred forest area in the Strzelecki State Forest must be divested from the Victorian Plantations Corporation immediately. It is within this deferred forest that the VPC has been logging. Canberra was not aware of this logging even though the deferred forest areas are supposed to be an agreement between the State and Federal Governments.
* Locally, the inclusion of native forest in VPC land has been the main cause of complaint, followed by concerns over the frequency and intensity of logging, and the sheer amount of our state forest vested. From an environmental perspective, 80 -100 years must be considered the minimum rotation rate for a plantation on this sensitive public land. We appreciate the need to continue logging in native bush as a primitive stop gap way to meet our timber needs, however, due to the severe forest depletion experienced in the Strzelecki Ranges and the abundance of plantations in the area, the remaining public native bush must be protected in reserves.
*In other regions, the use of defoliants have been a major concern
* The Eastern Strzeleckis are already contributing more than its fair share toward the Victorian economy through the vast areas of State owned pine plantations as well as, forest owned by Amcor. To include 20,000 hectares of publicly owned native forest in the VPC's package is sloppy and greedy. This forest is the region's last bastion of the mountain ash range, the cool temperate rainforest gullies, habitat for wildlife, forest for recreation and scenery.
* The behaviour of the VPC in the Strzelecki State Forest has not gone unnoticed by the local community. Deferred forest areas have been logged; sites of botanical significance have been logged; a rainforest reserve has been partially logged; roadsides and streamsides have been logged; blackwood and myrtle beech have been logged; slopes over 30¡ have been logged etc.
* The Victorian component of the Regional Forest Agreement has failed to communicate any details of the impending RFA process in Gippsland to locals. People who have registered as interested parties have received no literature. No maps have been sent. The main DNRE office at Traralgon are not distributing RFA material on the Gippsland Region and claim to have no copies of the "Deferred Areas Victoria" booklet. Politicians and DNRE spokespeople have never indicated that a great swathe of VPC vested land in the Strzeleckis is actually a Deferred Forest Area.
* Water catchments must be managed extremely carefully. The most valuable resource from the Strzelecki State Forest is not timber, but water. Water supply catchments should be divested.
* The Strzelecki State Forest is well known for its incredible steepness, its propensity for landslips, heavy rains and soil movement. In the interests of soil conservation, slopes steeper than 20 degrees, regardless of whether they contain Native bush or plantation, must be divested.
* In recognition of the values of the Strzelecki State Forest, a large swathe of the forest was declared a deferred forest area (DFA) by a joint agreement between both Commonwealth and the Victorian Government, giving it temporary reserve status until the outcome of the Regional Forest Agreement for Gippsland is complete. The VPC have chosen to ignore this protection and have been clearfelling hundreds of hectares of deferred forest in at least 12 logging coupes in the last 12 months alone. This Amendment Bill allows this land to be logged, leased or even sold before the RFA process gets under way. This is at odds with the Regional Forest Agreements and their commitment to public participation in the RFA process.
* The VPC and Amcor believe they have the right to swap parcels of public land as if it is their own private property. See Amcor press releases.
* Personally, we would prefer public land to remain public. The facts show quite clearly that most private land in Victoria is cleared, whereas most public land is forested. Obviously, forest is easier to preserve on public land.
If the State feels incapable of managing these forests and plantations, its
first choice must be to offer management to the local community, not vest it
in a company in order to sell it to private (possibly foriegn) timber concerns.
Locals are deeply insulted and hurt by the crude attempt to disposess us of
our land. We belong to the Strzeleckis and vice versa.