LETTER TO THE EDITOR:
OVER past months we have continually heard of local saw mills losing their allocation of sawlogs with Nationals Tim Bull and Darren Chester telling us that Daniel Andrews has to stand up to the Greens.
For as long as I can remember the conflict between environmental groups and timber harvesting has been addressed by, whichever party, government simply setting aside areas of National Parks and areas where timber could be harvested, neither side happy with what they got.
It didn’t matter which party was in power, the National parks and the areas designated for timber harvesting were managed disgracefully. Clear felling is incompatible with proper management with regular cool burns.
National Parks have been managed by people who haven’t accepted the vast historical evidence for Aboriginal burning and have either created a disaster waiting to happen with summer wild fire or watched with total indifference as the environmental disasters happened over the last couple of decades.
Since early last century timber industry pressure stopped most of the burning by cattlemen and other bushmen in the higher rainfall ash and mixed species forests causing many environmental disasters and massive loss of timber resources.
This has been particularly so in the last couple of decades.
In recent times vast areas of alpine ash have been decimated by fires that wouldn’t have happened with the traditional cattlemen’s burning stopped by the government through timber industry pressure.
A largely pulp wood driven timber industry has clear felled east Gippsland’s coastal and foothill forests and left behind it areas of poor regrowth, areas of trees growing far too close to each other with massive understorey scrub.
The timber industry has created a major environmental mess compounded by an absence of proper management across the board.
Timber harvesting has been largely pulpwood driven and this is where a lot of the future sawlog allocation has gone.
As it has been told to me it is at a cost to the taxpayer with royalties not covering costs to the state, management of the timber resource has been a disgrace and if the environmental movement have been able to galvanise a city based backlash then the governments of either side, including the previous Coalition government that Tim Bull was part of, should accept responsibility.
Tim may be able to deny reality but please spare us attributing the consequences of reality to someone else.
