Yahoo News Calls for review of forestry exemption laws after VicForests conservation breaches
A landmark court judgment that a government forestry agency repeatedly breached conservation regulations has sparked calls for a review of an industry-wide exemption for logging under national environment laws.
Last week the federal court found VicForests, a body owned by Victorian taxpayers, breached a code of practice in a regional forestry agreement (RFA) between the federal and state governments covering the state’s central highlands.
It means for the first time in 20 years, forestry operations may have to be assessed under the federal Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act. Forestry is exempt from the act under the terms of RFAs in place in four states.
Mortimer found past and planned logging by VicForests would have a significant impact on the vulnerable greater glider and the critically endangered Leadbeater’s possum, and the agency had breached a code of practice by not observing a precautionary principle relating to environmental conservation.
Related: VicForests breached threatened species laws with central highlands logging, court rules
Campaigners, legal experts and state and federal governments are still considering the implications of Justice Debra Mortimer’s 444-page judgment, published last Wednesday, and the court is yet to issue final orders in the case.
Some familiar with the case believed the judgment would have ramifications beyond Victoria’s central highlands. Jess Abrahams, a national campaigner with the Australian Conservation Foundation, said it had “torn a gaping hole” in the exemption granted to forestry.
He called on businessman Graeme Samuel, who is leading a once-a-decade review of the EPBC Act, to address the exemption when he makes recommendations to the federal government later this year.
“Graeme Samuel can’t pretend that this isn’t a major failing in the act and he’s going to have to make recommendations to fix it in one way or another,” Abrahams said. “Environmentalists have been pointing to this law for a long time and saying the consequence is the environment is being destroyed and species are being sent to extinction.”
Related: Australian government stops listing major threats to species under environment laws
Lee Godden, the director of Melbourne University’s centre for resources, energy and environmental law, said Mortimer’s reference to the precautionary principle could have wider implications for the forestry industry and the way it prepared for logging.
She said the judgment concluded VicForests’ use of desktop surveys to identify where threatened species were found was flawed, and found more comprehensive on-ground surveys were necessary.
“Part of what needs to be considered very strongly in the EPBC review is this exemption,” Godden said. “The fundamental thing is [VicForests is] not carrying out that rigorous scientific work to establish whether those species are there or not, and that would seem fundamental to why that exemption is granted.”
Samuel declined to comment while the review was still under way.
The Wilderness Society said it was unclear in the wake of the judgment whether any native forest logging in Australia was being carried out legally.
“We definitely think this has very significant implications for logging under RFAs everywhere,” Amelia Young, the national campaigns director, said. “No one can guarantee with any degree of certainty that logging in any situation would have been lawful. It is clear that the precautionary principle has not been applied in Victoria.”
Young said conservationists would look closely at Tasmania, where logging had been carried out in the habitat of the swift parrot and other endangered species.
Veteran environmentalist Lyndon Schneiders, now working as a consultant to the Places You Love Alliance, said communities, legal teams and campaigners would be examining the prescriptions and schemes in individual states. “If I was in Tasmania I would be wanting to make sure that my forest agency wasn’t logging threatened species habitat right now and likewise in New South Wales,” he said.
The forestry industry has called on state and federal governments to clarify what the judgment means for logging. A VicForests spokesman said it would carefully consider the implications.
The Tasmanian resources minister, Guy Barnett, last week said the government was considering the judgment, but its advice to date was that it was specific to Victoria. “We have every confidence in the resource security legislation in Tasmania, and the regional forest agreement in Tasmania,” he said.
A spokesman for Victoria’s resources minister, Jaclyn Symes, said the state government would take “the necessary time” to consider the ruling.
Related: Australia's national environment laws 'actually allow extinction to happen'
The former Greens leader Bob Brown, an environmental campaigner since the 1970s, said groups in each state covered by RFAs – Victoria, Tasmania, NSW and Western Australia – would be examining the case. He said it was an “unmissable opportunity” for Victoria to bring forward its plan to phase out native forest logging by 2030.
Brown won a 2007 federal court case against logging in Tasmania’s Wielangta forest on the grounds it would destroy habitat of the swift parrot, the broad-toothed stag beetle and the Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle, but the judgment was overturned on appeal.
He said there was a long list of endangered species in Tasmanian forests, and habitat was still being logged in forests in the Tarkine, in the state’s north-west, and in the south.
“The reality of it is all major forest logging in Australia should stop,” Brown said. “It is a prime cause of the march towards extinction.”
