East Gippsland RFA Review - Dean Haywood

In this International Year of Biodiversity, I find it appalling that the best that the Victorian and Federal Government can offer is this bit of sham public consultation over an Agreement that has done little to protect biodiversity in East Gippsland. The fact that the Commonwealth Government plans to do nothing to amend this Agreement, which allows the appalling logging of areas such as Brown Mountain to occur, is scandalous. While this area provides habitat for the endangered Long Footed Potoroo, it appears that the Commonwealth Government has abandoned any responsibility for making sure that all suitable habitat for this species is conserved.

While this review is supposed to be reporting on progress of the RFA up to 30/6/09, I am amazed that so much of the Victorian Government’s report deals with projects and initiatives that have not yet seen the light of day. For example, 13 years after the signing of the East Gippsland RFA, the Victorian Government still has no data for many of the indicators used in its State of the Forest report and 13 years later, the Victorian Government is still talking about holding another review to try and work out how to get data for these indicators. The Victorian Government promised a comprehensive quality assurance program, but claims that the most important part of this is a new system called EMS that is still under development – despite the fact that a need for this system was identified in the 2002 Our Forests, Our Future report. Elsewhere in the report, the Victorian Government claims to be developing “..a new monitoring program which will provide the information required to evaluate the success of policy and management initiatives in achieving desired forest outcomes”.

We are now two thirds of the way through the life of the East Gippsland RFA, and it is testament to the Victorian Government’s lack of commitment to sustainable forestry that so many systems and practices required to provide this type of management are still not in place. As the original East Gippsland RFA was being developed, both the Federal and State Liberal Governments decided to water down the funding needs for the Agreement. Initial wording of the Agreement initially read that “achieving the objectives of this Agreement will require the ongoing commitment of considerable financial resources from both Governments” (my emphasis). However, the key work “considerable” was removed from the Agreement, and many of the current problems with the RFAs such as the failure to commence collecting data for all the biodiversity indicators, the failure to properly monitor regeneration, the failure to establish weed and pest programs and the failure to satisfactorily regenerate all logged areas are all due to the Victorian Government’s failure to make adequate funding available for these programs. This failure is quite inexcusable, because over the term of the Agreement, the Victorian Government has been running large budget surpluses.