North East Forest Alliance, media release,
1 February 2019:
EPA ENCOURAGES ILLEGAL
LOGGING BY REPEATEDLY LETTING FORESTRY OFF
The North East Forest
Alliance is claiming there is no justice for forests after the EPA on
Wednesday confirmed numerous breaches of the Forestry Corporation's Threatened
Species Licence in Gibberagee State Forest (east of Whiporie) but yet again issued
useless cautions and warnings rather than fines and prosecutions for these
serial offenders.
"Over the past
decade NEFA have exposed the Forestry Corporation committing thousands of legal
breaches of their environmental obligations, with the EPA confirming hundreds
more breaches in the last few months from NEFA's audits of Gibberagee and
Sugarloaf State Forest", said NEFA Spokesperson Dailan Pugh.
"Yet the EPA have
never taken the Forest Corporation to court, despite commitments to do so, and
in January 2016 they made the political decision not to issue fines.
"With no
consequences for their blatant breaches of environmental laws, is it surprising
that the Forestry Corporation repeat them time and time again?
"If you or I went
around illegally cutting down oldgrowth trees (hundreds of year old), clearing
rainforest, and bulldozing roads through exclusions around threatened plants
time and time again we would be put in jail, but the Forestry Corporation don't
even get a fine.
"The EPA's
regulation of the Forestry Corporation is farcical, though the biggest problem
is that by their refusal to take meaningful regulatory action the EPA are
fostering what Justice Pepper described in 2011 as "a reckless attitude
towards compliance with its environmental obligations" Mr. Pugh said.
"On Wednesday, in
response to a NEFA complaint made 2 years ago the EPA confirmed that the
Forestry Corporation failed to adequately mark the boundaries of 50m logging
exclusion zones around numerous individuals of Endangered heath Narrow-leaved
Melichrus, and undertook logging operations and roading within their exclusion
zones.
"The EPA also
confirmed NEFA's complaints of reckless damage to hollow-bearing trees and
recruitment trees, while also confirming that the Forestry Corporation was not
following the requirements for selection of appropriate recruitment trees.
"Though we can't be
sure the EPA found all the breaches we identified because the EPA won't tell us
how many they found, and when the EPA invited us into Gibberagee to be show them
in March 2017, the Forestry Corporation wouldn't let us show the EPA and
ordered us out of the forest.
"When NEFA made its
first complaint over Gibberagee in March 2017 we hoped the EPA would take
action to stop the breaches, yet when NEFA did another assessment 7 months
later we found the same sort of breaches were continuing unabated. We are still
waiting for the EPA to respond to the last complaints.
"In October last
year the EPA confirmed over 86 breaches of the logging rules identified by the
North East Forest Alliance in Sugarloaf State Forest, south of Tabulam, at that
time the EPA issued the Forestry Corporation with a Warning Letter for 72 and
an Official Caution for 1 offence.
"The confirmed
breaches included roading through a wildlife corridor, nine cases of roading in
exclusion areas along streams, failure to retain the required numbers of
habitat trees, and over 70 cases of serious damage to, and inappropriate
selection of, marked habitat trees.
"While failure to
retain the required number of habitat trees is called one offence, in practice
the EPA found that they had retained 200 less hollow-bearing trees than were
legally required.
"There were
numerous other breaches that the Forestry got off scot free for, for example
the EPA confirmed clearing within the marked boundary of the Endangered
Ecological Community Lowland Rainforest but refused to take action on the
grounds that because the "forest structure and species present at this
location have either been totally removed or severely altered/damaged" it
precluded identifying what it had been like before logging.
"The EPA chose to
ignore that they and the Forestry Corporation had jointly mapped it as Lowland
Rainforest some 6 months before it had been logged and cleared.
"These offences are
a repeat of similar offences we reported a year earlier in the nearby Cherry
Tree State Forest. Despite the EPA's assurances they were going to take legal
action there for logging and roading 4.5ha of mapped Lowland Rainforest and
recklessly damaging hundreds of habitat trees, they let the Forestry
Corporation off scot-free.
"NEFA estimated in
that operation around 1,000 habitat trees were likely to have been damaged or
had excessive debris left around their bases, though the EPA justified their
refusal to take any regulatory action on the grounds that while it was "likely"
the damages "were as a result of harvesting operations", they
were not able to prove "beyond reasonable doubt ... that the damage was
[not] caused by some other means".
"There is no justice.
The EPA's sham regulation is encouraging the Forestry Corporation to repeatedly
break logging laws with impunity" Mr. Pugh said.
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