TRANSCRIPT
The Liberals are promising to make up to 40,000 hectares of native forest in Tasmania available for logging - it's part of what's known as the Future Potential Production Forest (FPPF).
The land was established to secure a ‘wood-bank’ to provide for future sustainable forestry production in Tasmania.
There's a total of around 356,000 hectares of FPPF dispersed across the state, outside of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area.
Tasmania's Premier Jeremy Rockliff says the closure of the industry in other states, including Victoria and Western Australia, means now is the time to make this timber available:
"What this will do is give security and certainty to rural and regional Tasmania, sawmillers, families, local people employed in the sector, including contractors."
But the Tasmanian Forest Products Association, which advocates for the industry, says the industry is being used as a political football and the Liberal Party could have worked to solve wood supply issues any time in the last 10 years rather than making it an election issue.
Environmental groups say protest action is almost certain if the proposal goes ahead, even with the risk of jail time under tough anti-protest laws.
Not unexpectedly, the Tasmanian Greens are saying they want this area protected.
Rosalie Woodruff is the party leader:
We will be pushing in a balance of power, to protect these forests, but what will the Labor party do, what is their position? The liberals have made themselves very clear.
Meanwhile, Labor leader Rebecca White says the party has been consulting with industry and unions and will release its policy around forestry in the coming days:
After 10 years of government, where they could have addressed resources security and supply if they'd wanted to, they leave it to an election campaign, I think this is a very cynical ploy.
The Greens' Rosalie Woodruff says few Tasmanians want to see this happen.
Who is speaking for the forests if the Greens and these people are not? We are with the majority of Tasmanians, we want to draw a line in the sand on this. These forests were protected and should have been put in permanent protection, because of their intrinsic values. It would be a climate crime to log and burn these forests, it would be a crime against nature because of the threatened species they hold. Tasmanians don't want that for our future, they want to move on.
But Forestry Minister Felix Ellis maintains the logging project has many positive outcomes for Tasmania.
We came into government to rebuild the forest sector and we've done just that. Jobs are up. Exports are up. And people are in work right around this state. But now the opportunity is to grow. So by unlocking 40,000 hectares of Future Potential Production Forest that we saved from Labor-Green lockups we will now be able to go even further with providing those timbers to the market.
It's certainly not the last we'll be hearing about native forestry in the election campaign, with another three weeks left till polling day.
