Exactly thirteen years ago today (3rd Feb 2010) Australia’s first Regional Forest Agreement was signed for East Gippsland. This RFA has seen the logging industry decline and promises broken for the environment. It paved the way for ongoing conflict and legal challenges.

“After 13 years of violating this agreement, the state government has finally announced a posthumous performance review – seven years overdue. This would have to win the prize for the most contravened government document in history”, said Environment East Gippsland’s Jill Redwood “This should be a Monty Python sketch, not a serious government process”.

“The governments need to agree it’s been a waste of $300 million to produce reports full of flawed resource data and commitments that were mostly ignored. Its main achievement was the increased volume of export woodchips leaving East Gippsland’s forests.”

“The obligation was for ‘world class protection of old growth and biodiversity’. Instead there have been ongoing protests, an inability to obtain eco-certification of the logging (by a world certifying body), reduced funding to research threatened species, thousands of hectares of old growth converted to industrial woodchip crops, no sustainability checks despite claims of sustainable logging, and the recent legal injunction on logging the habitat of protected wildlife at Brown Mountain”.

“We were told millions of dollars would flow to the region, hundreds of jobs would be created, and logging would be sustained forever”, said Ms Redwood. “What we’ve seen is the opposite, including admissions of incorrect data and overestimates of available sawlog resource, as well as serious regeneration failure. From 22 mills in the region back then it’s now down to about six, but woodchipping hasn’t slowed down”.

“Since the RFA was signed 13 years ago, only woodchip volumes increased in East Gippsland. Mr Brumby needs to acknowledge the RFAs are ill-formulated, poorly researched, shamelessly dishonoured, fully redundant and transparently political”.