What has happened to the Investigation…?

27 August 2007 - 10:00AM

Tiwi Islands logging under fire
Rosslyn Beeby

Australia’s biggest agribusiness investment funds manager could face fines of more than $6million for alleged illegal land clearing, after a federal investigation of its woodchip operations on the Tiwi Islands.

Tiwi traditional land owners claim the project has failed to deliver jobs and income for their communities, despite promises it would “deliver millions” in royalties from sawlog and woodchip exports to Asian markets.

More than 90 Tiwi women have signed a petition claiming the project is ruining the land for future generations, clearing forests providing ceremonial artefacts, bush foods and materials for sought-after traditional arts and crafts.

A former president of the Tiwi Islands football club, Gawin Tipiloura, was sacked recently from the Tiwi Land Council after suggesting it had not acted in the best interests of Tiwi people by becoming a partner in the forestry project.

Perth-based company Great Southern, which manages more than $1.9 billion for 40,000 investors in tax-minimisation schemes including forestry plantations, olive and almond groves, vineyards and cattle feedlots across Australia, acquired the Tiwi Islands forestry operation in 2005 from South Australian forestry company Sylvatech.

Former federal environment minister Robert Hill gave approval in 2001 for Sylvatech a subsidiary of Adelaide company Australian Plantation Group to clear up to 26,000ha of native eucalypt forests on Melville Island to establish quick-growing acacia plantations for export woodchips. The decision approved what was to be the biggest single land-clearing operation in northern Australia, imposing 11 environmental conditions, including retention of buffer zones around rare tropical rainforest habitat, wetlands, river banks and nesting sites for threatened bird species. It also stated that no more than 10,000ha could be cleared over any two-year period.

After complaints to the federal and Northern Territory governments by Tiwi land owners and Darwin-based environment groups, a team of Commonwealth audit compliance inspectors visited the plantations on Melville Island earlier this year.

Sources within the Department of Environment and Water Resources recently told The Canberra Times a report on the alleged breaches had been passed to the Attorney-General’s Department for further consideration.

If Great Southern is found to have breached its permit conditions, it could face fines of more than $6 million under newly tightened land-clearing laws within the federal Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.

The results of the investigation are potentially embarrassing for Prime Minister John Howard and environment minister Malcolm Turnbull, after their announcement earlier this year to pledge $200 million to reduce deforestation in South-East Asia.

Tropical forests there are being cleared for palm oil plantations.

A spokesman for the company said Great Southern had conducted an independent audit of the Tiwi forestry project after taking it over from Sylvatech and “chose to share certain of these findings with the government”. Company literature recently distributed to Tiwi Island communities admits clearing of protective buffer zones “happened accidentally” in some places because of outdated maps and technology.

According to the company’s reports, the Tiwi project provides “a low-cost source of land” to meet growing global demand for woodchips. The company leases Tiwi land for $17 a hectare, with investors paying $3300 to invest in a 0.33ha acacia woodlot which provides a return on investment when harvested about eight to 12 years after planting.

Tiwi Land Council executive secretary John Hicks told a recent Senate estimates committee the project employed “three full-time Tiwis” and there had been losses of $600,000 on shipments of logs to China, with only one out of seven shipments returning a modest profit.

The Environment Centre of the Northern Territory claims the company has breached seven of its 11 permit obligations, including retention of buffer zones, scientific monitoring of environmental impacts and submission of a detailed threatened species monitoring plan.

Wilderness Society forests campaigner Peter Robertson said freedom of information requests revealed that ecological studies required by the permit had not been undertaken, and “no final threatened species management plan has been submitted or approved”.

Mr Robertson said that as former coordinator of the NT Environment Centre he wrote to Mr Turnbull earlier this year, listing the potential breaches and calling for further clearing on Melville Island to be suspended and for a full investigation into all aspects of the forestry operation.

According to research published last year in the international Journal of Biogeography, up to 12 native mammal species “are likely to be severely disadvantaged by plantation development” on the Tiwi Islands. A scientist with the Tropical Savannas Cooperative Research Centre, Ronald Frith, said the plantation development “targets the tallest and most well-developed eucalypt forest environments” and would “substantially reduce” the habitat of native mammals on the islands.

Source: The Canberra Times, ACT

Land clearing on the Tiwi Islands - Christine Milne’s Senate speech

Excerpts of transcript of the Senators speech

Senator MILNE (Tasmania) (1.11 pm)—I rise today to draw the Senate’s attention to land clearing on the Tiwi Islands. I think most Australians would be appalled to know what is happening in this beautiful part of Australia. I am talking about the Tiwi Islands, which are off the Northern Territory; Melville and Bathurst islands, owned by the traditional owners. It is Aboriginal freehold land under the Commonwealth Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Amendment Act 1978. Different parts of those islands are owned by different clans of Indigenous people and traditional owners. The areas have high biodiversity values, with eucalypt forests and tropical savannas side-by-side with rainforest patches such as Jump-up Jungle. They are sensitive to fire and disturbance and they are particularly important as biodiversity areas, particularly as species refugia, as biodiversity is being diminished in other parts of the Northern Territory because of the spread of the cane toad, amongst other things.
These forested areas in the Tiwi Islands are now the subject of a major clear-felling and woodchipping project approved by the Howard government in 2001, so the Tiwi Islands are becoming an industrial monoculture. That, by any definition, is deforestation. Deforestation is when you have natural forest areas cleared for crops, and that is precisely what is now happening in the Tiwi Islands, contrary to the Global Initiative on Forests and Climate that the Howard government released in July this year and of which it is so proud. At the press conference in July, the Australian government said that almost 20 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions come from clearing the world’s forests and that, if the world could halve the rate of global deforestation, we could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by three billion tonnes a year. It went on to say that the Australian government was investing $200 million to support new forest plantings, limit destruction of the world’s remaining forests, promote sustainable forest management, and on and on it goes.
At the same time as the government through this initiative and the Sydney declaration is telling the other APEC leaders about this, and leading up to the Bali conference—at which avoided deforestation will be a major issue—native areas of vegetation, tropical savannah and the buffers of rainforest patches are being cleared illegally, and we are seeing a massive conversion taking place. We are talking about 31,000 hectares since 1998 approved for clearing by the Howard government, and it must stop. It is particularly important to draw attention to it now because there is a proposal to take the area to be cleared up to 80,000 hectares. That would for the first time see the inclusion of 20,000 hectares of forest on Bathurst Island.

I rise today to say that this has to be investigated, that the breaches of the agreement that the Howard government had for this land clearance need to be properly investigated and that people need to be brought to account. You might wonder how this could be possible in an age where we recognise we are losing biodiversity and native vegetation at a great rate and where we are concerned about greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. In 2006 alone, 10,000 hectares were cleared. That was the single largest native forest clearing project for the whole of Northern Australia and it was done essentially for woodchips. The native forest is cleared and burned. The project is currently under federal investigation for serious breaches of environmental laws, such as clearing buffers around rainforest patches, and it is to be hoped that when that investigation is concluded the companies involved will be fined and required to restore native vegetation.

There needs to be a full investigation not only of the environmental breaches of the conditions set down under the EPBC Act, because we know that there have been serious breaches, but of how there has been such gross mismanagement of this project that the traditional owners have made a loss when they were led to believe that they would benefit from the logging operation in the Tiwi Islands. That is the main point that I want to make today in relation to this project. At least 2,000 Australians have invested with Great Southern through the MIS and believe they are doing something in relation to wood production. Great Southern needs to explain to their very own investors how they have got mixed up in actively pursuing a deforestation project to the detriment of the traditional owners of the Tiwi Islands. More particularly, we want from the government a clear statement that they will not continue to approve any further deforestation in the Tiwis, that they will not allow this application for expanded logging up to 80,000 hectares.

The Tiwi women have put out a petition and in that petition they made it very clear that what they wanted was an investigation and they wanted the logging to cease. What they have discovered is that they have been completely misled, that they have been ripped off and that the people making the money are these forest companies. I believe this would not be occurring anywhere else in Australia. In fact, it would not be occurring if this area were easily accessible. I think it is a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’: because it is the Tiwi Islands, because people are not going there regularly either as tourists or as businesspeople or in any other capacity, this is going on behind the scenes. I think it is about time that people look at the corporate social responsibility and ethical responsibility of companies like Great Southern and the banks that are financing some of these operations.

More particularly, I would like to know from the government how the investigation of the breaches of the conditions set down under EPBC is progressing and whether any charges are going to be laid in relation to that investigation. When is the community going to know where that investigation is up to?
Secondly, I would like a commitment from the Commonwealth to stand by its Sydney declaration and its global initiative on deforestation and to stop deforestation in the Tiwis. How ridiculous is Australia going to look, how hypocritical, at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) meeting in Bali later this year, when the community groups get up and point out to all the other APEC leaders, and indeed to all of the signatories of the UNFCCC, that Australia is saying to Indonesia ‘Stop deforestation’, saying to PNG ‘Stop deforestation’, but right next door in the Tiwi Islands the Australian government is not only encouraging and approving the conversion of native vegetation but it is also subsidising it—and subsidising it directly as well as through the MIS. That is not going to be something that the rest of the world is going to overlook in Bali. It is going to significantly diminish Australia’s standing.

I am calling on the government and the minister for the environment to become serious about what is happening on the Tiwi Islands, and I am calling on Great Southern to explain themselves, because they are a company which is trading on goodwill and trading on being ‘out of sight, out of mind’, and this cannot continue. Some scrutiny needs to be given. Where did the money go? Who benefited from these shipments, since the traditional owners ended up losing money on the logging of their own forest to the detriment of the wellbeing of that community?

The full transcript can be found on Senator Milne’s website

Senator Christine Milne on Tiwi Islands

Just before 1pm today, Northern Territory time, Senator Christine Milne spoke about the Tiwi Islands in the Australian Senate. The speech questioned to the breaching of environmental conditions, financial improprieties and arrangements for the project and the landclearing of native vegetation.

This was contrasted with the Howard Government’s position of landclearing in the tropics, where they have allocated 200 million to reduce landclearing. 

More to come…

Woodchip plantation breached environmental conditions: report

 A Northern Territory Government report has described “widespread and systematic” breaches of biodiversity conditions by Great Southern Plantations on the Tiwi Islands. The ABC’s Background Briefing has obtained a confidential Territory Government assessment of the Tiwi Islands woodchip plantation. The document says there has been a poor level of compliance with federal biodiversity conditions. It states “the lack of action is clearly to the advantage of the forestry company”. Professor Steve Garnet from Charles Darwin University says only some of the required environmental surveys have been completed.

A timber plantation on Melville Island. (ABC: Wendy Carlisle) 

“We’ve asked them why they haven’t been done but they haven’t given a reason for not doing them,” he said. Great Southern Plantation’s spokesman David Ikin says no rainforest has been chopped down. “It’s converting eucalypt open forest woodland to jobs for Indigenous Australians,” he said. Mr Ikin declined to comment on a Commonwealth investigation into allegations that buffer zones have been cleared. from the abc…

Timber, tax and the Tiwis

Below are links to Wendy Carlisle’s breaking story on ABC’s background briefingAustralia has promised $200 million to Southeast Asia to stop deforestation, but on the rich Tiwi Islands priceless and irreplaceable native forests are cut down and burnt to grow plantation timber for wood chips for Japan. It’s really a tax minimisation scheme and Tiwi forests could be worth more to the locals in carbon trading. Reporter: Wendy Carlisle.

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from the ABC…