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issue 135 | 26.07.10 | Page 1
Balancing act Tasmanian negotiations hold key to fate of nation’s native forest industry
By JIM BOWDEN
THE future of Australia’s productive native forest industry is in the balance as the nation goes to the polls in just 27 days – and its fate may well be determined by the Greens if they are handed the balance of power in the Senate on August 21. Greens and Labor have agreed on a tight swap of preferences in the senate and in marginal seats, which comes as no surprise. Forest industry adversary and Australian Greens leader Bob Brown is on an election campaign to close all native forest logging – in Tasmania and the mainland. Talks between timber industry players are well advanced to end or reduce old-growth
? Election result may decide fate of native forest industry.
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logging in Tasmania, and the big parties are under pressure to unveil a jobs-rescue policy to help the timber workers who will inevitably lose out. “The negotiations between sectors of the timber industry and conservation movement in Tasmania have national implications,” the national president of the Institute of Foresters of Australia Dr Peter Volker told T&F enews. “They are flawed because they are conducted in secret and only one side has anything to give; the conservation movement cannot lose whatever the outcome because its only stake is emotional, not economic or social,” he said. Dr Volker believes a closure of native forest operations in
Elections a ‘mixed bag’ for industry Anxiety in the forest
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issue 135 | 26.07.10 | Page 1