Todd
and Astrid Duddley, St Mary's.
Discussing their court win to save their local forests.
Todd: That the tribunals, details all the case was about and what the case was about and they just go through the different evidence, and as they are oping through they'll say whether they think one person's evidence is better then another, and at the end they make a final summing up of it all.
Jake: Would you be able to give us the story of what happened and how it began?
Todd: Yeah, let me see. Because it was a development application you see, that was what the good thing was about it it, because it was on private land and the land owner didn't bother getting a private timber reserve on his property so he put in a development application like the same you would put in for building a house or whatever so it had to go through the planning system rather than the forest practices system. So that is one of the reasons why people want to get all foresty operations under the land use planning approvsals act, which is what all private land in Tasmania and some public land goes under that system. And with that system people can actually have input into the development. So it has to be advertised and then if you don't agree with it then you can register a complaint against it and then when the council approves it and you don't like the decision then you've got, you can go through planning appeal, a tribual to go to and you can basically appeal against it and if you have a good case then you can basically stop a quite lot of things. And that is why forestry doesn't want to be under it, that is why they are exempt from that system because they would probably have a lot of operations stopped.
Louise: They would get a lot of appeals.
Todd: Yeah they would get a lot of appeals, which is fair enough anywhere. It is public land why shouldn't they be subject to scrutiny. But that is quite a good system actually, but there is also like aqua culture marine farming, they are exempt from it too, ans so is mining, so all the industries that are stuffing up Tasmania are all exempt from it basically. But is this case because it was private land with a developement application then they had to go through that process. And so what happened is that me and and about four other people that live fairly close to the land up there they all objected to it and it was just advertised as clearfelling and he wanted to clear all the land on the block and turn it into plantation, plus plant all the cleared land on the block as well.
So once we did that we were kind of in the process. And then the council at the next council meeting they make a decision on it and they approved it ofcourse, they approve everything. So then after that then we said okay we are going to fight this one. There were a lot of really clear cut and good reasons. We thought wed have a really good chance of winning. We had looked at the forest practices plan and there were a lot of deficiencies in it, glaring deficiencies, and then the next part of the process is that you register to the tribunal saying you are going to object to it and then you have what is called a directions hearing. The developer, the land owner, and three people from Gunns, well they were North Forests Products at the time and now they are Gunns, and then there were me and the other people who were the objectors. In the end there were a couple of people who put there names down and I was like giving them advice and support.
And so at the Directions hearing they decide whtther you can have a mediation, is there a compromised situation that you can come to some kind of agreement, or else they have what is called a hearing where you say you know there is a lot of this we are not happy about and there is no middle ground. And we just said well we are not going to compromise on there being any clearing native vegetation for plantation. And they said well it is not viable without that and so there was no middle ground so that meant we had to go to a hearing. So the hearing was set down for a couple of months after that so what you have to do in the mean time is get all this evidence togther, because everything that you put togther in your evidence is all that you can use in the hearing, you cant throw anything in afterwords so it has to be pretty spot on and clear and you have to cover every possibilitiy of things that are going to come up.
So our submission was about 60 or 70 pages, covering all the scientific and legislative evidence, what acts it does or doesn't comply with, just anything to do with any residence, and they have to all make statements about why they object to it etc etc so you have to put all that together, and present it, and they do the same thing and then you swap evidence and then after that you have a hearing, which went for barely three days and it was fairly unusual. And it was probably one of the few times where, they had about ten witness and so they had all the experts from various parts of forestry, people responsible for using 1080, people responsible for using poison, people responsible for establishing plantation, people for doing the inspections, the expert scientists that do the assement for the threatned species. So they had the whole operations, scientific, the whole different gammet of people who could be involved in any forest practices plan.
So that meant we had the opportunity to actually examine how the whole system worked and how competent or incompetent it was. And that's what Steven really enoyed because we really knew exactly what was going on and we were pretty well researched where as they were pretty casual and complacent because they sort of, well you know, "We've got all these experts, you know, we'll just go in and it will be alright". They didn't know what to say to us really. I wish we had a transcript of it actually because every one of their witnesses was flawed and their evidence contradicted each other. It was laughable. Like the very first question we asked their expert landscape person who was there to assess the impact on the landscape, the very first question Steven Hall asked at the start of the hearing was "Well, have you been to the site" and the guy says "No", so that was a good start so it just went on from there really.
They had the Forest Practices Officer, which is the person who goes out and does the basic groundwork. He didn't have any competency in botany or anything, fauna or anything really and he made all the recommendations and assessments of vegetation and what kind of wildlife were there. And he was completetlywrong. He did not recognise RFA (Regional Forest Agreement) eucalypt communities that were on the block and he completely misinterpreted the suitably of habitat for different threatened species. That was one of the main reason it got stopped because of this Velvet Worm, and they said it was too dry for Velvet Worms to be there, and you know we showed there were all these ferns everywhere and rotten logs. And their scientific experts you know just were biased.
Their main star witness was an expert in the whole of Tasmanian on Velvet Worm you know, its his main thing that he is known for but he just obviously contradicted himself and gave basically false evidence because he was a forestry person, pro industry.
Louise: Got to tow the line!
Todd: Yeah, and it was obvious you know, I think the tribunal could tell all the way. Every on of their witnesses they weren't telling the truth and contradicting each other, they weren't very well organised, so that was interesting. Whereas all of our witnesses all said what we thought, didn't try to mislead them or fool anybody.
Louise: How many witnesses did you have?
Todd: About 6 or 7, mainly just local residents plus myself, Peter McQuillen, Owen Ingells, both scientists and doctors, Owen knows a lot about soils, chemicals and management. We got a chance to ask each one of them about all kind of things, using 1080, atrizine, simozine, non local eucalypts, about the accuracy of their botanical and fauna assessment, the whole thing. In every case it showed up that it was inadequate. So that was pretty interesting. But in the end the main reason why it wasn't allowed was that the Velvet Worm because they actually changed the plan during the hearing. Every day they come in with a new proposal, they kept modifying it!
Jake: So altering their evidence?
Todd: Yeah they were, so that counted against them pretty well. But they actually went from clearfelling the whole lot originally, buT then they decided to selectively log the more old growth part of it. But even that wasn't allowed in the end because even with selective logging they still were going to remove 60 percent of the over story
Jake: And clearfell it right to the bush they would leave and call that slective logging I'd imagine?
Todd: Yeah, and most of the selective logging includes getting rid of most of the old growth trees, so they said threat would cause drying out of the forest and also the Velvet Worms need rotten loggs for their habitat and so if they got rid of all the older the trees they wouldn't be any recruitment of rotten logs for the worms. And also what is pretty signifcant is they use the precautionary principle in terms of chemicals there. There wasn't any evidence given the effect on atrizne, simozine, 1080 on the Velvet Worm. So they said that that was another reason they were not allowed to use it because they couldn't be sure that it wouldn't cause harm to them.
And the other thing was the water courses - they only had ten metre buffer zones on most of them. In the local planning scheme the mininmum is thirty metres unless you can show any reason why it should be less. And they didn't provide any evidence they just said that it complies with the Forest Practices Code, so they thought just by saying that it complies with the Forest Practices Code that therefore it is beyond any contest that there could be harm done.
Jake : What is the normal regulation of buffer zones on that?
Todd: It depends, the Forest Practices Code allows for 10, 20 or 30 metre buffer zones. They allow 10 metre buffer zones on a lot of creeks and you are allowed to take all the trees out within that ten metres as well. And that was what they were going to do in part of this but the tribunal said because they hadn't shown that it wasn't going to cause harm to them. All of the creeks had to have 30 metre buffer zones on them, which is quite a lot really if you take either side of the creek. So that didn't leave them with very much land to plant out, because of all the buffer zones and they weren't allowed to clear virtually any of the native vegetation. They had nothing much left to plant so that was the end of it. That was it, it was a pretty big case.
Jake: Steven Hall mentioned if Gunns wanted to they could still class it as a Private Timber Reserve and perhaps even get away with doing the original plan?
Todd: Yeah well, they could apply for a private timber reserve, which is pretty farsicle, but it would be difficult for them to justify, because the reason why it was rejected was because of really strong scientific evidence, so I think they would not have been able to get away with it. If if was less tangible evidence they might have been able to push ahead with it but because it was so based on expert evidence I don't think they could have done it. But in a lot of cases they can, yeah.
Jake: Steven mentioned that even with the strong backing of all the scientific evidence, if they really wanted to push it the Private Timber Reserve means you don't need to consider the Velvet Worms. You don't need to consider any of that.
Todd: They could try but I think it could be fairly difficult for them though. Not every block of land has a threatnened species on it though.
Jake: It is getting there though.
Todd: Yeah well that's
right, they are trying to exempt forsety from the threatened species act
now anyway from what I can gather. Probably it is a fair bit to do with
this case why they would do that. The Forest Practices Code wasn't really
adequete so they would need to change the law to make sure they could
still carry on.