By NOEL MURPHY
BITTER environmental fights would flare in the Otway Ranges again after logging operations came under the control of VicForests, activists warned this week.
Otway Ranges Environment Network (OREN) warned the decade-old Otways forest war, which raged from 1996 through 2002, would be resume after State Government handed logging control from Department of Environment and Primary Industries.
“Letting VicForests back in is like letting the fox take charge of the henhouse,” OREN spokesman Simon Birrell said.
“Although currently clearfell logging and woodchipping in still legally banned on public land in the Otways, VicForests by its very nature will try to overturn this legislation. They cannot be trusted.”
Mr Birrell said residents and conservationists staged more than 40 blockades during the bitter seven-year battle against VicForests and its logging practices, in particular clearfelling of “biodiverse” native forests.
“VicForests is a commercial entity that will seek to maximise profit through extractive exploitation of Otway native forest. VicForests has no role to play in the Otways and their presence will only guarantee to stir up old battles.”
But Agriculture Minister Peter Walsh’s office dismissed the OREN as “dead wrong”.
“There’s no commercial logging in the Otways,” spokeperson Deborah Cole told the Independent.
“This involves four people previously in the Department of Environment and Primary Industries whose job was to manage the licences for about 70 small operators in the west of the state.
“Those four people now work for VicForests. They do the same thing, manage the same licences and there’s no change to harvest levels.
“Anybody suggesting changes to harvest levels because of this administrative transfer is incorrect. The environmentalists are making lot mischief over this and they’re just dead wrong.”
