Forests group reminds Govt of promise

Press, 15 December 1983, Page 20

Forests group reminds Govt of promise

Parliamentary reporter The Government and the Joint Campaign on Native Forests are in dispute on the logging of native forest south of the Cook River in South Westland. The director of the campaign, Mr Guy Salmon, has called on the Government to say publicly whether it intends to keep its 1981 election promise to maintain a moratorium against any logging in the forests. He has been prompted by the reported statements of the Conservator of Forests at Hokitika, Mr P. Berg, that the Forest Service planned logging trials throughout the 160-km stretch of State forests south of the Cook River. In a joint statement in September, 1981, the then Ministers of Forests and the Environment had said the forests would be placed under a logging moratorium until 1990.

Mr Salmon said he had been reassured repeatedly by the Minister for the Environment, Dr Shearer, that there would be no backsliding on the Government’s promise. “That message does not seem to have reached the Forest Service in Hokitika,” he said. The moratorium had been necessary because all methods of selective logging of rimu forest tried in South Westland had failed. Selective logging had caused extensive mortality of standing trees and had so badly damaged the forests that the remnants of logged stands were now being clear-felled. Before Forest Service logging gangs were permitted to move any further south, they had to prove that they had developed a logging method that was capable of a sustained yield, said Mr Salmon.

These experiments could be conducted in forests north of the Cook River.’ Forest Service staff were not entitled to reinterpret the Government’s policies by alleging a difference between “commercial logging” and “trial logging,” he said. Logging trials planned for south of the Cook River involved felling trees and selling them to sawmills. There was no difference between these plans and other logging work further north, since all the logging in South Westland was essentially experimental and commercial, said Mr Salmon. If the Ministers had intended that the moratorium really meant a start of logging, then they should have said so before the election. The Minister of Forests, Mr Elworthy, accused Mr Salmon of “engaging in sophistry.”

The trials now had been foreshadowed in the 1981 statement, he said. Then, it had been clear that soil trials, research into wildlife values, the potential for agriculture, and other matters would need to be investigated before 1990. “It is nonsense to suggest that these trials are a new concept,” said Mr Elworthy. Decisions would need to be when the moratorium was due to be lifted in 1990. It was about then that longterm logging contracts to Westland mills would expire, and decisions would have to be made on whether to review or renew them. Trials were needed so that the decisions could be made with a firm idea of the nature of the timber resource and whether it could be managed, said Mr Elworthy.