The Australian Forest Products Association wants the University of Tasmania to investigate Dr Jennifer Sanger over her links to the Bob Brown Foundation. Dr Sanger was co-author of a peer reviewed scientific paper with Professor James Kirkpatrick and Suyanti Winoto-Lewin from the University of Tasmania’s Discipline of Geography and Spatial Sciences which withdrawn from academic publication because it contains significant errors. Source: Timberbiz
The report, which linked forestry with forest fires, has been condemned by the timber industry as a whole, both sides of the Tasmanian Parliament and the Australian Senate which declared the paper as “bodgy”.
The AFPA says Dr Sanger has now been revealed as a campaigner for the Bob Brown Foundation.
In an opinion piece published in The Conversation, Dr Jennifer Sanger is disclosed as “working’’ for The Bob Brown Foundation.
AFPA CEO Ross Hampton has called on the University of Tasmania to urgently investigate whether Dr Sanger has misused her academic position to campaign against the native forestry industry, and whether the University had seen any disclosures that she was employed by the Bob Brown Foundation.
“Whilst everyone has the right to protest, most Australians would find it inexcusable that an academic, submitting a ‘bodgy’ paper to a prestigious journal like Fire, and then using it to call for an end to the timber industry, would not be up front that she works for an organisation dedicated to closing down the same industry,” Mr Hampton said.
“This is clearly a conflict of interest.”
The Australian Senate passed a motion noting that the “report used by the Australian Greens to assert that forestry operations cause bushfires has been retracted and withdrawn after insistence from the academic community” and “that the withdrawal of this paper was required because of the number of significant errors and wrong conclusions and that it did not meet the standard for ‘high-quality scientific works’ as required by the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI)”.
