Jane Garrett
High-profile state government MP Jane Garrett faces a backlash at next year’s Victorian election over one of Labor’s most challenging issues: logging in native forests. Source: The Age
New polling in Ms Garrett’s inner-city seat of Brunswick suggests almost half her electorate believe the government is not doing enough to protect wildlife from logging – but more than 60% of voters would be more likely to re-elect the MP if this improved.
However, the issue is particularly delicate for Ms Garrett, who is under threat of losing Brunswick to the Greens, but is also close to the CFMEU and pledged her support for timber workers long before this week’s bail-out announcement.
According to the ReachTEL poll: The majority of voters in Brunswick – 8 out of 10 – support the protection of forests and wildlife in new national parks and 61% of Brunswick voters said they would be more likely to vote for Ms Garrett if she supported forest protection and the creation of new national parks.
This was a significant increase from 48% in December.
Fewer than one in five people think the government is doing enough to protect forests, while 49% think it is not doing enough.
The poll of 820 Brunswick voters was commissioned by the Wilderness Society and Friends of the Earth, and conducted on Thursday night.
Campaigns manager Amelia Young said the findings showed Ms Garrett was “out of touch” with her electorate, “who overwhelmingly support the creation of new national parks to protect forests and wildlife from logging”.
She said it also showed the community’s desire for Labor to establish a Great Forest National Park, which would set aside 355,000 hectares of newly protected forest stretching from Kinglake to Mount Baw Baw and back to Eildon.
“Every day without the Great Forest National Park is a day where native wildlife are killed by logging, forests are destroyed, and voters grow more fed up with this government’s lack of action on new national parks to protect forests and native wildlife,” she said.
However Ms Garrett said a balance could be struck between protecting forests and protecting jobs.
“My electorate has a proud history of support for the environment,” she said. “It also has a proud history of standing up for others in times of need. We can both protect our forests and save the jobs and towns of our fellow Victorians.”
Brunswick has always been Labor territory, but the gentrification of the inner city has hurt the ALP over the years.
The government now only needs an anti-Labor swing of 2.22% for the seat to change hands. However, some believe the former emergency services minister – who famously quit cabinet over the CFA dispute – has enough public support to narrowly hold on.
Nonetheless, the push for a Great Forest National Park will continue to be an issue for the government until it is addressed.
Anger over the lack of action intensified in recent weeks, after a dead koala was found in a VicForests logging coupe that was also home to another threatened species: the Greater Glider possum.
