Increased penalties for Forests NSW “unjustifiable”

Luke Foley seems to have missed the boat with his claim for increased penalties for Forests NSW operations, according to the NSW Forest Products Association.
“It was his government that made the regulations and set the penalties. They spent billions of dollars reserving forests and putting people out of work.
“Since then they also managed to incinerate millions of hectares of reserved forest in wildfires that occurred simply through neglect and mismanagement,” according to a NSW Forest Products Association.
“In each region of NSW Forests NSW has to comply with over 1500 individual regulations in the conduct of their operations. In context, the offences that Foley refers to are trivial and minor, as incidents in a very difficult operational environment under an enormous burden of government regulation. Environmental outcomes have been non-existent or negligible.”
Remediation work was always carried out under supervision of the Department of Environment.
“Forests NSW continues sustainable management of forests to supply resource to industry in country towns of NSW. Comparisons with pollution events and illegal land development offences is unjustifiable.
“The Smoky Mouse case occurred in April to May 2009, two years ago, under the Labor government. The exclusion zone was habitat that had been burnt regularly up until it was reserved in 1998. The mouse has not been found since 1992. The hazard reduction fire most probably re-established the habitat for the mouse, hopefully the 45 cameras ordered in Justice Pepper’s judgement might now be able to find some evidence of the Smoky Mouse repopulating the exclusion zone,” according to a NSW Forest Products Association.
“The Smoky Mouse judgement ordered the Forestry Commission to pay $5,600 to the Department of Environment and Heritage for a project to monitor Smoky Mouse sites and to pay $19,000 legal costs to the department. Mr Foley should be asking the outcomes of the project.
“Having government agencies charging each other with such offences simply transfers funds from one government agency to another and keeps lawyers in business at a great cost to the taxpayer. The funds would have been much better spent on research, training and cooperative development of better environmental outcomes in sustainable forest management. Increasing the penalties would achieve nothing other than a transfer of more funds between agencies and legal costs.
“The NSW Forest Products Association calls on the NSW Coalition government to now review the regulations for forest harvesting operations, to bring them up to date and into line with realistic operational management, and to ease the unnecessary and unproductive cost burden that the Labor government created in 1998.”