Miss Management and Scott Free How Bracks beats the rap in Red Gum Forests : Melbourne Indymedia

Miss Management played the government's star red gum forest manager, juggling threatened species such as the Superb Parrot and Brush-Tailed Phascogale. Unfortunately Miss Management had a habit of dropping these cute creatures, but lucky for her, Scott Free was on hand with his trusty internal inquiries to clean up the mess.

Another internal inquiry only result of latest illegal red gum logging

Twelve months after the Department of Sustainability & Environment (DSE) were embarrassed for illegally logging protected Superb Parrot habitat, in the Barmah forest, environmentalists have busted them at it again.

DSE have breached their Forest Management Plan and the Code of Forest Practice in three separate incidents:

SUPERB PARROT HABITAT LOGGED TWICE – DSE admitted that last year’s logging of Superb Parrot habitat had been pre-dated by the logging of a huge old-growth tree just 50 metres from one of only two known nesting trees for the Parrot in Victoria.

FOUR HECTARES OF LOGGING OUTSIDE AN APPROVED COUPE – after a forest officer failed to check the mapped coupe boundary. Lucky there wasn’t a Special Protection Zone next door!

FELLING OF PROTECTED OLD-GROWTH RED GUMS – two ancient red gums supposedly protected from logging were felled. Tragically one was then left on the forest floor apparently becuase it had too many hollows to be of use to the timber mill.

Following the discovery of these grave logging blunders in the Barmah Forest, an internal government inquiry proposed – apparently without irony – the implementation of recommendations of an inquiry into a previous incident and the generation of a second report into the more recent incidents.

The latest inquiry found that protected old growth red gums had been felled and coupe boundaries exceeded because inexperienced staff were working with minimal supervision and inadequate training.

This comes after an external EPA Audit in Feburary found the Bracks Government responsible for the illegal logging of the last Victorian habitat of the Superb Parrot in the Barmah Forest.

The Parrot has already lost so much of its Victorian habitat to logging and land clearing that it is only known to nest in two trees, both in the Barmah forest. 156ha of Special Protection Zone was supposed to protect the trees and surrounding habitat, however the EPA Audit found that 23ha or about 15% of the Zones had been logged.

The EPA put the cause of the blunder down to: a) Poor planning, mapping, communications and training; b) False assumptions and c) Failure to follow procedure and obtain proper approval for logging.

Victorian law still has no provisions for penalising the government when it has breached logging law, although the community can rest assured that an endless stream of inquiries will document the blunders as we push the Superb Parrot ever closer to extinction.