National Day Of Action Targeting ALP

Big thanks to all those who participated in the National Day of Action targeting the Rudd/Garrett sell out of Tasmania's ancient forests. Forest defenders in Launceston,Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, Canberra, Sydney, Newcastle and Brisbane conducted banner drops,office occupations, and other actions, with meeting held or organised with ALP pollies in several cities. check huon.org for photos of all actions.

About 20 crew from Camp Flozza, HVEC, and Still Wild Still Threatened made a rare one day only appearance in north tassie, occupying the office of Labor Forestry Spokeperson Kerry Obrian. The action focused on the ALP sell out and the hypocrisy of it's climate policy not including ancient forests as carbon sinks.After some counter jumping and office occupation antics, Senator Obrian proved happy to meet with representatives from the crew, and a 45 minute meeting discussing:
# the real situation in the Southern Forests,
# the trashing of world heritage valued and bordering forests,
# the merits of "alternative" methods of clearfelling such as aggregated retention,
# reasons as to why the Alp is mimicking the Liberal forest policy
# possibilities for creating a plantation based, native forest free economically sustainable industry in conjunction with reservation of remaining high conservation value forests
#why Garrett's office is peddling the notion to environment groups that there may be more reservation of public forests when Rudd has knocked down this possibility....

Senator Obrian confirmed that Labor, despite their March conference position to consider further reservation of old growth forests, has no intention of reserving further public lands with it's only conservation focus to ensure the private land reservation targets in the Howard -Lennon Community forest agreement are met. Basically Labor has sold us out.

So the message to all out there is - keep hassling the ALP anyway you can to get Tassie's Ancient Forest back on the agenda. Other ALP politicians have indicated that there is a large degree of dissent within the ALP regarding the Tassie forest policy, and this can clearly be worked on. Most Australians want the woodchippers out of our old growth forests, so let's make it happen!