Unesco's World Heritage Committee has summarily dismissed the Abbott government's bid to wind back protection from Tasmanian forests. The committee meeting in Doha took just seven minutes to consider the bid, which member nation Portugal called "feeble", and setting an unacceptable precedent for the future.
No country spoke in favor of the bid to de-list 74,00 hectares of old growth forest, which official cultural and natural values advisers told the meeting would weaken the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. Colombia and Germany supported the recommendation to reject the de-listing, but only Portugal spoke at length to the meeting in a passionate defense of the World Heritage system.
"The justifications presented to the reduction are to say the least feeble," the Portuguese delegation said. "Accepting this de-listing today would be setting an unacceptable precedent impossible to deny in similar circumstances in the future.
Environmentaist lobbyist Alec Marr, who was in Doha, said: “The World Heritage Committee saw through the deception of the Australian Government’s efforts here, and the high quality science and professionalism of the advisory bodies was exemplary.” “Today is vindication for every Australian, and people around the world, who love Tasmania’s forests and want to see them protected,” Mr Marr said.
The de-listing bid, one of few in UNESCO history, arose of out a 2013 election promise by the Abbott government to roll back a 170,000 hectare extension to the 1.5 million hectare Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. The extension fulfilled a key plank of the peace deal struck by industry and green groups to end the generation-old Tasmanian forest conflict, and was guided through by former Labor Environment Minister Tony Burke. After Liberal landslide wins in three of the five Tasmanian seats in the election, the government claimed a strong mandate to wind back the listing.
The Parliamentary Secretary for Agriculture, Richard Colbeck, launched a campaign arguing that the listing of 74,000 hectares of forests made a mockery of World Heritage values because of previous logging. But the federal Environment Department told a Senate inquiry into the de-listing bid that only four per cent of the 74,000 hectares had been heavily disturbed.