NEW ZEALAND: Green Party supports logging venture
Copyright 2001 Otago Daily Times
July 21, 2001
Green Party supports logging venture Wellington: The Green Party has given its surprise support to a West Coast native logging operation funded by the Government's Timberlands compensation package.
"The Green Party always expected that at least some of the $120 million given to the West Coast in compensation for the scrapping of native logging on Crown land would end up in new logging projects," the party's forestry spokesman, Ian Ewen-Street, said.
"That is why we were in favour of including pine forests and relatively less cash in the package."
It emerged on Thursday that the Forever Timber Group has been given a loan of $400,000 by the Westland District Council, funded out of the $120 million the Government gave the West Coast as compensation for banning logging native trees on public land.
Forever Timber says it will mill native trees on private land using sustainable management practices.
Among its principals is former Timberlands executive Kit Richards, who lost his job with the state-owned enterprise while championing a plan for sustainable beech logging in the West Coast's public forests.
The Government yesterday maintained it was unperturbed by the scheme, which is lawful. And West Coast MP Damien O'Connor, who supported Timberlands' proposal to continue logging of native trees, came out in support of Forever Timber. Mr Ewen-Street said as long as the project met all the appropriate resource consents - which it appeared to have done - the private owners had a legal right to get a return from the trees on their land.
Coasters and the Ecologic Foundation also voiced their support for the Forever Timber project.
Buller Mayor Pat O'Dea said the company was providing timber New Zealand needed to stop importing timber from unsustainably-managed forests overseas.
Mr O'Connor accused National's environment spokesman, Nick Smith, of trying to make political capital out of a non-issue.
"The political grandstanding of that patronising . . . Smith does nothing for the West Coast. They [Forever Timber] have put in place a commercial venture and I doubt whether the basis of this whole initiative is to make a political statement."