#10.  Has Vica Bayley still got his Magic Pencil?

Who is Vica Bayley?  He is the Tasmanian Campaign Director for The Wilderness Society.

We were all led to believe that the process for determining Areas of High Conservation Value Forest was a highly scientific and technical process, and best left to qualified experts who have widely established credibility and experience. Apparently not so!

During the negotiations surrounding the Tasmanian Forest Agreement, a lot of arguing and not much compromise was all we got from the ENGO's, especially from Environment Tasmania and The Wilderness Society. For TWS, Vica was joined by his national counterpart, Lindon Schneiders, (see #3).  They dragged things out as long as they could, and while it suited them, but when it started to turn against them, and it appeared there might not be enough time to legislation or a World Heritage extension nomination sorted in time, they started applying pressure. One of the industry negotiators described to me how one day Vica Bayley grabbed a pencil, and started re-drawing lines on some of the maps on the negotiating table... apparently that is how scientific the process was! All this talk of polygons, score charts, criteria, what happened to that...???

And what about those Contingency Coupes? Remember them? They were supposed to be the areas the ENGO's were prepared to give back to help make up on-going sustainable supply of our unique and valuable Special Timbers, and up to at least the level of supply promised in the Tasmanian Forest Agreement.... But wait...!!! Some of them didn't even have any trees in them! Some of them had been harvested in recent years, some as recently as 2010, and re-sown with Eucalypt! Even if some of them did have ST in them, they sure don't now! In fact, even if there was ST seed in the soil, there wouldn't be any trees (apart from Blackwood, if any are present), mature to saw log size for at least 200 years! Celery-top Pine would take at least 400 years, and other species even longer. Some of those Contingency Coupes featured Buttongrass Plain, rocky outcrops, mine tailing dams, and low level scrub, but certainly not viable Special Timbers forests. Some, as I said, had neat lines drawn around existing coupes that had already been harvested. Initially the maps provided were no use, but eventually we were able to get better GIS data, and we were able to overlay them on Google Earth imagery. Here is one such Contingency Coupe, WE25S, out near Lake Gordon:

Here is a video clip we made of a site visit to that coupe:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRKbOSlT24E&feature=youtu.be

Further images and information can be seen here:  https://www.facebook.com/TasmanianSpecialTimbersAlliance/?fref=ts

And by the way, as my Facebook Memories feed reminded me, Vica and others were in Bonn exactly one year ago today, probably telling some of the massive lies the have become famous for telling at venues all around the planet... It was the meeting of the World Heritage Committee, at which the Reactive Monitoring Mission was established, which visited Tasmania in November, 2015, and for which the report was issued in March, 2016, bearing yet more evidence of corruption and undue influence that pervades the WHC, IUCN and other UN bodies.

How must it feel to be regarded by some as belonging to organisations that are deliberately dishonest, and to be peddling dubious and corrupt information and influence?