It took just 10 minutes for the United Nations’ World Heritage Committee to reject a move by Australia’s conservative Liberal-National government to delist a large area of forest from Tasmania’s World Heritage Area (WHA).
The UNESCO Committee that administers the World Heritage listing, meeting in Doha, dismissed the government’s application to reverse protection for 74,000 hectares.
The area was part of 170,000 hectares added to the WHA last year under Tasmania’s forest peace deal enacted by the former state and federal Labor governments.
Conservation groups, including former Australian Greens Party leader Bob Brown quickly welcomed news of the decision describing it as a “global diplomatic humiliation” for the Australian government.
The coalition government had argued the 74,000 hectares were degraded by previous logging and should be unlocked for the timber industry.
However, opponents to the move said only 8.6 per cent of the forests had been disturbed, with the rest being pristine old-growth rainforest.
In Doha there was little discussion before the decision with only delegates from Portugal saying “accepting this delisting would set an unacceptable precedent”.
Wilderness Society campaign manager Vica Bayley said the decision showed the world was behind preserving the forest.
“Over here in Doha, environmentalists and Aboriginal Tasmanians are together welcoming this decision because it does protect the integrity of the Tasmanian World Heritage Area and it would protect that in perpetuity,” he said.
The conservative Liberal-National Prime Minister Tony Abbott said the government would study the UN’s decision before deciding on its next move, but was disappointed with the development.
“The application that we made to remove from the boundaries of the World Heritage listing, areas of degraded forest, areas of plantation timber, we thought was self-evidently sensible,” he said.
A spokesman for the Tasmanian Government said it was disappointed with the outcome but would accept the umpire’s decision.
Liberal Senator Richard Colbeck, the parliamentary secretary to the Minister for Agriculture and one of the major proponents of delisting the forests, said the ruling would hurt Tasmania’s struggling timber industry.
Australian Greens leader Senator Christine Milne described the decision as a great win for forests, for wildlife and for Tasmania.
“Thankfully the world community doesn’t believe political point scoring is a legitimate reason to abandon a globally significant area and to destroy the outstanding universal values for which it is famous,” she said.
