Why reignite Tasmania's forest wars – to produce logs no one will buy? | Lenore Taylor

The state government's determination to open up protected land for logging is a saga that moves from ridiculous to absurd

I thought I'd seen the turbid depths of policy driven by ideology and perceived political self-interest, but then I turned my attention back to the Tasmanian forest "wars".

I first started reporting on this issue in 1988 when Bob Hawke and his environment minister Graham Richardson appointed a former judge, the late Michael Helsham, to investigate whether parts of the Tasmanian forest were worthy of world heritage listing. That resulted in the first of many agreements over the decades (in 1989, 1997, 2005 and 2013) in which federal and state governments paid hundreds of millions of dollars to "end the forest wars once and for all" by restructuring the industry and determining which forests should be protected and which should be open to logging.