Gloves, are, off, Tasmanian, forests

People from communities that depend on Tasmania’s timber industries are as mad as hell at protesters threatening their livelihoods and they’re not going to take it any more. 

Timber workers have decided to give forest activists a dose of their own medicine by releasing photographs to Asian Correspondent that they say show the rubbish, including abandoned car bodies, that environmentalists have left behind in their forest camps in southern Tasmania. 

Rex Flakemore, a retired forest worker from Tasmania’s Timber Communities Australia (TCA) doesn’t mince his words:

“These protesters preach about looking after the environment, yet in reality they are two-faced. What they created and then abandoned in the Florentine Valley can only be described as a dirty, filthy slum.” 

Mr Flakemore rejects claims by the protesters that they did not have time to remove the rubbish.

“These so-called protectors of wilderness should have never dumped trash and wrecked car bodies there in the first place, but if they really were that concerned they have had plenty of time to remove their trash. TCA was able to gain permission to commence the clean up, so why didn’t they? We know they have the means, because they took the trash and car bodies there in the first place with no trouble.”

State Coordinator of TCA, Barry Chipman said his organization had recently upset the protest leaders when they made a public display of the photographs outside Parliament House in Hobart.

“Not long after we set up the display a number of activists claiming to be from the protest camp turned up with the aim of preventing people from seeing the pictures – they definitely don’t want people to see these photographs. Environmentalists tell us we all must ‘Think globally act locally’, but it seems that they are not practicing their own slogan,” he said.

Flakemore said continued illegal protests leave timber families confused and stressed from the constant pressure of uncertainty created. 

“Everyone should have the right to go to work," he said. "If these radical protesters are content to create and live in slums then they should go do it in their own backyard and not burden forest working families with the aftermath of their illegal antics.”