From the Melbourne Age 1/4/02 By Claire Miller
Environment Reporter

The State Government has spent more than $420,000 battling conservationists who are disrupting logging in Goolengook in East Gippsland.

The costs, since Victoria's longest-lived forest blockade was busted on March 5 and logging began, have exceeded the timber's nominal value of between $250,000 and $350,000. The Department of Natural Resources and Environment has declared a 25-kilometre public exclusion zone with manned road blocks around Goolengook, where four crews are clear-felling four coupes totalling 90 hectares.

But conservationists continue to enter the coupes where they disrupt logging by locking on to machinery and maintaining tree sits. More than 50 people have been arrested. A department spokeswoman said it would be several weeks before operational costs were calculated.

Sources said DNRE was spending between $15,000 and $18,000 a day on maintaining its staff and facilities in Goolengook to keep conservationists at bay. The figure does not include the strong police presence. Logging is expected to take another two to three weeks to complete.

A spokesman for the Environment and Conservation Minister, Sherryl Garbutt, said the state could be liable for millions of dollars if it did not meet licence commitments. He said leaving Goolengook might not save money because activists had threatened to disrupt crews elsewhere.

The spokesman said regional sawlog volumes would be reduced by 43 per cent under recently announced cutbacks, and contractors would be upset if they were denied access to an area designated for logging under the prevailing 20-year Commonwealth-State Regional Forest Agreement.

He said the department had a duty to provide access to the resource. A campaigner at the Goongerah Environment Centre, Fiona York, said Goolengook was the priority on a list of contentious areas containing old growth or habitat for endangered species. She said crews would be left in peace if they were not working in contentious coupes.

Forestry Victoria general manager Peter Rutherford said the four Goolengook coupes would yield an expected 9000 cubic metres of sawlogs, and up to 10,000 cubic metres of woodchips.