Former Greens leader Bob Brown’s eponymous environment group has lost a legal challenge to native forest logging in Tasmania that claimed the industry’s logging was at odds with federal conservation laws.
The case by the Bob Brown Foundation, lodged in the federal court in August and billed by the group as “the great forest case”, argued an effective exemption from environment laws granted to logging meant a regional forestry agreement between the federal and Tasmanian governments was not legally valid.
Lawyers for the foundation said the agreement lacked an enforceable requirement that the state must protect threatened species, particularly the critically endangered swift parrot.
In a judgment on Wednesday, the full federal court said the forestry agreement was legally binding.
The loss is a significant blow for the foundation, which had run a fundraising drive to support the case.
Brown told Guardian Australia the judgment would not stop the group’s campaign against native forestry.
He described it as “small beer” compared with campaigners’ defeat at the Tasmanian state election in 1982, after which it appeared certain the Franklin Dam in the state’s south-west would be built.
The Franklin became Australia’s most celebrated environmental campaign, and the dam was famously stopped the following year after the Bob Hawke-led Labor party won the federal election in part on a pledge to protect the river.
Brown said the foundation would consider the judgment before deciding whether to appeal. He said it in part reflected the nature of the law, which he believed had been designed to allow logging, not protect the environment.
“We will protect native forests in Australia, the only question is how soon,” he said. “Legal action is only one action in our quiver.”
Tasmanian senator Jonno Duniam, the federal assistant minister for forestry, said the judgment was “a win for Australia’s forest industry” and called on Brown to accept the court decision.
“This is a victory for every hard-working man and woman in forestry across the nation,” Duniam said.
“Bob Brown is the loser in today’s judgment. Once again, his attempt to use lawfare to shut down forestry has failed.”
Forestry’s exemption from the national Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act has been contentious since regional forestry agreements were introduced in the 1990s.
An official review of the laws by the competition watchdog, Graeme Samuel, last week called on the Morrison government to abolish the exemption as part of a major overhaul of the EPBC Act.
The Australian Forest Products Association said the court judgment was a “strong endorsement of Australia’s sustainable native timber industry”. The Tasmanian resources minister, Guy Barnett, agreed, saying the court had backed “sustainable forest practices”.
Janet Rice, the Australian Greens forests spokesperson, said it just showed national environment laws were “completely broken” and failing to protect forests “from destruction”.
The foundation had said if the case was successful it would consider similar action against federal-state forest agreements in Victoria, New South Wales and Western Australia.
A landmark federal court judgment in May last year found logging in Victoria’s central highlands by the state-owned agency VicForests was in breach of a regional forest agreement. VicForests is appealing that judgment.
