Many people have called into my electorate office to express their concern at plans to extend existing controls over the use of firewood. The detail in the Government’s discussion paper is intimidating to the average firewood user.

While it goes into minute detail on the environmental effects of using wood as fuel, it does not relate these effects to the use of alternative fuels. Apart from renewable sources such as solar, wind, etc., which currently meet a negligible portion of the State’s needs, coal, oil and gas are the major fuels used. These are largely the products of forests and living organisms buried by nature millions of years ago and, without human intervention, would forever remain deep in the ground and the by-products of their use would never affect the atmosphere. By contrast, wood unless it is buried by some means or another, sooner or later will either burn or rot releasing roughly the same quantity of greenhouse gases by either process.

In fact, wood is part of the process of recycling elements in the air and the surface of the earth, aided by the sun that makes life on earth possible.

The effect of heat pollution generated by the use of energy in the metropolitan area far exceeds the impact of using firewood in country homes. It has been estimated that the mean winter temperature of the metropolitan area has risen by 4o leading to fruit bats now finding it warm enough to remain year round in the Botanic Gardens.
It is difficult for country people who have seen the effect of massive bushfires that have occurred in the past to imagine how the use of a small amount of firewood can have any real impact on biodiversity.

Firewood collectors reduce rather than add to environmental damage by utilising material that will add to the intensity of a bushfire when it occurs. It is the nature of eucalypts to drop large quantities of small and large branches that build up to become a major factor in the massive fires that periodically ravage forests and farmlands alike.

Gippslanders recognise that fire, in small doses, is an essential part of the life cycle of forests. Nature repairs the damage in time but the more severe the fire, the greater the danger of other forces such as erosion doing more permanent and widespread damage. For many people, firewood collecting is not only an economic source of fuel, it also is a healthy family day out with a picnic in the bush and an education of their children in an appreciation of nature.

If the government can “ring fence” us into paying higher charges for electricity, it can ring fence us out of restrictive firewood regulations.