Howard also unveiled a $50 million plan to assist the timber industry and promised there would be no job losses.
Conservation groups have condemned Howard's plan as a travesty.
The Wilderness Society, the Australian Conservation Foundation and Greenpeace joined forces to attack the plan.
Alec Marr from the Wilderness Society says it is a con job.
"Most of that 170,000 hectares is not trees and big chunks of it are the areas that were too remote and too uncommercial for the industry to log," he said.
"What John Howard has done is taken scraps thrown to him by the woodchip companies and the Tasmanian Government and tried to dress it up as a conservation outcome.
"So what they've cynically done is take the important names like the Styx and the Tarkine and protected little bits of them, the bits that the logging industry didn't want."
The Wilderness Society says that there is no commitment to ending land clearing, which it says is one the biggest problems.
Greens Senator Bob Brown says Mr Howard is offering to protect about one-third of what Opposition Leader Mark Latham has promised to save.
"What John Howard has done is pick bits and pieces from the Tarkine, from the Styx, from other forests in the eastern highlands and said 'we'll allow those to be protected but we're ultimately guaranteeing that large areas also go to the woodchip mills'," he said.
He has now asked his party to give preferences to Labor in another 26 seats.
"I've asked the party tonight to contact those electorates in the view of this appalling destruction of forests, imminent in the policy that's been greeted by the loggers today with handshakes from Prime Minister Howard, but which sells out this nation's heritage, to review that decision by those electorates," he said.
"I'll be hopefully able to coordinate or collect that data and pass that on to the electorate between now and Saturday."
Labor's forestry spokesman Joel Fitzgibbon says it does nothing to protect the most threatened old-growth forests in Tasmania.
"Not one additional hectare of old-growth forests will be protected as a result of John Howard's policy," he said.
The Forestry Union's Michael O'Connor says Mr Howard's package falls short of union demands.
"We don't want to give up one hectare, one tree, we don't want any changes to the Regional Forests Agreement, that's our position," he said.
"There's only two politicians that support making no appeasement to the Greens and that seems to be Paul Lennon and Dick Adams."
The pro-logging Labor member for the Tasmanian seat of Lyons, Dick Adams, says he cannot support either of the major parties' forestry policies.
Having already spoken out against his own party's forest plan, he has also denounced Howard's policy because it involves locking up more land.
While he concedes the Liberal plan would lock up fewer trees, he would not say he supported that policy over Labor's.
"There is a difference here and I don't support locking up any more of Tasmania's forests," he said.
"The decision today by Howard was to do that so I don't support that."
By Green Not Greed 6 October 04
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