Evironmental ideology: killing a Victorian rural industry by stealth

It is notable that new Leadbeater’s Possum detections have now become so numerous that its critically endangered status is under review by the Federal Government; and acutely ironic that the industry is now being denied access to forests because there are too many possums rather than too few! 

The Victorian Government’s predilection for appeasing environmental ideology, suggests that it is happy for the lives and livelihoods of rural workers and their communities to be ridden over roughshod by eco-activists who “know” what is best for their nature-pure agendas, but don’t understand that the best management usually involves compromise and people.

The extent and severity of Victoria’s current bushfire situation is already ample proof of the greater ecological price to be paid when time-proven forest management practices are overridden by the sort of ‘green’ thinking that prevents prescribed cool burns on narrow ecological grounds, or encourages anti-logging protesters to prevent logging machinery being shifted to help fight bushfires. Instances of both of these scenarios have been documented in relation to last week’s West Gippsland bushfires. 

Further to this, the current temporary (?) unemployment of timber industry contractors reportedly led to a lengthened time taken to begin fighting several of these fires, to an extent where they were enabled to grew far bigger and more environmentally damaging than would otherwise have been the case.

In time, it will be more widely recognised that evicting timber production from the Australian bush has been counter-productive to good environmental outcomes given how it weakens fire management capability. The question is whether this realisation will come soon enough to save a meaningful timber industry from governments seemingly intent on virtue signalling to appease environmental ideologues.