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Victoria’s native forestry ban exemplifies the lost perspective of ‘progressive’ politics

By Mark Poynter - posted Thursday, 14 November 2019


Last week in Victoria – our most ‘socially progressive’ state – the Andrews Labor Government announced the phased closure of the state’s 120-year old native forest timber industry, dressed-up as an impossible 10-year ‘transition’ to a plantation timber resource.

While the decision was celebrated in the green-Left heartland of inner Melbourne, it was devastating news for forestry and timber industry workers employed in regional Victoria and in outer suburban wood and furniture manufacturing businesses, where job losses have been estimated at up to 5,000.

In announcing the decision, the government asserted that it was forced by “… a reduction in available native timber resources due to fire and wildlife protection”. While it is true that there is a shrinking available timber resource, the effects of bushfire had already been accounted for in reduced harvest levels, and it was mainly the government’s over-the-top and unlimited wildlife protection regulations which were forcing the industry out of the available forests designated as its timber resource.

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The Victorian timber industry operates on an 80 to 100-year cycle of harvest and regrowth within scattered wood production zones throughout central and eastern Victoria. Collectively these forests that are available and suitable for wood production, comprise just a 6% portion of the state’s 7 million hectares of public native forests. Given this proportionally small zone of activity, alongside the fact that 94% of the forests are acting as conservation reserves, it is almost inconceivable that timber production poses a significant threat to the survival of any species of fauna or flora.

Nevertheless, wildlife protection regulations had been developed to protect rare or endangered species if they were detected in wood production zones. While this is a reasonable concept, the size of the protection buffers being automatically generated around any verified detection sites – varying from three to several hundred hectares depending on the species – are unreasonable for zones that are primarily meant to supply wood. Indeed, over just four years, automatic 12.6 hectare protection buffers established around over 600 verified Leadbeater’s Possum sightings, had substantially reduced and fragmented the available ash forest resource. This was a perverse situation where the industry was being effectively shut out of its most productive forests because there were too many, rather than too few, rare possums.

The government had refused to alleviate this situation by ignoring a pre-determined upper limit of Leadbeater’s Possum protection buffers which acknowledged that wood production zones should be primarily serving that purpose, rather than acting as wildlife preserves. This meant that the government sanctioned unlimited wildlife protection in zones that have long been designated as the industry’s timber resource. A new focus on Greater Gliders at the behest of environmental groups and ecologists was set to further exacerbate this problem.

Despite these significant impediments, the state’s commercial forestry agency, VicForests, had made a good fist of dealing with the challenge and was reportedly close to meeting another Government demand to attain FSC certification, again at some significant cost to the available timber resource. But last year, the Victorian Government heaped further pain on the industry by inexplicably delaying the signing of the annual Allocation Order for 8 months (from September 2018 to May 2019), thereby preventing most of the timber harvesting which normally occurs during the peak summer and autumn season. The resultant sawlog scarcity inflicted substantial hardship to the industry and heightened concerns that the government was actively engineering its demise.

Accordingly, the Andrews Government’s claim that the industry needed to close because it was running out of resource is quite disingenuous given its role in creating the timber shortage. Arguably though, it is the government’s deceitful claims about the supposed environmental benefits of ending native forest harvesting that has poured insult onto injury for forestry and timber workers.

In her media release announcing the planned industry closure, Victorian Environment Minister, Lily D’Ambrosio, said that taking this action would end “… the destruction of our old growth forests” and that her Government will immediately move to protect “90,000 hectares of Victoria’s remaining rare and precious old growth forest – aged up to 600 years old….”.

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This is dishonest because there basically hasn’t been any timber harvesting in such forests for many years. All of Victoria’s contiguous areas of old growth forest had been placed into the formal reserve system by 2009, and harvesting had stopped much earlier in many places eg. in the early 1980s in the Central Highlands. In East Gippsland, the younger forests outside the reserves contain some scattered individual old trees and small patches of old trees (of insufficient size to be classed as forests), but, with some exceptions, these are also largely protected by harvesting prescriptions. According to an industry insider, just 5 – 10% of the claimed 90,000 hectares of ‘old growth’ to be immediately protected, would be actually comprised of old growth trees, and most of this would not have been harvested anyway.

Minister D’Ambrosio went on to claim that closing the native forest timber industry “… will reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere by 1.71 million tonnes of carbon-dioxide-equivalent each year for 25 years – the equivalent of taking 730,000 cars off the road annually”.

It would be fascinating to see the logic that underpins this incredible claim. Most people would appreciate that timber products are renewable and store carbon. Accordingly, timber harvesting is not a carbon emission, but a transference of stored carbon from the forest to the community within usable products. While there are some carbon emissions in machinery use and post-harvest burning associated with timber production, these are being simultaneously recouped by trees regrowing after previous harvesting. If the annual harvesting rate is sustainable, timber protection is effectively carbon neutral.

The climate benefit of timber production has been acknowledged by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) since 2007, when its Fourth Assessment Report(2007) noted:

In the long term, a sustainable forest management strategy aimed at maintaining or increasing forest carbon stocks, while producing an annual yield of timber, fibre, or energy from the forest, will generate the largest sustained mitigation benefit.

Presumably, the Victorian Government’s claim that carbon emissions will be reduced by closing one of the state’s most climate-friendly industries, is based solely on the ongoing growth of trees in the wood production zones in the absence of timber harvesting. However, this inexcusably ignores the consequences of producing less hardwood and the associated carbon emissions that would flow from the response to such a wood shortage. As the IPCC also noted in 2007:  

… stopping all forest harvesting would increase forest carbon stocks,but would reduce the amount of timber and fibre available tomeet societal needs. Other energy-intensive materials, suchas concrete, aluminium, steel, and plastics, would be requiredto replace wood products, resulting in higher GHG emissions.

The Victorian Government has set the nation’s most ambitious carbon emission reduction targets. Given such determination to act on climate change, it doesn’t make any sense to close an industry that produces renewable products which store carbon when it will lead to greater use of alternative emissions-intensive materials and more timber being imported from overseas, mostly from the Asia-Pacific region where there are far greater environmental challenges. Similarly, given that increased bushfire frequency is said to be associated with climate change, it is non-sensical to effectively vacate forests thereby losing the forestry workforce that are frontline fire-fighters, and closing much of the road and track network which typically occurs when there is no longer an economic imperative to maintain it.   

By so spectacularly shooting itself in the foot, concerns have been raised as to who is advising the government on forestry matters. Certainly, Minister D’Ambrosio’s media release is rich in the rhetoric usually associated with environmental activism, and some reports suggest she has an open-door access arrangement with the Wilderness Society.

Indeed, it has been obvious for some time that the Victorian Government is unwilling to listen to those with expertise in forestry and timber, given its biased conduct of several initiatives – the Forest Industry Taskforce and the RFA Modernisation Program – seemingly designed to implement the agenda of environmental groups and an associated cohort of ANU conservation scientists who have targeted their research to discredit Victoria’s native hardwood industry. Despite this research often exhibiting poor understanding of basic forestry concepts and feigned ignorance of important background context, environmental bureaucrats and political advisors have shown themselves to be incapable of seeing through its often flawed assumptions and findings. Perhaps a case of accepting things that you want hear.

The most prominent of these ANU conservation scientists – ecologist David Lindenmayer – has effectively acted as the intellectual figurehead and spokesman for the environmental campaign against Victoria’s timber industry. He has featured prominently on the ABC, often making ill-informed claims about matters beyond his area of scientific expertise – such as transitioning the industry to plantations, claiming knowledge of industry employment, or singing the virtues of eco-tourism. In the days following the Government’s announced industry closure he appeared on ABC Radio implying yet again that just 300 people are employed in Victoria’s native hardwood industry.

His link to the Victorian Government was laid bare in a 2015 article on The Conversation in which he claimed to have been given a written undertaking prior to the 2014 state election, that if it won office, the Andrews Labor Government would declare a huge national park, thereby closing the majority of the state’s native hardwood industry. This is especially interesting because the CFMEU national secretary, Michael O’Connor, responded to last week’s announced timber industry closure by saying: “This debacle … flies in the face of the understanding that our union has had with the Andrews Government since prior to its election in 2014”.

The Victorian Government’s announced closure of the native hardwood industry also included a commitment to fund a transition to plantations in just 10-years, which it claimed would “… ensure a long-term and sustainable future for Victoria’s forestry industry – and for the Victorian workers who rely on it”. Transitioning a sawmilling industry to plantations in such a timeframe is simply an impossibility given the 40 years needed to grow quality wood, but the vagueness of the announcement leaves open the option that these new plantations would be intended only as short-rotation pulpwood to supply Australian Paper – which is a different industry. In response to this, the CFMEU’s Mr O’Connor, noted that promising such an impossible ‘transition’ would make blue collar workers across Australia justifiably “even more sceptical of Labor when they promise a ‘just transition’, as this fiasco speaks louder than their promises”.

Unfortunately, this fiasco seems to be indicative of the current state of so-called ‘progressive politics’ in relation to a range of fashionable causes where policy is effectively being outsourced to minority groups so focussed on their particular agenda as to be incapable of appreciating a broader perspective. In this case, the Victorian Government’s reliance on groups and individuals ideologically determined to end the harvesting of native forests, has blinded it to counter-productive consequences such as increasing carbon emissions and exacerbating the bushfire threat under a drying climate.

Worse than this though, is the manner in which the Victorian Government has facilitated this decision by engineering a timber resource crisis that has pre-emptively weakened the industry, and then grossly misinforming the public as to why action needed to be taken, including citing an impossible transition strategy to give an appearance of softening the blow. This demonstrates a complete lack of appreciation that acquiescing to ideological demands can have hugely unfair and damaging consequences for workers, many of whom in this instance will likely become a social welfare burden given that they reside in areas where there is little or no alternative employment.

Environment Minister D’Ambrosio, proudly said that: “By 2030, Victoria will be home to an area of native forest protected from logging that is larger than the entire land mass of Tasmania”. Of course, her government has actually protected nothing as should be evident from the catastrophic bushfires currently afflicting NSW and QLD. On the contrary, closing the timber industry will increase the threat faced by Victoria’s forested environments. But it is also pertinent to ask whether, in a world where there is increasing urgency to reduce forest loss and degradation in developing countries driven by factors including Western demand for wood, should Victorians be proud of producing nothing from our 7 million hectares area of native forest?

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About the Author

Mark Poynter is a professional forester with 40 years experience. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Foresters of Australia and his book Going Green: Forests, fire, and a flawed conservation culture, was published by Connor Court in July 2018.

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