Native forestry closures betray a nation that is losing its way

In a few weeks, the curtain will be drawn on generations of domestic hardwood timber production from the public native forests of both Victoria and WA after their respective state Labor governments announced it would end at the close of 2023.

A perpetual cycle of timber harvesting and regrowth limited to within a designated small portion of a hugely greater forested area, should be a relatively innocuous land use. Using Victoria as the example, all current and future timber production was limited to within just a 6% portion of the state's 6.7 million hectares of public native forests, within which around 3,000 hectares was being annually harvested and regenerated. This annually harvested area represented just a tiny 0.00045 fraction of the total 6.7 million hectares of forest.

It is ludicrous to suggest that such a proportionally tiny rate of renewable forest use could pose an existential threat to any species of flora or fauna. Indeed, it has been acknowledged in the past that forestry in Australia has never been responsible for any species' extinction. Nevertheless, despite this reality, the political decision to end timber production in Victoria's native forests was effectively predicated on an irrational belief that it posed a substantial threat of species extinctions.

That this represents a staggering lack of logic is exemplified by a recent article in the Saturday Paper by Bob Brown, in which he described sending the PM, Anthony Albanese, a 1.3 second audio recording of an endangered swift parrot call while a chainsaw roars in the background. Recorded at a protest-ridden logging coupe in southern Tasmania, Brown describes it as "one of the most poignant recordings in Australia's natural history" which illustrates to Albanese the choice he needs to make between "the rescue of the honey-eating swift parrots from extinction or the ongoing needless destruction of their forest habitat".

The obvious flaw with this 'choice' is that harvesting and regenerating small patches of forest cannot be held solely responsible for the decline of a bird species that migrates each year to mainland Australia (with all the pressures that it faces there) and is subject to savage predation by introduced sugar gliders while breeding in Tasmania. Nevertheless, Tasmanian forestry authorities have already substantially modified timber production plans and practices to minimise impacts to the swift parrot, including ending timber harvesting altogether on Bruny Island which is recognised as a key breeding ground.

It follows that enacting Brown's call for an end to Tasmanian native forest timber production would devastate a significant industry for little benefit to the swift parrot; but his stunt is nevertheless instructive in exemplifying the growing propensity for activists to illogically misrepresent a threat to an individual animal or bird as a virtual extinction event.

Traditionally, the impact of timber production on wildlife conservation has been managed at a landscape-scale, whereby any impacts incurred on harvesting sites were overwhelmingly diluted by the reality that most forests where wildlife occurs are reserved and/or not subject to logging. This far greater area of unused forests forms the bastion of biodiversity conservation. Accordingly, it has been appropriate for forestry practices to minimise adverse wildlife impacts during timber harvesting, rather than to try to totally avoid them which would, in any case, be incompatible with the felling of trees and production of logs for the timber industry.

However, in recent years in Victoria, an eco-activists' demand that every individual rare, threatened, or endangered animal or plant be effectively guaranteed protection on timber harvesting sites has increasingly infiltrated the environmental bureaucracy, ultimately finding its way into government policy. This trend was accelerated by a series of legal challenges by activists against the government's forestry agency, VicForests, which was effectively encouraged by the Victorian Environment Minister's (deliberate?) inaction in relation to technical legal loopholes that were being exploited by activist litigants.

Some unexpected and perplexing judgements arising from several of these legal cases demanded that VicForests metaphorically find out the names and addresses of all individual endangered animals living within any proposed harvesting coupe before operations could proceed. The intensity of costly wildlife surveying that was demanded effectively transformed VicForests into a wildlife conservation agency, significantly constraining its capability to cost-effectively fulfill its primary function of timber harvesting.

Where these pre-harvest surveys detected the presence of an individual of an endangered species, mandated exclusion zones were applied around each detection site, and in many cases these reserves left so few trees still available for harvest as to render coupes unviable before their harvesting even started.

The substantial size of these exclusion zones had been pre-determined and agreed to on the basis of the expected rarity of endangered species, but the surveys actually found them to be relatively common thereby creating the perversely ironic situation whereby timber harvesting was being effectively shut-out of the designated production forests because supposedly endangered species were not rare at all. As the Victorian Environment Minister rejected calls to revise the need for and/or size of these exclusion zones, the native timber industry was being starved of logs and was effectively dying, even before the government finally announced its closure.

The politically-forced Victorian forestry debacle exemplifies a danger for other Australian resource use industries that, if they are also forced to accept this new standard of over-the-top wildlife protection, it will ultimately also constrain their primary function and destroy them. This is undoubtedly the intention of the likes of Bob Brown and his activist cohorts, while there is also concern that Federal Environment Minister, Tanya Plibersek, may buy into this approach given her unwavering determination to prevent species extinctions under her watch.

Already in Tasmania, an endangered fish – the Maugean skate – is being appropriated by environmental activists as the campaign vehicle to force the closure of a salmon aquaculture industry in Macquarie Harbour on the state's west coast. Typical of activist campaigns, it has never acknowledged that the Maugean skate has disappeared from nearby Bathurst Harbour where there has never been an aquaculture industry, undoubtedly because this would show that a range of other factors, apart from salmon aquaculture, are the major drivers of the skate's decline.

This sort of deceit by omission is all too common in environmental activist campaigns. A current example, is a television advert by the World Wildlife Fund calling for donations to save the koala from supposedly imminent extinction. Far from being on the brink of extinction, the most recent government estimate of the koala population in Victoria alone, is 460,000 animals, including 46,000 living in eucalypt plantations that are the future hardwood source now that native forests are off-limits. How long before eco-activists are demanding that these plantations are also reserved for koala habitat?

Undoubtedly, deceptively one-sided environmental campaigning and unquestioning media reporting has been hugely successful in manufacturing a skewed and incomplete view of resource-use that demonises industries as environmental villians. This has convinced Labor state governments that a huge cache of urban-based votes can be secured by down-sizing or closing resource use industries in the name of environmental protection, despite most public support for this being based on misguided beliefs about easy alternatives, and an ignorance of seriously adverse consequences.

In reality the populist notion that environmental benefit can be easily attained by closing down resource use industries and creating more protected reserves, is dangerously simplistic. Using Victoria's forests as an example, the upcoming closure of the already small native timber industry will not improve conservation outcomes because any marginal benefit in not harvesting in a minor portion of the state's forests will be more than counteracted by the weakened capacity to manage far more damaging bushfires due to the loss of forestry and timber sector workforces that were traditionally the premier fire-fighters. Unnatural fire regimes and introduced feral species have always been the infinitely greatest threats to forest ecology and this will remain the case after the timber industry is gone.

Aside from this, it has made no sense to close timber industries when there is a dire shortage of building materials during a housing boom. It is also a sovereign risk for Australia to become even more reliant on imports of tropical rainforest timbers to meet the enduring strong demand for durable and decorative hardwood products. Any notion of plantation grown-hardwoods replacing the timber volumes previously sourced from Victorian native forests, is at least 40 – 50 years away (if at all) despite alternative activist and Labor government rhetoric.

Then there is the questionable morality of an affluent first world nation like Australia, opting not to use vast swathes of its own forest resources given that it is amongst the top ten nations for per capita forest cover, and in the top five per capita consumers of wood products. We can certainly expect this to be noticed by those developing nations that are expected to increasingly meet our hardwood needs despite grappling with endemic corruption and illegal logging.

It is apparent that the Victorian and WA native timber industries have effectively been sacrificed for no good reason beyond fulfilling a party political ideology which is popular primarily in inner urban electorates. It is only Labor Governments, both state and federal, that have actively down-sized native timber industries over the past 20 years, and are now closing them. Given that Labor's forest policies are shaped by an internal environmental policy network founded and still presided over by a former Wilderness Society career activist, we should probably not be surprised.

Native forestry has been testing ground for anti-natural resource use campaigns that are typically dangerously misguided and lacking in perspective. Accordingly, there are understandable fears that over-the-top environmental restrictions will be increasingly championed by Labor in relation to other resource use industries that we also rely on. It is disturbing that Australian Labor governments seem to find it politically more palatable to callously close important industries than to fight for their survival. Indeed, it is hard not to think that, as a nation, Australia is losing its way.