Native forestry closures betray a nation that is losing its way

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.