Nationwide, the native timber industry’s survival is under threat.
Victoria has banned native logging on Crown land from next year.
A similar ban in Western Australia, the first Australian state to stop native logging, will apply from January 2024.
And a court action to halt logging is currently underway in Tasmania and New South Wales.
The Greens, environment groups, and sections of the federal Labor Party all want a nationwide end to native logging.
A motion to end logging across Australia was defeated at the Labor Party’s national conference in Brisbane this week, after strong lobbying from senior Labor figures.
But the pressure is still on at the state level.
“The decent thing here is that Tasmania should be following Victoria and Western Australia, and ending native logging and destruction and extinction of our species,” former Greens Senator Bob Brown recently told the ABC.
‘A very courageous step’
Environment groups are thrilled about the impending end of Victoria’s native timber industry.
Wilderness Society national campaigns director Amelia Young said vast areas of forest in Victoria had been “badly mismanaged” for too long.
“So it’s very welcome that the government has decided to remove industrial logging from them,” she said.
Ecologist and forestry academic Chris Taylor, from the Australian National University Environment School, agreed it was a good decision.
“The government needs to be congratulated on taking this bold step,” Dr Taylor said.
“It was a very courageous step, one that was long overdue.”
But some experts fear the loss of local timber will have devastating consequences for many developing nations, hasten the destruction of whole ecosystems and accelerate the extinction of perilously threatened species.
Overseas imports
Tyron Venn, an agricultural and natural resource economist at the University of Queensland, has studied forestry systems in Australia and overseas for more than two decades.
He said native timber production in Australia had almost halved since 1995, by around 2.2 million cubic metres.
But that shortfall has been largely replaced by timber imports from Asia and the Pacific, principally China.
“China imports or gets … logs from places like Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Ghana, Thailand, Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia,” Dr Venn said.
He said those logs were processed and exported from China to Australia.
“We also import a lot of products from Malaysia and Indonesia,” he said.
“We know that plantation timbers and native forest timbers from Malaysia are associated with the decline of the orangutan, Malayan Tiger and other endangered species in Asia.”
