The logging industry has been on massive welfare payments for years, despite it claiming it is profitable. Our taxes pay to have our forests destroyed.
The industry is a dead loss in many ways.

Our taxes wasted on logging industry payouts

This one is a ripper if you take a moment to read it. Andrew Darby, an Age journo based in Hobart, revealed in early January that the $45 million of our taxes about to be handed to Tasmanian loggers could be money down the drain. One exit program of the Howard era was supposed to …

Continue reading

Taxpayers stump up for logging policy failures

As $45 million of your taxes is about to be divvied up for broke loggers, a worrying precedent has come to light that raises serious questions about this bailout of a struggling industry.   Attempts by successive federal governments to pay businesses out of the native forest industry in Tasmania have failed to meet basic benchmarks …

Continue reading

Is using native forests for energy really carbon-neutral?

Australia’s forest conflict gets easier to solve as every day passes. In reality, the conflict will solve itself if the government can just resist reviving the environmentally and economically inferior native forest part of Australia’s “forest” industry. The government must not open native forest wood to the energy market. Some are proposing that Australia’s forest …

Continue reading

Blasphemy from a forester

Until he returned recently to Australia, expatriate Jim Douglas had spent the last eight years as the World Bank’s Forests Adviser in Washington. Writing a guest editorial in “Australian Forestry”, he had this to say about Australia’s forests: “I will go out on a limb here and suggest that the conservation, recreation and carbon values …

Continue reading

Australia’s forestry crisis

This one simple graph tells the story; the orange line shows the declining level of sawn timber coming from native forests – down down down it goes. At the same time the export of native forests has skyrocketed – only dropping slightly due to the slump in the overseas market. This is for a number …

Continue reading

Native forests for Bioenergy or Biodiversity

Dr Judith Ajani analyses the arguments of both sides of the forestry debate about whether native forests should be used for bioenergy or biodiversity. Australia’s forestry industry and foresters argue that, from a climate change perspective, we should substitute fossil fuels and emission-intensive products with native forest wood, highlighting the fact that trees re-grow. Ecological …

Continue reading

More to logs than jobs

Logging the forests of south east Australia releases three per cent of our carbon dioxide emissions, and destroys precious biodiversity. Yet this activity is subsidised by our governments. FORTY YEARS AGO, the NSW Government agreed to supply 5,000 tons of waste from saw logs to the newly established export woodchip mill at Eden. A Japanese …

Continue reading

VicForests’ hypocrisy highlighted by their own plantation report

A report commissioned by VicForests has shown that there is enough plantation wood in Victoria to end native forest woodchipping for paper production in Victoria. For years, VicForests has been misleading the public by saying that there is not enough plantation wood to make paper here in Australia. This rhetoric has lead them to continue …

Continue reading

Latest logging audit spin

How can an audit that has found environmental breaches on almost all the coupes checked possibly end up with a result of 93% compliance?The latest audit of logging in Victoria’s forests will leave many environmentalists convinced that these Audits are totally worthless exercises that have done nothing to protect biodiversity in our forests. One of …

Continue reading

Baillieu govt rewards VicForests for bad management

VicForests has again been given aid of almost $1.3 million to clean up degraded clearfelled public forests that should have been rehabilitated and paid for by VicForests years ago. “What other business has made a loss every year yet is rewarded by millions of dollars of tax payers money to keep going?” asked Jill Redwood …

Continue reading