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.
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.
The Victorian Government has struck a deal to keep open Australia’s largest hardwood sawmill, at Heyfield in Victoria’s east, but workers are warning up to 20 contractors could be out of work in weeks. The mill’s operator, Australian Sustainable Hardwoods (ASH), had been locked in a dispute with the Government and state-owned logging company VicForests …
The Andrews government has been told it must choose between saving Victoria’s endangered emblem the Leadbeater’s possum or hundreds of timber industry jobs. The government’s forest taskforce has been told the only way to save the Leadbeater’s Possum, is to stop logging in the Central Highlands. The highlands are home to the vast majority of …
A parliamentary inquiry into Victoria’s forestry body won’t be a “witch hunt” because it is simply designed to get some answers for the state’s ailing timber mills, Victorian MP Jeff Bourman says. Mr Bourman, an MP for the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party, has established a parliamentary inquiry into VicForests, who manage the state’s timber …
THE people of the Latrobe Valley are right to be dismayed by the looming fate of the Australian Sustainable Hardwoods mill at Heyfield. Gippsland has long been the centre of the hardwood timber industry in Victoria, and the hardwood timber industry has long played a major part in Gippsland’s development and in its prosperity. The …
The impending closure of Heyfield sawmill has pitted senior federal ministers against each other, a premier, farmers and conservationists. By Karen Middleton. In the federal government, Josh Frydenberg is, among other things, the minister for protecting wildlife and saving trees. In the agriculture portfolio, his Nationals colleague Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce is effectively the …
How ironic that the timber industry chose March 21st, International Forest Day, to barricade Parliament with logging trucks and demand accelerated logging of the dwindling mature forests of the Central Highlands! When the rest of the world was reflecting on the benefits of forest wilderness for people, for economies and for the planet itself, we …
Josh Frydenberg’s actions belie his words and show a disregard for the significance of forests to our survival, writes Dr Oisin Sweeney. ON THE MORNING of 21 March, I got a call from a journalist in response to a media release our organisation, the National Parks Association of NSW (NPA), had put out for International …
Matt Ruchel, member of the Forest Industry Task Force and our executive director, explains why sawmills and the pulp and paper industry don’t understand how forests work. Forests are living ecosystems, not magic puddings, and cannot supply something that doesn’t exist. The recent declaration by VicForests, the state government’s logging agency, that there is insufficient …
LIKE politician Danny O’Brien, I’m angry about the Australian Sustainable Hardwoods sawmill debacle. Very angry. This disaster should have been avoided. Successive governments, of all persuasions, have badly mismanaged timber resources. A sawmill company is now gaming the system, demanding access to timber it knows is not there. Sawmill workers will be losers. But so …
Hundreds of timber industry job losses could be offset with $45 million in government and private investment into a new national park in eastern Victoria, The Wilderness Society says. The 500,000 hectares of forest, east of Melbourne, is home to the critically endangered Leadbeater’s Possum, but also provides timber for Australia’s largest hardwood processor at …
