VicForests – serial defendants to environmental cases

VicForests is becoming a familiar defendant in the Victorian Supreme Court. In late 2010 the Court found it guilty of intending to illegally log an old growth forest near Brown Mountain that supports protected rare and endangered wildlife. Now they are again in the same court defending their actions to destroy Victoria’s faunal emblem, the …

Continue reading

Wide scale salvage logging linked to log dump destruction

During the 2009 bushfires, a huge log dump near Marysville was destroyed by fire. Michael Ryan from VicForests stated that 50,000 tonnes of pulpwood had been destroyed – around 10% of the total annual production of pulp logs for this area. The log dump was located near Marysville surrounded by tinder dry forest. Photographs of …

Continue reading

Foresters still confused over a rainforest

The fifth EPA audit of logging has been released recently and shows that DSE/VicForests is still incapable of ensuring full compliance with the Code of Practice. The report checked logging done at 41 logging coupes during the 2006/7 financial year and its findings include:More than 10% of coupes had fires that escaped outside the logging …

Continue reading

VicForests compares apples with Jerusalem artichokes.

VicForest foresters and PR men always like to present their ‘facts’ as unquestionable science and anyone who dares question them are blasphemers.Well – get a load of their latest ‘home brand’ fact sheet on logging. VicForests are proudly peddling this small two page glossy on their homepage and it’s a truly amazing mishmash of statistics …

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

Call for inquiry as salvaged wood exported

THE Ombudsman has been asked to investigate VicForests for allowing thousands of tonnes of wood salvaged from the Black Saturday bushfires to be exported to China in breach of a government contract. The Wilderness Society has lodged a complaint with Ombudsman George Brouwer after VicForests confirmed a private company, Pinex Logging, had breached a contract …

Continue reading

China Logs

TWS Vic and MyEnvironment Inc. have played private eye for the last 12 weeks to study a supply chain of logs that have been leaving our fire ravaged forest and ending up in Footscray. The forest were once home to the endangered faunal emblem of Vic – the Leadbeaters Possum. The supply chain is a …

Continue reading

VicForests has credit extended

THE financial woes of the state government’s commercial forestry arm VicForests have deepened, with it forced to go back to Treasury for a bigger loan. VicForests’ line of credit with Treasury has doubled in three years, from $12.5 million in 2009 to $25 million this year, as the company struggles with cash-flow problems. The deepening …

Continue reading