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 …
Being such an environmentally sensitive logging agency, VicForests decided to do a bit of self promotion by claiming it had found a giant tree that it will save. Halleluiah. They claim the tree is the first to be protected under VicForests’ new Giant Tree Protection policy. Well, the DSE introduced this prescription in 2004! So …
The report to Treasury on the performance of VicForests was revealed in late February via an FOI by the Age newspaper. >Read it here. . It details much of their mismanagement and appalling behaviour. They have illegally logged forests, not adhered to their charter, not regenerated thousands of hectares of logged forest, lost millions of …
After a complaint was made about the content of VicForests’ “Flora, Fauna and Wood Production” factsheet, they have pulled it off their web site and replaced it with several new “fact” sheets that are just about as bad as the original. VicForests has been running around media outlets trying to build “relationships” and in the …
With the late 2010 state election out of the way, VicForests released its 2010 Sustainability report, a classic piece of Spin from the last days of the Brumby era. This year VicForests appears to be more concerned with hosing down community concerns over salvage logging and biodiversity protection than providing any information about its performance …
Recent checks by EEG of VicForests corporate reports have found examples of VicForests blatantly misrepresenting its environmental performance in a recent corporate report. VicForests has boasted in its 2008 Corporate Plan Highlights report that there had been “measurable improvements in the environmental performance of forest management operations on State forest.” VicForests has boasted in its …
This map showed the unparalleled mapping of logging coupes planned to wipe out an entire landscape. VicForests plotted these coupes on the map just after the Brown Mt Court case in 2010. If we didn’t know them any better we’d say this was an act of revenge. This area is just to the west of …
After discussions between green groups and the certifying agents of the Forest Stewardship Council in mid 2009 – supposedly the most reputable forest certifying body in the world, VicForests were thankfully refused endorsement by the FSC. Certifying logging – should we ever endorse native forest logging? In 2007 the logging industry was desperately grabbing for …
Last year almost a third of the native forest logs that came from East Gippsland was sold to the Geelong-based export woodchipper Midway. The state-owned logging enterprise, VicForests, sold them as dirt cheap, low-grade pulp logs. The Victorian Government has undermined its own forests policy that says public forest logs must be sold so that …
MOST of the trees logged in Victoria’s native forests last year ended up as pulp, much of it exported to Japan to become photocopying paper. More than 85% of the 1.59 million cubic metres of the state’s native forest logged last financial year, the equivalent of 4745 MCGs, was turned into woodchips, sawdust and waste. …
