Introduction

The most popular emoji of 2022 was, according to Brandwatch, the laughing-crying emoji. Tasmania’s north-west newspaper, The Advocate, doesn’t let readers add emojis to online articles but if I could, I would have added about 20 to the article, titled ‘Liberal support for our forestry industry’, by Tasmanian’s Forestry Minister, Felix Ellis. 

It was hard to read it through the flowing tears and manic laughter. There is a real risk that Advocate readers believed what Mr Ellis said. We thought it was important to correct the public record. (Insert ‘grab-your-popcorn’ emoji here.) 

Tasmania’s Liberal Government has most recently overseen the native forestry industry since 2014. In those nine years, and for many before it too, the native forestry industry has continued to shrink: losing jobs and investment while species go extinct and habitat is destroyed. Meanwhile, the larger plantation forestry part of the industry continues to grow and attract investment and add jobs.

This is the opposite of what Regional Forest Agreements (RFAs) were designed to do. RFAs are agreements that cover native forest logging across the continent and suspend the national environment laws from applying to logging operations. RFAs were an attempt in the 1990s to avoid the conflict that dogged industrial logging for decades and, a cynic might suggest, shunt this conflict from the Prime Minister’s desk to that of state premiers. 

At the same time, RFAs are exempted from logging from Australia’s national environment laws, the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act,. This exemption from federal environmental law is further exacerbated by the Forestry Management Act that requires in law Forestry Tasmania to produce a quota of wood – 137,000 metric tonnes per year. (Redolent of Soviet Russia, imagine a law requiring bakeries to produce 10,000 loaves of bread annually – or else! And this from a party that says it believes in small government and big markets.)

When signing the first RFA with then Tasmanian Premier Tony Rundle in 1998, Prime Minister John Howard said that RFAs would deliver “good conservation outcomes while generating hundreds of jobs.” A quarter of a century later, RFAs have done neither. 

The EPBC Act is required by law to be reviewed every decade to assess its performance. In 2019, this was the task of lawyer, businessman and academic Professor Graeme Samuel AC. What Professor Samuel’s report showed was that the EPBC Act was basically a disaster. His first paragraph does not mince its words: 

“Australia’s natural environment and iconic places are in an overall state of decline and are under increasing threat. The environment is not sufficiently resilient to withstand current, emerging or future threats, including climate change. The environmental trajectory is currently unsustainable.”

That’s a damning indictment, especially because Australia is an ark: an island continent, one of the world’s few mega-biodiverse continents of landscapes and species literally like nowhere else. Yet, despite being a wealthy country with a small population living on a vast continent, we are a deforestation and extinction hotspot. The EPBC Act has not stopped these things from happening. That’s exactly the problem. EPBC? Extinctions Pollution Bullshit & Collapse Act, more like. If RFAs worked, endangered swift parrot, koala and Leadbeater’s possum numbers would be increasing, not falling.

Samuel put forward 38 proposed reforms. Here’s what he had to say about RFAs, including that the EPBC Act:

  • Exempts RFAs for additional assessment and approval for forestry activities 
  • Should be amended to replace the RFA ‘exemption’”
  • Does not specify the environmental benchmarks against which the RFA must be consistent for the exemption to apply.
  • does not require reporting on the environmental outcomes of activities conducted under RFAs. 

And:

  • There is insufficient Commonwealth oversight of RFAs 
  • RFA assurance and reporting mechanisms are weak
  • Commonwealth oversight of environmental protections under RFAs is insufficient 
  • Immediate reform is needed.
  • National Environmental Standard for MNES should be immediately applied 
  • RFAs should be subject to robust Commonwealth oversight.

Like the EPBC Act, RFAs aren’t working either. For an even more detailed view, check out our rhetorically-titled report, Creating Jobs, Protecting Forests? It found that under RFAs: 

  • More than a quarter of all federally-listed forest-dependent threatened species that were listed as threatened when the RFAs were signed are closer to extinction than they were 20 years ago. 
  • Volumes of logs removed from native forests have declined by 63% between 2000 – 2017 – a significant failure given a key aspiration for RFAs was for them to secure wood supply. 
  • Climate change, altered fire regimes, changing consumer demand and competing forest uses threaten the RFAs’ capacity to achieve their intended outcomes into the future. 

Against this backdrop of cataclysmic failure, there is a real risk that readers of the Advocate may have assumed that Mr Ellis was telling them the truth. There is also the risk that readers could end up less well-informed after reading his article. 

For the benefit of the public record, we thought it important to conduct a line-by-line correction of Mr Ellis’ article for the benefit of Advocate readers and the wider public. 

Claim Western Australia’s transition from native forest logging is problematic

Victoria and Western Australia are responding to the decline of the native forest industry in a responsible way, by helping their forestry workers transition from a native logging industry in decline to one that’s flourishing – plantation forestry. You can’t get a clearer illustration of the two sectors than from these graphs. Tasmania started this process 10 years ago but then this was scrapped and replaced with the Rebuilding the Forestry Act 2013. (Add laughing-crying emoji here). 

Graph: Figure 4 Volume of logs harvested by forest type and total value, 2007–08 to 2017–18, Dept Agriculture, Fishers and Forests

Graph: page 17, National average annual harvest and sustainable yield of sawlog from multiple-use public native forests, State of the Forests report 2018  

To summarise these graphs: Native, down; plantation, up. (Yes, more recent data would be nice, but a State of Australia’s Forests report has not been published since 2018. Perhaps the shocking state of native forestry is why.)

In a report at the end of last year, one of the world’s largest plantation forestry companies, New Forests (parent company of Tasmania’s largest plantation forestry company, Forico), said “Australian Eucalyptus plantation owners are seeing record stumpage prices, up 15% year-on-year.”

In contrast, Forestry Tasmania lost $21 million of public money in the 2021-22 financial year, on top of a $17 million loss the financial year before. This comes on top of FT’s $1.3 billion losses – of public money – over the last 20 years; money diverted from schools and hospitals. Diverted where? Down the drain. 

The kicker is that plantation forestry is thriving despite not having an RFA exempting it from the national environment laws. It doesn’t have its own bespoke laws, it doesn’t have its own cosy self-regulatory regime (where government, regulatory and industry are all besties) and it’s not subsidised with public money, with a government agency to build its roads and a logging quota telling it how much wood to produce. Nor does it destroy forests or habitat. 

At the same time, not a single native forest company in Tasmania has the gold standard of the Forest Stewardship Council’s Forest Management certification. Forestry Tasmania pretends it’s ‘on the journey’ to try and fool everyone that it’s serious about forest management, while continuing to destroy the species and habitat that FSC requires forest managers to protect. In contrast, several plantation foresters in Tasmania do have the FSC-FM gold standard certification, including Forico and Norske-Skog. 

Why the long-term decline in native forestry? Two main reasons. 

Most people don’t want to buy timber, packaging, paper and beef products associated with forest destruction. It’s currently impossible for Australian consumers to look at a product and know if it came from a plantation or a destroyed forest. The logging industry knows that if consumers could see this, they wouldn’t buy these products. So we’re kept in the dark. 

The second reason for the decline is that private investment flows into the plantation timber sector like never before because it’s lower risk, more sustainable, has shorter rotations and outputs better-quality timber and does so more frequently. With longer rotations, the increased frequency of bushfires means that an 80-year native forest rotation can be wiped out by fire when it’s ready to ‘harvest’. The 2019 bushfires burned 40,000ha of Tasmanian’s production forests. Plantations don’t carry this risk. 

The future of forestry jobs lies in plantations and recycling. This is what Victoria’s and Western Australia’s governments recognise. Tasmania’s Liberal government, by contrast, seems to think it can treat its native forestry workers like mushrooms. The writing’s on the wall for native forest logging. (Unfortunately, you have to be able to read to know what it says.)

Claim WA’s transition is problematic for regions

This is gaslighting. There are towns, for example, in Tasmania’s north-east, near the plantations of Forico, the state’s biggest plantation company, that are going fine. The problem is timber towns’ that rely on native forestry, falling mercy to the transition away from forest logging that Mr Ellis and co are letting go to the wire. 

Claim WA & VIC forestry transitions are problematic

You can’t get more ideological than supporting needless forest destruction against the best scientific advice and economic prudence, especially when better alternatives are available. Nor can you get more ideologically than needlessly wasting public funds when there are much more profitable – and needy – alternatives. 

It’s worth noting that New Zealand, like Australia’s smarter sibling, banned native forest logging way back in 2002 and it’s forestry industry is doing fine. Another huge difference is that in Australia, ancient Aboriginal forests are exploited without the permission or engagement of Aboriginal people. In New Zealand, “There’s nearly 200,000ha of plantation trees on Māori freehold land alone”. 

Claim Tasmanian Forests Agreement didn’t help industry 

This agreement was supported by the logging industry itself, unions, the Labour party and a bunch of conservation groups. VIC and WA have overtaken us, while TAS languishes. The TFA provided millions more dollars from the taxpayer to support the industry transition. But those millions have been squandered, instead of being invested in a transition that could have put Tasmanian forestry ahead of the pack. The TFA document mentions the word transition 14 times. 

Not content with the 800,000 hectares of ancient Aboriginal forest allocated to Forestry Tasmania under the TFA, Mr Ellis has now asked the Tasmanian Labor Party to help it log the 356,000 hectares of high conservation value that were supposed to be protected in exchange for the millions going to transition the industry. Talk about adding insult to injury. And another example of Tasmania being a one-party state divided into two halves.  

If native forest logging is truly sustainable, why does the industry always want more? If the Liberal and Labor parties collude to log the TFA’s native forest reserves that Labor initially helped protect, the area of logging could widen from 800,000ha of forest to 1,156,000 million hectares of forest. What better proof of the native forest logging industry’s total lack of sustainability and dependence on government? 

Logging contractors were paid tens of millions of dollars to exit the industry, only to be allowed to return only a few years later when the Liberals gained government in 2014. How can contractors be worse off with such a hefty payout and rebound jobs?

The future of forestry jobs in lutruwita/Tasmania is plantation forestry, which doesn’t involve forest destruction or taxpayer funding to keep going. 

Claim native forest wood can’t substitute plantation wood

This is why it’s so important to the future of forestry that the Tasmanian Government supports an orderly, transparent and just transition and supports investment, R&D and innovation in overcoming these challenges. 

The native forest industry doesn’t need to innovate because it’s got Forestry Tasmania to shelter it. Only Mr Ellis can explain on what basis he supports a soviet-style state-sponsored logging agency while at the same time favouring private sector enterprise.

Plantations already constitute 90% of the wood supply in Australia. With support from the government, could become 100%, while retaining regional forestry jobs. This would be a good way to support more new and affordable homes that need to be built. 

Claim logging is ‘sustainable’

“Done right.” Hmm. The logging industry is exempt from nation environment laws, has its own legislation, its own regulator, its own government owned agency and has grant after public handout given to it year after year. Most recently;

  • $200,000 to help address emerging national wood supply pressures
  • Grants of up to $2.5 million each will be available to support the development of more on-island processing
  •  $112.9 million to accelerate the adoption of new wood processing technologies
  •  $300,000 for a Diversity Action Plan
  • $200,000 to “inform a strategic approach to securing and growing our forestry resource”

Most other industries or sectors don’t enjoy the number of resources, support and attention the favourite child of native forestry does. However, despite all this cosseting and insulation from harsh reality, there is compelling evidence that logging across the island could be illegal, since as long ago as 1987. We secured an injunction to stop logging at Mt Tongatabu and this case is now waiting for the decision in the Blue Derby Wild injunction that could finally answer the question about illegal logging. (The issue the court will consider is whether Forestry Tasmania and the Forest Practices authority became too close in signing of on logging permits.)

Swift parrot experts are exasperated that, despite relentlessly making clear that logging is driving the extinction of the world’s fastest parrot, the critically-endangered swift parrot, the logging of its habitat continues and its numbers are now perilously close to extinction. Meanwhile, the same logging is Tasmania’s single biggest source of CO2 emissions. 

This is logging done wrong and is the reality of logging in Tasmania. 

Claim logging required to replace plastic

Structural timber typically comes from plantations so the idea that we need to destroy forests in order to build houses is a complete furphy. 

Plastic use is increasing in Australia, including Tasmania and the Tasmanian Government continues to support the fossil fuel industry that generates it. There is no plan for the Tasmanian Government to use less plastic nor has it expressed any desire to divest Tasmania from fossil fuels. In fact, the opposite is the case: it continues to sponsor new fossil fuel projects. The notion that forest destruction is somehow necessary to reduce plastic use is entirely spurious. 

Claim logging sows new forests 

The ancient Aboriginal forests of lutruwita are the property of the palawa-pakana peoples and have stood for millennia without needing humans’ help to germinate. It is only in the wake of colonisation and the forest destruction that followed that human-helped ‘regeneration’ follows human-caused forest destruction. 

Logged forests take several hundred years to recover, restabilize and to truly regenerate. A bunch of trees do not a forest make. Forests take hundreds of years to become forests. Forestry Tasmania would log them again before that happens. Forests are destroyed and replaced with trees, often effectively monocrop plantations masquerading as forests, while these true ancient Aboriginal forests continue to be destroyed. 

Claim logging forests ‘maintains native forests’ 

This line is ridiculous: Logging forests to maintain forests? Even better than logging forests for perpetuity is simply to protect them and leave them alone. Forever. 

Logging is Tasmania’s single-biggest source of emissions. In fact, the emissions from logging in Tasmania, Victoria and New South Wales are, at more than 11 million tonnes a year, larger than Australia’s domestic aviation industry. 

After the Tasmanian Forest Agreement, when 100,000ha of forests were added to the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area and another 356,000ha were informally protected, Tasmania became carbon negative: our newly-protected forests sequestered more CO2 than the whole of the rest of the island emitted. It’s not logging forests that good for the climate, it’s leaving them alone.

The graph by Sustainable Living Tasmania shows the reduced logging (brown line) pushing emissions into negative territory. 

Claim logging required to maintain roads

Tasmania’s Parks and Wildlife Service currently maintains the 356,000ha of TFA forest reserves – what the government calls the ‘wood bank’. The point being, you don’t have to log forests to maintain them. If Sustainable Timber Tasmania was directed to stop logging the ancient Aboriginal forests and start farming them for their carbon values, not only would it make the agency – and Tasmania’s economy – more money than logging them, it could still maintain former logging tracks. 

Claim logging required for fuel reduction burns

The best way to protect people from bushfires is to leave forests alone. Back in the day, firies would chase fires until they reached wet rainforests, where they fizzled out. Thriving forests can help keep the island cool and moist. Logging them does the opposite. As the world’s land temperatures increase, logging forests lets in sun and heat and new saplings simply create incredibly flammable fuel loads. Legitimate fuel reduction burns don’t need to be conducted by the logging industry.  

Claim logging in Tasmania represents a long-term business model

Forestry Tasmania’s financial record shows that it is economically unsustainable. Its business model, such that it is, is basically moribund. Without Forestry Tasmania, native forestry isn’t sustainable. An industry that depends on taxpayer funding isn’t viable. Regional Forest Agreements have failed. Native forest logging is ecologically unsustainable because it logs ancient forests and the habitat of species living there. (This is basically why Forestry Tasmania has twice failed to achieve FSC Forest Management certification.) The only thing this business model incentivises if a transition out of native forest logging like those in Victoria and Western Australia. 

Claim logging is investment-friendly

Businesses and investors are increasingly conscious of supply chain risk. There remains a significant question hanging over the native forest logging industry about whether its logging approvals are legal or not. This calls into question the provenance and legitimacy of wood from Tasmania. Investors and businesses should be wary and conduct due diligence before buying it. Similarly, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has prioritised clamping down on greenwashing. A logging agency that calls itself sustainability, is still legally called Forestry Tasmania, logs threatened species habitat and is part of Tasmania’s single biggest source of CO2 emissions should be on the ACCC’s hitlist. 

Claim native forest logging products appeal to international markets

The European Union is increasingly rejecting products and supply chains exposed to forest destruction. Without a single forest business being able to achieve FSC-FM certification, Tasmanian native forest products are vulnerable markets moving away from them. Third, it’s not possible for a consumer to buy paper, timber, packaging or beef and know whether it originated from a native forest or a forestry plantation. This overt lack of transparency is likely to prove highly problematic as consumers, retailers and investors want to know where forest products come from. The millions of dollars of limited public money indulged upon an increasingly small native forest logging sector is likely to prove less and less acceptable to the public.

The lack of social licence for native forest logging is another key supply chain risk that purchasers are increasingly alert to. Throw in destructive weather and bushfires into the mix and the future of native forest logging is precarious indeed. A responsible minister in a responsible government that actually cared about native forestry workers would support them to transition to new forestry jobs outside the native forest logging sector before it’s too late instead of trying to talk up the downturn. Don’t say you weren’t warned. 

Tom Allen is Campaign Director for The Wilderness Society Tasmania.