I feel compelled to write to express how saddened I was by the recent announcement from the Liberal Party, that if re-elected they would release a further 40,000ha of native forest for logging, from which they plan to acquire a further 185,000 cubic metres of sawlog.

Likewise Labor has announced they will guarantee the current contracts until 2040. There is so much wrong with this, especially when over 3,000 passionate people of all ages turned out in the biggest election rally for years in Hobart on Sunday 17 March.

The media release referred to the 365,000ha of high conservation forest set aside through the forest peace deal as a ‘wood bank’. This was never the intention. The peace deal was achieved after years of negotiation between industry and conservationists, and the forest areas were taken out of production and termed ‘future reserves’.

When the Liberals gained power in 2014, they reversed those years of work, claiming a mandate despite ony half of the electorate voting for them. They reassigned the forest set aside as reserves, to ‘future production’.

The native forestry industry has never been profitable, and has sucked money from federal funds and state taxpayers for 40 years or more.

In 2011 logging contractors received $22m of federal assistance to exit the industry. In 2013 $44M of additional federal money was allocated under the Tasmanian Forests Intergovernmental Agreement (IGA) Contractors’ Voluntary Exit Grants program. Overall the IGA resulted in $379M of federal money flowing to Tasmania, approximately $250K of which went as development funding to the regions. In the 20 years leading up to the IGA, $1B in direct cash assistance was provided to the Tasmanian forest industry. But in 2012 Forestry Tasmania was virtually insolvent and the Tasmanian state government bailed it out to the tune of $110m over 4 years.

Things have barely improved in the 12 years since.

In 2015 a $30M equity transfer was made to Forestry Tasmania from TasNetworks. In 2017 the Tassie government provided $14M to the rebranded STT. A further $14M was borrowed from Tascorp. The 99-year forestry rights to 29,000ha of plantations were sold for $60m, despite FT receiving $115m in 2005 to establish said plantations – and 25,000 of those hectares belonging to the Crown rather than FT.

Also in the same year, the Tasmanian government took over the superannuation liability of all ex-forestry employees. In recent years STT has claimed small profits, but a quick look at the annual reports shows several millions in government subsidies each year, plus sales of plantations and opaque asset revaluations. The majority of STT’s plantation estate has now been sold in an effort to keep the organisation afloat.

STT currently has a remit to produce 137,000 cubic metres of sawlogs, but has missed this target most years. The sawlog yield from native forests is very low, and ranges from <1% to 10% depending on whether the total bulldozed volumes are counted, or just the amount removed from site (around 30% of the volume cut down in a clearfell operation). Apart from being morally reprehensible when the world is facing down a climate crisis, releasing a further 40,000ha of native forest to logging won’t sudddenly make STT profitable or sustainable.

It’s not even a good job creation scheme. The national economics modelled series (State Growth’s recommended statistics, detailed on profile.id), shows that only 49 estimated jobs were attributable to forestry and logging in the Huon Valley in 2021. The census figures for the same year show only 39 people, and only 637 in the entire state. Forestry support services account for 103 jobs for the whole of Tasmania, and just four for the Huon Valley (census data is the only series that provides a breakdown between forestry, agriculture and aquaculture support categories). The modelled data shows only 79 were working in the industry in the Huon Valley as far back as 2014/15.

Yet we are going through so much angst, and destroying our environment and threatened species’ habitat on the completely flawed assumption that forestry is a big provider of jobs, housing timber, economic value and votes.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Even in NSW, before Dominic Perrottet left office in March 2023, he commissioned a report on native foresty logging that showed it would be cheaper for the state to close the industry.

A large number of concerned citizens marched for forests on Sunday 17 March in Hobart.

Forestry operations are also the largest emitter of carbon in Tasmania by far, equivalent to 1.1million cars (non-EV), or close to 2.5 times our total transport emissions. The industry argues that the amounts emitted are re-sequestered through growing trees, not mentioning that there is a decades-long lag for these trees to drawdown the equivalent amount of logged carbon.

There are also uncalculated amounts of carbon being released from the fallen, charred debris in regrowth coupes, from harvests years past. The vast majority of the harvested timber is converted into woodchips and thus short-term uses such as printer paper, newsprint and toilet paper. These single-use, rapid turnover products quickly degrade and release their carbon into the atmosphere.

We then have the issue of flammability, and the far higher danger of bushfires induced by the rapid onset of climate warming and instability – to which the native forestry industry has itself contributed to large extent over the past decades.

The most recent comprehensive research reveals: “Disturbance [eg logging] sometimes initiates a short initial period of low flammability, but then drives an extended period of increased flammability as vegetation regrows” Lindenmayer, Zylstra, Dec 2023. In the UTAS webinar entitled ‘Forging a Fire-Ready Future’ (see below), David Bowman, respected fire and forest researcher, noted the increased flammability of regrowth forest and the difficulty of controlling wildfires under such conditions.

A paper on the fire resilience of mature and old growth wet eucalypt forest in the Huon Valley, reveals: “Our results showed that mature TWEF were resilient to these wildfires, with overall eucalypt survival of 75%”; “Fire resistance … increased markedly with tree diameter” “clearfell logging … creates a vulnerable, even aged stand of young regrowth, and … also reduces average tree size, reducing overall resistance to fire.” Prior, Foyster and Furlaud, Feb 2022.

Given there is no logical environmental, social or economic argument in support of continuing native forest logging in Tasmania, what possible justification can the Liberal and Labor parties have in prolonging its existence?

Jenny Cambers-Smith is a Huon Valley Councillor, passionate about Tasmania’s unique environment and wildlife, sustainability and social justice. She has a law degree and has worked in varied roles in manufacturing, local government and consulting. She lives with her family on a mixed farm in Crabtree.

Editor’s note: the author has provided a response to Mark Poynter’s comment.

As an experienced forester, Mr Poynter must surely know the arguments he puts forward in response to the article are spurious, but no doubt they play well to the audience he is courting.

Firstly, he conflates a campaign to end native forest logging with a desire to ‘not use [our own] forests at all’. This is a deliberate misrepresentation of the views of those who wish to stop native foresty logging. No one is proposing to shut the industry down. The article instead argues for a switch to higher yielding plantation timber, plus onshore processing to create more value and further increase yield.

It is nonsense to suggest that we would suddenly need to switch to importing far more timber, when imports did not increase following the halving of timber production under the peace deal. We already import most of our sawn timber, primarily softwoods from NZ for house framing and hardwoods from NSW and Asia. As stated in the article, most of the harvest from native forest logging is either left on the ground or sold abroad as woodchips or whole peeler logs, with only around 1% ending up as structural grade timber.

Where Mr Poynter is correct, is in pointing out we are an extremely wealthy nation, that could afford to fairly transition the few workers fully dependent on native forest logging, into meaningful and sustainable work that draws on their skills and knowledge. By and large, conservationists support this, despite the $$m sunk into the sector as compensation to contractors for exiting the industry, only for some to resurface both here and on the mainland.

Equally we have the resources to put into R&D and grant programs to create value-added and engineered structural products, with an economically sustainable pricing structure that provides profit and incentive for small business.

Mr Poynter says the article ignores the fact that sawmillers and haulage contractors are in fact profitable. Clearly this is the case, but is no argument for continuing native forest logging, since the source of their logs is immaterial. Even plantation E.nitens can be turned into structural lumber with the correct machinery or technology, as demonstrated by some Victorian sawmills.

Our native timber is also sold very cheaply – so it would be surprising if sawmills were unable to make money. None of the environmental costs are factored in, plus STT can afford to aim low when propped up by subsidies, land and plantation sales, revaluations and questionable cost calculations. There is a history of businesses going to the wall trying to make (for instance) engineered timbers that can compete on price with our cheap as chips native timber. The woodchip exporters are very profitable – but only because they are buying feedstock at ridiculously low prices. Like other big businesses that profit from the exploitation of the environment, their profits do little to benefit the Tasmanian people.

It is interesting that Mr Poynter questions the article’s focus on STT. They are after all the prime exploiters of our native forest resource. Since the overwhelming percentage of native timber is either left on the ground during harvest operations, or sold overseas as woodchips or whole peeler logs, it is very telling that he suggests the ‘the overwhelming employment and turnover is generated by those who process those logs ….’ He is basically saying that STT is a loss-making job creation scheme at the expense of future generations.

Also, a quick look at the census data from 2021, proves him wrong. Forestry support workers (eg haulage contractors) account for 103 jobs, and ‘wood product manufacture’ plus ‘log sawmilling and timber dressing’ account for 576; a total of 679. This compares to 637 employed in forestry itself (ie harvesting). So downstream processing and support services account for just over half of the jobs employed in forestry overall – hardly an ‘overwhelming’ figure. Plus as argued above, these sawmillers and haulage contractors could equally be supported by a plantation-only industry that focuses on onshore processing rather than exporting woodchips.

There was no mention of ‘misappropriation’ of public funds, as suggested by Mr Poynter. The grants and subsidies were detailed to demonstrate the lack of an economic argument for continuing native forest logging. It is undeniable that native forest logging has sucked money from the public purse for decades, with little benefit to Tasmanians.

Mr Poynter is correct that 365,000ha of so-called ‘Future Production’ forest had been state forest for many years. It is key that he states it was ‘available’ for logging, since most of the forest reserved during the peace deal has not been logged (or was only selectively logged) in the past, and was carefully chosen for reservation owing to its high conservation values. Mr Poynter would rather we reignite the forest wars by opening up this forest to logging, than admit that native forest forestry is unsustainable on either economic or environmental grounds.

The final comment regarding carbon and bushfire threats being ‘flawed science’ is hardly worth a response. I’ll leave it to the scientific community to argue this point. Needless to say a considerable and growing volume of work is pointing to the need to conserve our remaining native forests for both their carbon storage capacity and their bushfire resilience. It’s already been shown that only 1-4%% of native forest harvest is stored in long-term products, with most carbon being emitted quickly either during ‘regeneration’ burns or disposal of short-life products (tissue, printer paper, toilet paper); also that we already import most of our sawn timber. Mr Poynter’s response also doesn’t argue with the decades-long time lag between harvesting and the re-sequestering of carbon through growing forests.

I am grateful every day for the forest above our home being saved during the peace deal. It binds the land which is otherwise highly prone to landslip and tunnel erosion; stores water and releases it slowly during the dry months via springs and creeks which run even during this extraordinarily dry season; provides shade and cooling for a large tract of land; generates its own microclimate for those living alongside; provides amenity value for bushwalkers, horse-riders and 4WD enthusiastics, and habitat for a whole range of threatened species which we are lucky enough to see regularly on trailcams on our property.