[T]he Opal Australian Paper Maryvale Mill [closed] on January 21 this year. . . .

Nippon, the owner of the mill, blamed the closure on reduced availability of timber in the wake of both the Andrews government’s announcement in 2019 that it planned to phase out logging in native forests by 2030 and a series of court cases between VicForests and environmental groups that had halted logging in some areas.

There have been indications for decades that logging in depleted native forests was leading to a collapse of forest ecosystems and imperilling the logging industry that relied on them. The catastrophic bushfires of 2019-20 have exacerbated the situation and climate-related disasters will take an increasing toll on the forestry industry, among many others.

Just before those fires, the Andrews government set aside $200 million to keep the native forest logging industry alive until 2030 and to save about 500 jobs. That said, up to 200 employees at Maryvale look set to lose theirs. And this month VicForests chief executive Monique Dawson told the Supreme Court that the organisation has had to pay close to $40 million in compensation to clients and contractors it could not supply with timber – a bill that went straight to the state government. In short, the current solution doesn’t seem to be keeping anyone happy – certainly not those who believe that logging in native forests should continue, nor those who are calling for an immediate cessation to that logging.

Nothing captures the counterproductive nature of the Victorian government’s strategy to keep everyone happy better than its promise to protect old-growth forests. Specifically, the 2019 announcement read, “90,000 hectares of Victoria’s remaining rare and precious old-growth forest – aged up to 600 years old – will be protected immediately”. However, as journalist Michael Slezak reported in November last year, at the very moment the Andrews government was making this announcement, a crew hired by VicForests was clearing an area on Mount Delusion in East Gippsland that included 28 hectares marked as old-growth forest.

Since the announcement it has become increasingly difficult for existing native forests to be categorised as old-growth. If fire hits an area, it no longer counts. If 15 per cent of the trees in a logging coupe are considered to be “regrowth”, the forest will also be excluded from protection. An old-growth forest needs to be senescent, meaning in decline. But you can’t protect forests by protecting only its oldest trees. To state the obvious, to have old trees you need young trees and an environment in which they might reach maturity.

A decade ago, VicForests acknowledged in a submission to state cabinet that logging was not profitable and had not been for many years, and in the most recent financial year the organisation recorded its largest-ever loss of more than $52 million, as reported by The Age’s Miki Perkins. A report by the Liberal Party-aligned Blueprint Institute, titled “Logging off”, recently argued that saving the forests we have left would generate more in tourism, water supply benefits and carbon credits than cutting them down. It also stated that VicForests has become increasingly reliant on state government grants – grants that are not publicly disclosed or accounted for in annual statements. The Parliamentary Budget Office recently calculated that ending native forest logging in 2023 would save Victoria $205 million over the next decade.

Given that Australia has one of the longest histories of plantation timber in the world, and that timber is of adequate quality for paper production and building materials, and is usually more economical than logging in native forests, we should be turning to our plantations to help us transition to a more sustainable timber industry. But here is another problem. Victoria grows about 3.9 million tonnes of eucalypt pulp logs to make paper and woodchips every year yet 2.9 million tonnes go to China and Japan, export markets that date back to the 1970s. According to Professor David Lindenmayer, “Diverting 10 per cent of that plantation timber would alleviate the timber and paper crisis in Victoria. We could process just a quarter of that for our own needs, and you would have more jobs in the forest industry than you have now.”

It seems like such an easy fix that it’s hard to understand why that diversion isn’t happening.

Again, the problem is a historical one. From the 1920s until the 1990s, native forests were clear-felled so plantations could be planted. The clear-felling ended with the Regional Forest Agreements of the 1990s, coincident with the privatisation of state-owned plantations in most states and the federal government’s “2020 Vision”, a plan that hoped to expand plantations through private investment. While plantations are now planted only on already cleared land, the National Party, among other groups, lobbied against the use of cleared land for growing timber, and Australia has yet to develop a culture that sees growing trees as a form of farming.