Orbost is on the brink of ruin. When you strip 114 direct timber sector jobs and around 60 support and services jobs (which equates to 36% of the town’s full-time jobs) the impact is devastating.
These are real people, in a town where they can raise their children in a tight community environment with a good school or have at least the necessary medical services and enough shops and retail businesses to enjoy a good life.
But that doesn’t matter to ideologues bent on bringing down our most sustainable primary industry. Regional people are just collateral damage to them. They can find jobs in tourism, right? Ha!
This Victorian Sate election cycle is fraught with this kind of ignorant self-righteousness focused on ending the native timber sector years before the 2030 deadline. The anti-forestry noise is deafening, and the regional communities affected by it have largely been silent.
Most recently, a court decision will see all contractor crews pulled out of the forest, crippling timber supply and putting regional people out of work.
Will it positively benefit the Greater Glider which is at the centre of the decision? Extremely unlikely. Is the irony that the gliders are, according to these fringe activist groups, so prevalent in areas previously harvested that they are ‘prime habitat’ lost on these people?
A couple of weeks ago the Municipal Association of Victoria bewilderingly pushed through a resolution to call for an early phase out of the native timber sector. Inner-city councils wanting to decide the fate of regional communities.
The vote on the motion, initiated by an inner-city Greens councillor, was narrow – 51 for, 49 against. What is telling is that Melbourne councils get two votes each while country councils get just one, so the result would have been an emphatic no had the votes been balanced.
The result represents ideology at its most transparent, given it was pointed out during the voting process that despite spending $50,000 in Freedom of Information requests, the Andrews Government has failed to provide any scientific basis for its decision to shut down the sector.
Instead, it has caved-in to years of anti-forestry campaigning which began with what appears to be an obsession with bringing down VicForests, the government agency charged with managing the timber resource in our public forests.
First it was Leadbeater’s Possum at dire risk from timber harvesting, but a closer, more sophisticated look discovered hundreds of colonies outside production forests and in young regrowth.
Then it was linking timber harvesting with fire risk and intensity, a theory refuted by Australia’s leading fire and forestry experts.
Or how about timber harvesting somehow putting Melbourne’s water supply at risk? One ABC journalist who published this assumption has been caught out by the Australian Communications and Media Authority for breaching “accuracy requirements”.
When VicForests handed over the Wombat State Forest to its Traditional Owners, who wanted to heal country after storms knocked over huge swathes of the forest, the “antis” came out in force with outrageously false nonsense to try to halt the process. So not even Traditional Owners can manage the forest without criticism.
Most distressing of all is the people in these timber towns – the people who will lose their jobs, their local shops, sports teams, schools, medical services – feel that they can say nothing in their own defence.
They have seen first-hand tiny portions of the forest harvested and regrown numerous times. They have seen the wildlife happily coexist and even thrive in regrowth forests. Yet they been beaten and bullied in the ongoing assault on forestry, made to feel like criminals, and left to wonder what their futures hold.
The people of Orbost are hurting, and that is just one timber town. If we all stood up and spoke out, maybe, just maybe, a political party whose fundamental charter is to protect the working class, will wake up and see through the crap.
Maybe they will look to the multitude of international examples where forestry’s benefits for the environment are clearly recognised and listen to leading authorities and academics rather than the self-interested before making decisions with such devastating outcomes.
But only if we all stand up and speak out. If we lose, can you say you did all you could?
Justin Law is the managing director of Forest & Wood Communities Australia
