The Andrews-Allan-D’Ambrosio government claims to be champions of women’s rights and environmental justice. Yet, in their reckless decision to shut down Victoria’s sustainable native timber industry, they are directly contributing to a devastating and perverse outcome –accelerating environmental destruction overseas and driving vulnerable children into the arms of predators.
Victoria’s native timber industry, which harvested just four in every 10,000 trees from a minuscule 4% of the public land estate, was one of the most tightly regulated and sustainable industries in the world.
Yet the Victorian government chose to kneecap it, turning its back on the rural communities that depend on it, leaving Australia (and other nations that utilised our timber) to import timber from overseas where there are few protections for forests or human rights.
The timber filling this gap left by the Andrews government’s disastrous policy comes from places including the Solomon Islands, where logging is neither ethical or sustainable.
The devastation is plain to see, coastal areas once green forest now scarred with barren, muddy log dumps. Reports warn that, at the current pace, all forest cover in the Solomon Islands could be wiped out by 2030.
But the environmental destruction isn’t the worst of it.
When we outsource timber needs to countries like the Solomon Islands, the Victorian Labor government is enabling a system rife with child exploitation and human trafficking.
As recently reported by the ABC, a media outlet not typically on the side of Victorian timber communities at these unregulated logging camps, young girls, some as young as 12, are coerced into relationships with foreign loggers, men who use their economic power to take advantage of vulnerable children.
In these so-called “log marriages,” young girls are traded, often by their own families, in exchange for money, leaving them trapped in a life of sexual exploitation and domestic violence.
And where is the Allan government, the self-proclaimed protector of women’s rights? Nowhere to be found.
It is deeply hypocritical for a government that postures itself as a champion of equality, justice, and the protection of women’s rights to allow such heinous practices to flourish abroad as a consequence of its policies.
What about the rights of a 13-year-old girl in the Solomon Islands to have a childhood free from predation and sexual violence? What about her right to safety, dignity, and a future untainted by exploitation?
By ending Victoria’s sustainable native timber industry, the Andrews-Allan-D’Ambrosio alliance has turned its back on its own people, blue collar families in timber towns who are losing their jobs and livelihoods while simultaneously supporting some of the worst environmental and human rights abuses abroad.
The green policies they claim to champion at home are feeding destruction overseas and leading children into a living nightmare.
This is not about protecting the environment; it’s about moral grandstanding for Greens preferences at the expense of families, both here and abroad.
The truth is, Victorian timber workers lose their jobs, forests overseas are razed to the ground, and young girls are trafficked into abusive relationships.
If this is what the Andrews government calls progress, it’s a bitter price to pay—for Victoria, for the planet, and for the innocent girls who will never have the chance to live their childhood in peace.
The Andrews-Allan-D’Ambrosio government must answer: how can you champion women’s rights when your policies are pushing children into the hands of predators in foreign lands? And how do you justify the end of the Victorian native timber sector when these are the true costs?
Michael Harrington is a native forestry advocate and third generation firewood operator.
