Victorian taxpayers will fork out more than $38 million after state-owned logging agency VicForests was forced to compensate customers and contractors it could not supply with timber. Source: The Age
VicForests chief executive Monique Dawson told a Supreme Court hearing on Friday it had paid out more than $12 million to contractors and $25 million to customers and sent the invoice to the government.
In the past financial year, VicForests recorded an unprecedented $52.4 million financial loss, which it blamed on the cost of court cases brought against it by community environment groups seeking to protect endangered species. The figure is significantly higher than the previous year’s loss of $4.7 million.
On Friday, Dawson said court orders preventing timber harvesting until surveys for endangered species had been completed meant VicForests did not currently have any coupes – logging areas – it was able to log.
The court orders are from a case last November, where the Supreme Court found VicForests had failed to follow the law, and the agency’s timber-harvesting operations in East Gippsland and the Central Highlands had presented a threat of “serious or irreversible harm” to endangered gliders.
At the time, Justice Melinda Richards put a number of injunctions, or logging bans, in place, with conditions that required the agency to search for gliders. VicForests is appealing against this court decision.
On Friday, in a case brought by the community group WOTCH with legal support from Environmental Justice Australia, Dawson said VicForests had found that the prospective coupes it wanted to log had more greater gliders and yellow-bellied gliders in them than expected.
“They are really very prevalent in most of the areas that we operate in … which means that coupes … are not viable [to log] because of the amount of the buffers and the additional reservations that are required under her Honour’s orders,” she said.
“We are working very hard to try to find some handful of coupes that we might be able to move into in the near time, but the combination of those two things is making that very difficult for my planners.”
The WOTCH case alleges VicForests failed to put protections in place for four threatened species heavily impacted by the black summer bushfires – the greater glider, smoky mouse, sooty owl and powerful owl.
The Victorian government says logging has ceased across most of the state. Dawson told the ABC that timber was being imported from NSW and Tasmania.
In 2019, Premier Daniel Andrews announced the logging of native forests would be phased out in Victoria over the next decade, with a reduction in the current level of native timber available for logging from 2024-25.
