The peak advocacy body for Australia’s forest communities has seized on a major peer-reviewed review of native forestry, arguing it strips the scientific cover from the harvesting bans imposed in Victoria and Western Australia and the campaign to extend them. That is according to Steve Dobbyns, chair and director of Forest and Wood Communities Australia, who said the findings should force a reset in how governments weigh forestry policy.
The review, published in the journal Australian Forestry by former CSIRO scientists John Raison, Sadanandan Nambiar and Glen Kile with University of Melbourne hydrologist Lindsay Bren, concluded that sustainable native forestry does not cause deforestation, threaten biodiversity at a landscape scale, worsen wildfire risk or generate the large carbon emissions claimed by its opponents. The release of the FWCA’s response follows Wood Central’s coverage of the review, which found the case for a nationwide ban unsupported by the published evidence.
Dobbyns said public debate had been distorted for years by the way the case against forestry was made, arguing it had been “dominated by misinformation, emotion and ideology rather than facts.” The closures in Victoria and Western Australia had been built largely on claims the paper directly challenges, he said, with the consequences falling hardest on the regional towns that depend on the industry — hollowing out those communities whilst deepening Australia’s reliance on imported timber and stripping out the workforce and machinery that underpin bushfire response in forested country.
Because the review also dismantles the assumption that plantations can quickly absorb the loss of native forests, the FWCA used its response to press the point on imports, noting the authors’ finding that Australia already runs a widening timber deficit. The demand does not vanish when domestic production stops, Dobbyns said, but is pushed offshore to suppliers that may operate under weaker environmental rules than those governing Australian forests.
Turning to the policy stakes, Dobbyns said the review ought to be required reading for any minister weighing fresh restrictions, given the bearing of forestry decisions on regional jobs, housing supply, renewable materials and long-term forest health. He argued that the authors had shown that blanket harvesting bans rest on no sound scientific foundation, declaring that “Australia deserves evidence-based forestry policy” and calling on federal and state governments to ground future decisions in peer-reviewed science and practical management experience rather than campaign pressure.
The FWCA describes itself as the national peak body for forestry businesses, timber communities, and the workers associated with them, advocating for Regional Forest Agreement reform and sovereign timber supply. On the authors’ own figures, native forest harvesting affects only a tiny share of the estate each year, with every harvested area regenerated under regulatory requirements, the review judged among the most rigorous in the world.
For further information: Raison, R. J., Nambiar, E. K. S., Kile, G. A., & Bren, L. J. (2026). Australia’s native forests can be sustainably managed for wood production together with other important forest values. Australian Forestry. https://doi.org/10.1080/00049158.2026.2663997
