Shutting native forest harvesting in one state does nothing to make demand for timber disappear, and the wood simply comes from somewhere else — often somewhere with far murkier credentials. That is according to Dr Michelle Freeman, president of Forestry Australia, who told 3AW Mornings she was “rather bemused” by reporting that Victoria’s native forest harvesting ban is now feeding Tasmania’s industry.
Fresh ABC reporting that Victorian sawmills are processing native logs shipped across Bass Strait drew a pointed response from Dr Freeman, who said the coverage confirmed what the sector has argued since the bans began. “Stopping timber harvesting in one area doesn’t magically make demand for that timber go away,” Dr Freeman said.
Timber is renewable, stores carbon and is, in her words, beautiful, which is why Dr Freeman warned the alternative to local supply is not lower consumption but worse substitutes. Without wood from home, she said, builders fall back on “other products that are almost always non-renewable, like steel, concrete or plastic.”
The deeper problem, Dr Freeman argued, is Australia’s growing reliance on imports and the far less transparent supply chains that come with them. The country already runs a timber trade deficit of roughly $2 billion a year, she said, with a significant share drawn from high-risk countries where environmental and social credentials are hard to verify.
That trade, she warned, takes in Russian wood entering Australia through China, more than three years after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine triggered Western sanctions. “That does include conflict timber from Russia coming into Australia via China,” Dr Freeman said.
Faced with a choice between verifiable local supply and opaque imports, Dr Freeman said the country had to confront the question head-on rather than congratulate itself on a single state ban. “Australia really needs to decide what it wants,” she said, adding she would rather the nation sourced its timber from forests where every log’s origin could be checked.
Pressed on the legislative detail of the Victorian arrangement with Tasmania, Dr Freeman declined to be drawn but defended domestic harvesting as highly regulated, independently certified and subject to intense scrutiny, particularly from environmental groups. At least the wood was still coming from Australian forests under strong oversight, she said, rather than from the $2 billion in imports flowing into the country each year through chains the country cannot fully see.
For more information, including the full transcript from the interview, click here to read the full article on the Forestry Australia website.
