Jobs lost and towns gutted by Labor’s lack of support for forestry workers

The formal end of native forestry in Victoria and Western Australia on Monday (January 1, 2024) is a bleak reminder to Tasmanian forestry workers of Labor’s national attack on their jobs. 

Across both states, mills have shut, jobs lost and towns gutted. 

In Victoria, workers and communities were given little more than six months to prepare for the end of a way of life built over generations.  

In Western Australia, businesses and towns were left reeling after Labor’s snap decision, made without warning or consultation.   

Taxpayers have been left footing an eyewatering bill. In Victoria alone, it reportedly already sits at more than $1.2 billion. 

Money that could be spent on hospitals, schools, roads and other necessary community needs is instead being spent on destroying regional jobs.  

Despite claiming that plantations will fill the gap left by the end of native forestry, WA Labor last month ended harvesting in pine plantations to the north of Perth on environmental grounds.  

It is dystopian madness, brought about by Labor’s own internal misgivings and green white-anting within a party with a long history now of selling out workers.  

Despite what the Greens - and clearly now Labor - would say, effective land management is not found in locking up our forests and throwing away the key.  

It is found in actively managing forests and sustainable native forestry provides a business model with inbuilt incentives to care for our forests in the long term.  

Native forest managers like Sustainable Timber Tasmania and others maintain thousands of kilometres of roads that provide access to remote parts of the country for recreation, tourism and firefighting purposes.  

They undertake fuel reduction burns across thousands of hectares of bush to help protect it and communities from catastrophic bushfires.  

Indeed, history shows that if we’re not actively managing forests in the Australian bush, it will burn, releasing into the atmosphere all that carbon stored in fire-prone eucalypts.  

Labor’s decision to end native forestry in other states will almost certainly lead to increased risk of bushfire and increased timber imports from countries with weaker environmental protections than our own. 

Australian native forestry is sustainable, helps provide our timber for our homes, fibre for a plastic-free future, captures carbon naturally as trees grow and supports regional jobs.  

Tasmanians know that the biggest risk to forestry, which is worth $1.2 billion annually to the economy of this State, is another Labor-Green Government.

Tasmanians haven’t forgotten the Labor-Green job destroying deal that tried to shut the industry down and put hundreds of people out of work.

Only the Rockliff Liberal Government can be trusted to stand up for Tasmania’s forestry industry.