Victoria ended logging. Now it's using another state's native forests

Topic:Forestry, Logging and Timber Industry A logging truck travelling from Tasmania to Victoria's Yarra Valley. (Four Corners: Rob Hill) Link copiedShareShare articleIt's a freezing, foggy morning as the Searoad Mersey II docks at Melbourne Port. We've had a tip off that the truck we're looking for is on board. Hours later, it appears, loaded with Tasmanian logs. Trees from Tasmania's public forests are not meant to leave the island. But two years after Victoria banned logging in its own state forests, Four Corners has discovered there are Victorian sawmills now relying heavily on Tasmania for supply. In some cases, Victorian taxpayers are even subsidising the practice. We follow the truck east on the motorway, to Melbourne and beyond, on to country roads in the Yarra Valley. The log truck turns into a mill in Powelltown, a picturesque former logging town, an hour and a half from the port. When we walk to the fence line, we see a timber yard with piles of logs, many with the white stickers used to mark those from Tasmanian state forests. It's clear this sawmill, in a state that's banned native logging in public forests, has shifted its supply. Just a few kilometres from one of Tasmania's famed multi-day hikes, the Three Capes Track, the forest gapes open for hundreds of metres. Trees are scattered over the muddy ground where they once stood. This is what remains of a logging coupe in the island's south. Tasmania has a regulated logging industry, which the state government says is one of the most stringent in the world. Part of the state timber company's mandate to harvest these trees is to support economic growth in Tasmania. The state government told Four Corners no logs from public forests like these are leaving the island to be processed interstate. That is not what Paul O'Halloran and Patrick Johnson have seen. The environmentalists reckon they've spent hundreds of hours at the Devonport ferry terminal, in the state's north, watching logs leave the island. O'Halloran says there was a big uptick in 2023, around the time Victoria announced its native forest logging ban. "Tasmanian native forests are already unsustainably logged, and this is just putting more and more pressure on [them]," O'Halloran says. The Tasmanian government says the hundreds of truckloads the men have documented over the past three years are from privately owned forests. Johnson doesn't buy it. He thinks with the sheer volume going across, some must be coming from the public estate. "In my view, it's plundering the resources of Tasmania to fill a gap that they've got in Victoria because the government made a decision to stop logging." Victoria's Labor government announced in 2019 that it would stop logging in state forests from 2030. A few years later it blindsided the industry, bringing forward the ban to the start of 2024. A $1.5 billion pool of money was set aside by the government to support the transition away from native logging. It included investments to move to plantation timber along with money it was contractually obliged to pay to sawmills for cutting off the log supply. There were no provisos on how most of it was to be spent. The mill we followed the truck to, Powelltown Sawmills, received $9 million in compensation from the Victorian government. Four Corners has found it regularly receives native timber logs from Tasmania, from both private and public land. Another business is even more intertwined with Tasmanian logging, and it's effectively being kept alive by Victorian taxpayers. The biggest native hardwood sawmill in Victoria, Australian Sustainable Hardwoods (ASH), now mainly survives on trees from Tasmania: half from plantation and half from native forests. It received more than $49 million from the Victorian government's transition fund over three years. Forensic accountant Daniela Juric reviewed eight years of ASH's books. She says that government money has enabled the company to buy timber from Tasmania. "It looks like an entity that's struggling to stay afloat without the additional compensation from the Victorian state government." David Lindenmayer, professor of ecology at Australian National University, says Victorians are now effectively paying for logging in Tasmania. "The Victorian taxpayer is subsidising destruction of the forests in Tasmania … that's just appalling and inappropriate," he says. ASH managing director Vince Hurley says it's wrong to characterise it as taxpayers' money as most of it was from a penalty payment they were legally entitled to. "You need to ask the Victorian government why they banned native logging and therefore were liable for failure-to-supply payments. I think that's a question for the Victorian government." Hurley says the company has used the money to expand its manufacturing capability and turn low-grade wood from Tasmania into high-value products, like benchtops and mass-engineered beams. With 200 people working at the mill, he s

Victoria ended logging. Now it's using another state's native forests

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