Axe falls on timber jobs: More than 1000 face layoffs

More than 1000 timber workers face the axe as VicForests makes a last-ditch appeal against the legal lockup of Victoria’s native forests.

Australian Sustainable Hardwoods has lost access to Victorian timber, which supplies 60 per cent of its needs, raising the prospect of job cuts.

The Andrews Government’s failure to end the legal lockup of Victoria’s native forests looks set to drive another wave of job losses through regional communities, from harvest and haulage contractors to timber mill workers.

Maryvale paper mill has already laid off 155 white paper workers, with another 45 to 50 trades, administration staff and managers set to go.

But the Supreme Court order that led to the lockup of Victoria’s native forests last November has left 25 of the state’s 27 harvest and haulage contracting crews without work and a thousand timber mill workers in limbo.

East Gippsland MWM Logging contractor Andy Westaway’s crew has shrunk from 13 to three.

“It’s myself and two workers cleaning up gear and maintaining stuff,” Mr Westaway said. “VicForests said they might have some sort of pine job, which we’ve put in for. But it’s a slow process and the government is sitting on its hands, not doing a thing.”

The last two active harvest crews, who are salvaging storm-blown timber from the Wombat Forest, say they suffered vandalism of their machinery and protests from locals, who have walked onto the site, disrupted work and locked themselves onto machinery.

The Victorian Forest Products Association warns a huge proportion of the state’s 20 mills have already registered expressions of interest to receive opt-out payments from the Andrew Government.

Australian Sustainable Hardwoods chief executive Vince Hurley said the mill was importing green-cut timber from Tasmania and American oak, but had no means of offsetting the 60 per cent of Victorian ash that VicForests was supplying up until last year.

Asked what ASH could do in the wake of Victorian supplies drying up, he said: “If it’s zero from now on, then we’re going to have to lose jobs.”

VicForests has lodged an appeal with the full bench of the Supreme Court to be heard on March 23, challenging Justice Melinda Richards’ November ruling in the Kinglake Friends of the Forest and Environment East Gippsland case against it.

Justice Richards’ ruling has forced VicForests to resurvey most of its coupes and slash the viability of harvesting others, to protect greater glider possums, which – like the ruling on the appeal – could take months.

Meanwhile VicForests is forced to compensate contractors and mills for timber it cannot supply, with the state-owned enterprise’s 2021-22 loss of $54 million set to blow out to three or more times that amount.

Industry sources say the cost of paying out harvest contractors alone is about $90 million.

Originally published as Axe falls on timber jobs: More than 1000 face layoffs