Logging losses: Possum policy wipes out timber jobs

Andrews Government ministers have embraced a policy that has steadily driven timber workers out of Victoria’s Central Highlands, says Peter Hunt.

Where to?: A war of attrition is driving these Powelltown saw mill workers and their families out of the industry. Picture: Yuri Kouzmin.

EVERY week, for the past six years, anti-logging protesters have been reporting Leadbeater’s possum sightings in logging coupes or on the only point of access to the site.

In 2014 there were just 153 possum colonies identified in the state forests outside the Central Highlands nat­ional parks. Now there are 828 colonies, each of which contains three to 12 individuals.

Every possum sighting found in a timber coupe means 12.6ha must be excised from the harvest zone, making many unviable.

If you’re a farmer it’s like losing a bit of your land every week, hectare by hectare, until there’s nothing left.

This steady erosion of timber workers’ access to a renewable resource has been aided and abetted by Andrews Labor Government Environment Minister Lily D’Ambrosio and her predecessor Gavin Jennings.

This possum policy was undermining the Central Highlands timber industry long before Premier Daniel Andrews announced the phasing out of native forest logging, on the basis it was unsustainable.

Maps of the sightings show just how focused community groups are in finding the possum on coupes. Last month alone 30 new possum colonies were identified across the highlands.

And there’s no prizes for guessing where they were found.

It’s disheartening enough that Ms D’Ambrosio sees no problem with activists scouring the forest for possums in the midst of coronavirus lockdowns.

But what’s truly disturbing is Ms D’Ambrosio’s bureaucrats blindly accepting the evidence of possum sightings by anti-logging community groups.

Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning bureaucrats don’t even bother sending out a qualified ecologist to verify the sightings.

As long as activists supply a photo, date, time and GPS location it’s thumbs-up for a positive possum ID and thumbs down for the timber industry – all done via what DELWP calls a desktop verification process.

The losses to the timber industry and VicForests are enormous.

When DELWP reports a sighting to VicForests it must create a 200-metre logging exclusion zone around a possum colony that only activists have seen. The “community” group sightings are often found on the entry point to a coupe or near landing points, which makes harvesting unviable once the 12.6ha possum exclusion zone is excised from the site.

Morwell’s ANC Forestry group wasted $15,000 on preparing a landing at a coupe it was about to harvest last month, which protesters successfully sabotaged by miraculously finding a possum colony the night before harvesting was to begin.

Who knows how much more was lost in planning, survey and mapping work conducted by VicForests and survey teams of qualified ecologists, who had already checked ANC’s coupes and 80 per cent of all other coupes to be logged this year.

But the greatest cost is the loss of a community, as hundreds of Central Highlands families look past the tall timber they’ve harvested for generations and wonder what next.

● Peter Hunt is The Weekly Times senior reporter