Nationwide, the native timber industry's survival is under threat.
Victoria has banned native logging on Crown land from next year.
A similar ban in Western Australia, the first Australian state to stop native logging, will apply from January 2024.
And a court action to halt logging is currently underway in Tasmania and New South Wales.
The Greens, environment groups, and sections of the federal Labor Party all want a nationwide end to native logging.
A motion to end logging across Australia was defeated at the Labor Party's national conference in Brisbane this week, after strong lobbying from senior Labor figures.
But the pressure is still on at the state level.
"The decent thing here is that Tasmania should be following Victoria and Western Australia, and ending native logging and destruction and extinction of our species," former Greens Senator Bob Brown recently told the ABC.
'A very courageous step'
Environment groups are thrilled about the impending end of Victoria's native timber industry.
Wilderness Society national campaigns director Amelia Young said vast areas of forest in Victoria had been "badly mismanaged" for too long.
"So it's very welcome that the government has decided to remove industrial logging from them," she said.
Ecologist and forestry academic Chris Taylor, from the Australian National University Environment School, agreed it was a good decision.
"The government needs to be congratulated on taking this bold step," Dr Taylor said.
"It was a very courageous step, one that was long overdue."
But some experts fear the loss of local timber will have devastating consequences for many developing nations, hasten the destruction of whole ecosystems and accelerate the extinction of perilously threatened species.
Overseas imports
Tyron Venn, an agricultural and natural resource economist at the University of Queensland, has studied forestry systems in Australia and overseas for more than two decades.
He said native timber production in Australia had almost halved since 1995, by around 2.2 million cubic metres.
But that shortfall has been largely replaced by timber imports from Asia and the Pacific, principally China.
"China imports or gets … logs from places like Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Ghana, Thailand, Myanmar, Laos and Cambodia," Dr Venn said.
He said those logs were processed and exported from China to Australia.
"We also import a lot of products from Malaysia and Indonesia," he said.
"We know that plantation timbers and native forest timbers from Malaysia are associated with the decline of the orangutan, Malayan Tiger and other endangered species in Asia."
Forestry Australia president Michelle Freeman said the end of local timber production, had seen a recent escalation in imports from countries like the United States, China, Brazil, and Indonesia.
"The majority of those imports are coming from countries where the environmental index is actually lower than Australia's environmental standards," Dr Freeman said.
"So that's something we should really be concerned about when we think about our own moral responsibility to manage our own forests and provide for our own needs."
But Dr Taylor disputed those figures.
"What we've seen from timber imports is … a decline from countries like Indonesia and Malaysia, particularly in dressed sawnwood, and this is the Australian Bureau of Resource Economics and Sciences … it's their data," he said.
Logging to be phased out by 2023
In 2019 the Victorian government announced native logging would be phased out by 2030 but in May this year, it stated the practice would cease by 2024.
The sudden announcement caught the timber industry by surprise, fuelling speculation the decision was swayed by politics rather than science.
Victorian Agriculture Minister Gayle Tierney conceded the decision was hastened by costly legal action taken by environment groups that halted logging in the state's Central Highlands and East Gippsland regions.
Timber is a major industry in Wellington Shire in Victoria's east.
With the coming ban, around 600 jobs now hang in the balance.
The council tried for four years to learn the reasons for the initial announcement about the closure of native logging by 2030.
Wellington Shire Mayor Ian Bye said recently, via a Freedom of Information request, the council received numerous heavily redacted cabinet documents.
"I was told that it was in cabinet confidence and they couldn't release any more, so the documents we got did not give us any closure on the decision at all," Cr Bye said.
But Victorian Agriculture Minister Gayle Tierney said the decision was entirely above board.
"I refute that there has been secrecy," she said.
"We've been very open about this, that there has been a convergence of circumstances, particularly the legal proceedings and people being stood down for a long period of time, that has brought this issue to a head."
Dr Venn said everyone involved in the future of Australia's forests needed to think about the bigger picture.
"We need to be considering the biodiversity and carbon impacts of our native forest management decisions at a global scale, not just a local or regional scale," he said.
"The economic reality of the world that we live in is that decisions made locally have ramifications internationally."
The Victorian government has promised a $200 million package to assist timber workers and communities to find alternative employment and opportunities.
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