Michael, I can only speak about WA but the anti-logging campaigns here have been just as intense as in Tasmania. However, we no longer harvest any old growth forest in WA and no one is growing native hardwood times for sawlogs because of several reasons, including the perverse taxation incentives brought in 20 or so years ago to encourage plantings of short rotation softwoods such as pine. With an 80 to 120 time period required for our two main hardwoods - karri and jarrah - to reach sawlog size and quality, the only way to access these timbers is from our native forests where there has been no loss of biodiversity as a result of logging. Yet the no logging campaigns continue, mainly whenever a non-Labor govt is approaching an election, and I can't help but conclude that the campaigns are more about increasing the Green vote than achieving on-ground environmental benefits.

It is time that those who are so anti-logging realised that there are many others who rely on the industry as well. There are a large number of flow-on jobs that are indirectly linked to the industry but unfortunately not captured as forest industry in any data stream e.g. manufacturing engineers, tyre retailers, cafes and roadhouses, fuel outlets. Let's not forget those employees who are equally concerned about their future because of the loss of the public native forest industry.

@Mark Carter .... This is actually a response to your response to my comment on your original point, but there doesn't seem to be any mechanism for carrying on the conversation.

You make the point that job losses in forestry are comparatively low compared to some other industries. Perhaps so, but industries such as tourism sink or swim based only on the economic climate or their own internal failings such as an inability to properly market the attractions. Last time I looked they did not have to contend with an industry dedicated to closing them down, which is essentially what the resource use sector is up against.

And make no mistake, the "environmental industry" is just that - a corporate conglomeration spending $70 million per year to manufacture or maintain environmental crises even where none exists.

Just looking at the Australia Institute who have initiated this misleading attack on forest industry employment shows the insidious linkages and underpinnings of the environmental industry's well-oiled machine.

The AI is reportedly largely funded by Graham Wood who gave the greatest donation in political history to the Australian Greens at the last Federal Election, and who co-owns a former Tasmanian woodchip mill purchased essentially to make sure it never re-opens. Its CEO, Richard Dennis, who authored the original employment misinformation about forestry employment is a former political adviser to Bob Brown, and a current Green staffer is on the AI Board. ......and you wonder why 'pro-logging welfare defenders' as you call them get a bit upset......

Peter, not sure what you mean by '...Australia continues to consume more timber and forest products than it produces'?
My quick check of the ABARE figures for the last ten years (http://adl.brs.gov.au/data/warehouse/afwpsd9able001/afwpsd9able201205/afwpsSummaries201205_1.0.0.xlsx) shows that Australia has consistently produced more logs each year (Table 6 - Logs harvested) than its total log consumption (Table 10 - Estimated logs consumed). In the last decade Australia has produced in the order of 20 - 25 % more logs than we have consumed every year.

Let he who doesn't want to consume resources shed all his worldly goods and stop eating.

Peter, could you give a reference for the ANU study? I’d be interested to see how its authors arrive at such a conclusion. My read of the ABARE data for the last ten years would seem to contradict this finding.
Using your example of sawnwood, over the last ten years Australian hardwood sawnwood production has declined pretty consistently, from 1,375,000 m3 in 2000-1 to 730,000 m3 in 2010-11, a drop of 645,000 m3. In 2010-11 Australia imported 88,000 m3 of hardwood sawnwood. That hardly seems a 'direct substitution' for the loss of 645,000 m3 in production. And hardwood sawnwood imports have declined every year since 2004-5, at the same time domestic hardwood production was declining. If the ANU report was accurate it should be the opposite.
Rather than substituting our declining hardwood production with tropical hardwoods the figures would suggest a culprit closer to home. In 2000-1 we produced 2,890,000 m3 of pine sawnwood. This grew to 3,826,000 m3 in 2010-11, an increase of over one million m3. That would seem a far more likely substitution than the relatively small amounts of declining hardwood imports. This is further borne out in the Australian consumption numbers. In 2000-1 we consumed 1,375,000 m3 of hardwood and 3,454,000 m3 of softwood sawnwoods. By last year the figures for hardwood and softwood were 740,000 m3 and 4,306,000 m3 respectively. Ten years ago 28% of our sawnwood was hardwood, last year it was 15%.
I suspect this sort of change - consumers, producers and retailers relentlessly shifting to plantation timbers - is behind the employment changes that Jacki is pointing out in the job decline data she presents.

(The commenting system has been changed to even less counter-intuitive than the one it replaced. But if you reply to the "top message" to which the person you want to reply to, had used, then after you submit it, and then refresh the page, our new post will be ordered correctly--in this example, under mine.)

Anyway your 120-years ago history is a very incomplete picture.
The reason I mentioned Red Cedar is because I have in fact done some study of it--because I was born there and my father was among the last cedar-getters & sawmill owners in Mullumbimby hinterland (before I was born). That was post-war when the use of mechanization (chain saws & trucks) allowed them to get the last stands on hills and in deeper forest. Red cedar, as you must know, only grows well when in mixed company of other trees.

Another curious story that got my interest was that my old alma mater (U of Q) owes its St Lucia campus to a fortune (the Mayne family) that was begun from an infamous robbery and murder of a cedar-getter who foolishly flashed his cash in 1848 Brisbane. (described in Siemon's The Mayne Inheritance).

From John Vader's Red Gold:
"In 20 years of continuous work among the red cedars of northern NSW Bill Haydon has cut 2000 trees, totalling more than 4,000,000 super feet. Milled into three million super feet of boards, that cedar has brought £600,000 to Haydon paid to Haydon and the millers. ($15 m in today's value). Last year (1956) Haydon paid to private landowners and to the government more than £5000 in royalties alone."

And: "In 1914, when the cream of the cedar stands on the Atherton Tablelands were long gone, the Queensland government made a desultory and halfhearted effort to re-establish the trees. ..the total area of red cedar trials in Queensland was 22 hectares, but some of these included mixtures with other species such as kauri pine and Queensland maple. There is apparently a remnant of the 1924 experimental planting in State Forest 287 Woowoonga but visitors have to walk in to reach the plots." "In the experimental plots young trees attained some 6 metres in height after a mere three years, indicating that in good soil cedar grows as quickly and as vigorously as practically any Australian species."

Despite this the "up to 30 years" required to get large girth mature trees suitable for the industry was too much for any sustained serious effort. That would be up to 7 cycles since red cedar was first harvested in the late 19th century (it was the very first commercial export from Australia to UK in 1795).

Mark Poynter.
My frustration with Australia's cavalier attitude to exploiting its primary resources has been moderated/exacerbated by observations of other countries. For example in South-West France, the area between Biarritz and almost up to Bordeaux known as Landes was pestilent swamp. Drainage was begun in the 19th century and, because of rather poor sandy soils (being shallow seas until relatively recently) it was eventually planted with vast pine plantations.

Hard to believe but these are now the largest continuous forests in Western Europe (about 5000 km2). You get an idea of the extent when you take the TGV from Bordeaux city to Biarritz, some 140 km thru the middle of this forest. I don't know what percentage of France's timber and paper it supplies (and whether it is an export industry) but it continues to support the industry to this day, and is the major employer after tourism.

I compare this to the Anglo approach, best described in another book on the Australian experience (Peter Taylor's Growing Up, Forestry in Queensland): "This was a British settlement and the new settlers were from a country that had used trees for centuries." Which is to say, the practice of indiscriminate clearance, which turned thickly forested England into open land by the 17th century. Some people love the manicured country garden look of English countryside but all I see is a hugely impoverished environment with the fewest remaining large mammal species and birds than anywhere in Europe.

But that is our cruddy heritage and it would ultimately produce disaster in our more fragile environment. Left to themselves one suspects the Tasmanians would turn their (our) green island into a version of Easter Island (treeless and heading to human extinction at the second European visitation in 19th century).

@Michael James

This is a response to your two comments about the history of cedar cutting, France, and Australia's supposed cavalier attitude to natural resources.

Your anecdotes about cedar are interesting, but still suggest that you are somehow inappropriately linking what happened 100 - 150 years ago to resource use management today.

In the pioneering era there was no resource management, and arguably no timber industry as such, just individuals setting themselves up as sawmillers and scambling to make a living out of demand for timber. It certainly wouldn't have been pretty but without it, the country probably wouldn't have developed as it has.

There wasn't even state Forest Acts legislated until the early 1900s and no consolidated efforts to manage and control activities in forests, and they wouldn't even have known the extent of them back then. This is vastly different to later and now when there are dedicated public lands sub-divided into tenures for conservation or use, plus maps of every forest type and its extent, and extensive knowledge about flora, fauna, and silviculture. The timber industry is now amongst the most regulated industries in the country.

I suspect your inability to appreciate this is a product of the extensive environmental campaigns which deliberately set out to over-simplify what are very complex matters. Its hardly in their interests to acknowledge the truth about forest management - far better to create an impression of it as being rapacious and uncontrolled which way too many people just swallow without question.

As for France ... have you not heard of the PX program starting in the mid-1960s whereby a million hectares of pine plantations were established throughout Australia? This has been the basis of Australia's wood products industry since the mid-1990s when softwood production started to exceed hardwood prod from native forests and has led to softwood displacing hardwoods from many of its traditional uses, but not all - and this is why we still need a hardwood industry.

Mark P.
Nothing you write negates my points. Indeed by repeatedly saying that forestry was a (anglo) free-for-all until quite recently is exactly the problem. The point about France-Landes is that they were into this careful management more than two centuries ago! Anglos, where ever they go in the world, they seem to have the attitude of rape and pillage with abandon. They can (more or less) get away with this in the vast Americas where the scale & regrowth is efficient, but not in Australia's vastly more fragile environment.
Of course I know about those 60s plantings--one drives thru them going to the north or south coast from Brisbane. (There used to be a paper pulp mill at Strathpine and all Brisbane households had big aluminium paper recycling bins that took waste paper direct to the pulp mill; no more.)

So, again, you may be correct that today (since the 90s, wow!) it is a highly regulated industry but one can only say, not before time! And despite all that, Forestry Tasmania still has an awful record, and the industry itself has been disreputable beyond toleration, and the politicians corrupt and clueless. And Victoria still wants to build a chips-fed power station (which once built will inevitably require a lot more than just timber "waste" and revert to unsustainably using forests to generate electricity!)

What I want you to try to understand is that you cannot expect the public to be turned around overnight in its trust. We are prefectly justified in distrusting this industry and the so-called guardians of the forests. It absolutely needs to be a sustainable industry with safeguarding of old-growth forests and clean processing etc.
Ultimately that does not rule out careful select logging of some old-growth trees, or even clean modern pulp plants. But as you know old-growth forests are incredibly complex ecosystems and are close to impossible to regenerate if clear-felled (then burnt!). And a million or ten million hectares of monoculture softwood plantations is no substitute for those original forests. You are in a better position than most of us to know the truth about the Managed Investment trees that the media are saying will now not be maintained properly. (And another example of typical Australian complacency mixed with incompetence and short-termist greed.)

You finished your last post with "this is why we still need a hardwood industry."

Certainly. That is why I am so dismayed by the loss of the Red Cedar forests and failure to do much (enough) to bring them back. In fact in 1987 the CSIRO began a Cedar Project. I don't know where it is today.

I love timber (and wood working) and find it awful that we have done little but cut it all down until nothing is left. I own a big solid silky oak table that is probably 100 years old. There are still some furniture makers in Queensland who use silky oak but I'll bet it is all sourced from unsustainable old-growth. This is probably more viable as an industry than red cedar but it remains a tiny niche and no long-term management.

Incidentally I am a molecular geneticist/biochemist and am aware of GM of trees. While it needs to be done carefully, I believe in this kind of thing; in this case "forest biotech". For example it seems like it would be the solution to the cedar-tip moth which has been a major barrier to re-establishing red cedar (but note: mostly because its original habitat is gone; it is clear the trees manage in a complex forest). Engineering to be more water efficient, grow in nutrient poor soils, grow faster (and still produce good timber) etc but I don't think this will necessarily allow for the kind of vast mono-cultures (like in Landes!) that forestry industry types want.

@ Michael James

You are still in denial about today's reality with comments like " I love timber ... and find it awful that we have done little but cut it all down until nothing is left"

As I said earlier, go and look at the amount of forest contained in parks and reserves that will never be harvested - there are huge areas of forest still around, so it is just untrue to say we have cut it all down until nothing is left ... and of course forests do actually regrow.

I also wonder where you get your information such as that Forestry Tasmania has done a terrible job ..... let me guess, a mainstream media that almost always reports forestry issues from the perspective of the eco-activists who keep raising them. Something like two-thirds of Tasmania's forests (on both public and private lands) will never be logged, but the media reports just ignore this as they gush over so-called 'peace deals to save Tasmania's forests'. If you want to really know about forestry issues you need to look beyond the media.