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Victoria’s timber supply shortfalls are principally due to the devastating forest fires of the 2000s, which, in 2010, led the state government to quietly make a key change to the timber allocation order – the legal device giving VicForests the authority to log. Rather than harvest levels being set by Forest Management Area and by various forest types, a statewide aggregate only was set, specifying just two forest types – "ash" and "mixed species".

The absurdity of regarding all the ash forests and all the mixed species forests of eastern Victoria as single systems for the purposes of ecologically sustainable forest management was conveniently overlooked.

Despite the ecological impact of the 2009 fires, the rate of logging across the Central Forest Management Area soon rose to around double the rate stipulated in 2004 and again in 2007 when the earlier rules were in place. In the Rubicon State Forest, near where I live, the remaining broadly intact areas of mature ash will be gone in as little as five years. And regrettably for those affected, the timber industry jobs the Rubicon forest logging supports will be lost too, along with the local income they bring.

Gone too will be the prospect for a viable native forest tourism industry. Left behind will be vast areas of dense regrowth with many elements of the understory community lost, surrounded by impenetrable thickets of blackberry and no longer able to support the various threatened animal and bird species that depend on mature forest, such as the greater glider, the powerful owl, the sooty owl and Leadbeater’s possum.

A public inquiry by the Victorian Environmental Assessment Council into the existing reserve system in the Central Highlands is urgently needed, not simply an increase in pre-harvest surveys as the state government has decreed.

Nick Legge is a former forestry lecturer and a member of the Rubicon Forest Protection Group.