The Rubicon State Forest and other state forests of the Central Highlands are being devastated by unsustainable, industrial-scale clear felling, despite huge forest losses in the Black Saturday bushfires.  Mountain landscapes have been scarred for years to come, with swathes of mountain ash forest reduced to quasi-plantations.

Other forest values such as wildlife conservation, biodiversity, bushfire mitigation and outdoor recreation and tourism are being seriously compromised.

As with over-extraction of water for irrigation, the refusal to act on global warming, the pollution of our oceans, and clearing huge areas of natural forest for agriculture, excessive logging of Victoria’s native forests amounts to intergenerational theft.  While the native forest timber industry provides profits, jobs and export earnings, these are sustained by the externalisation of costs to the environment and to our grandchildren.   

Read more online here. Print version here.

Act now: RFPG’s six point plan

• Protect what remains!
• Promote forest tourism!
• Stop unsustainable logging!
• Hold the states accountable!
• Encourage the development of eucalypt plantations!
• Encourage the development and implementation of more efficient technologies for milling and manufacture!

Further detail on the Six Point Plan

• Protect what remains!
• Forest Tourism in the Rubicon
• The Regional Forests Agreements – Promise Betrayed
• The National Forests Policy – Asleep at the Wheel
• The Code of Forests Practice – Under-specified and unenforced
• The Allocation Order – a Licence to Log
• Plantation policy – time for action
• Improving efficiency in tree growing, sawmilling and manufacture of wood products

Download these more detailed leaflets for printing and handing out