Hey gang! In June, our beast fiends at VicForests tweeted this out.

'Facts matter'. Yes, they do.

In July, when Bunnings announced it would no longer stock timber supplied by VicForests - after a court found it was breaching environment laws - it chose to go on the attack.

Here, in August, is the Australian Forest Products Association (AFPA) whingeing about the Wilderness Society. Even more than VicForests, it employs pretty emotive language - 'callous,' 'extremist,' 'attacks on workers'.

What unites these three excerpts? All cite job numbers. But the projected job losses bounce around a lot, from 170 to thousands to tens of thousands.

This thread has a look at the actual data to try and work out how many jobs are in native forest logging in Victoria.

Our source is this: a 2018 study commissioned by Forest and Wood Products Australia, a non profit established to promote wood products.

Presumably it would not be considered biased by VicForests or AFPA.

So, as shown below, native forest logging employs about 1639 people directly.

Plantations employ nearly double that number at 2894.

Another table notes the jobs provided indirectly through native timber logging.

At most, with both production and consumption induced jobs factored in, you arrive at 4792.

Again, plantations provide a lot more.

So, even the highest estimate of jobs falls well below the 'tens of thousands' promoted by the industry.

Its preferred figure is 21,000, which is not only very high but fixed in time.

Here it is quoted by the industry in a 2019 news report.

Here it is being used in a recent National Party petition. Note how it refers specifically to the native timber industry.

Here the same number - amazingly durable - is provided to a government inquiry in 2017. Direct jobs, no less.

The 21,000 figure appears to come from here, the State of the Forests Report 2013, prepared by the Victorian government.

Here's the thing: it applies to the entire forestry sector in Victoria, native forest AND plantation. And that was in 2010!

That figure was already out of date by 2013. Have a look at the decline in employment numbers in the forestry industry generally. This table is from the State of the Forests Report of 2018.

By 2016 it was down to 16,735. It is even less now.

Back to reality. That figure of 1639 direct jobs in the native logging sector includes over 800 jobs at the Maryvale Pulp Mill - a mill that uses both native timber and plantation timber.

If native logging were to stop, the mill could be supplied by plantations alone.

How do we know? Because Victoria currently exports over 3 million tonnes of woodchips a year through Portland.

Opal (owner of the mill) could use this supply.

But it gets such a cosy (legislated) deal to buy native forest timber that it doesn't bother changing its feedstock.

The Wilderness Society explain it here better than I can.

(Google: ethical paper opal)

Similarly, ending native forest logging would not see an end to haulage (comprising some of the 426 harvest and haulage jobs), since timber would still need to be transported t'mill. Only this time from plantations, not native forest.

So jobs lost by ending native forest logging would be in the hundreds, not thousands.

But you won't hear that from industry or union groups, who are united in their determination to ignore both science and economics to carry on logging.

They barely recognise, let alone appreciate, the 5 million taxpayer dollars required to sustain EACH job in this sector - as determined by Price WaterhouseCoopers in a study from 2016.

Instead, the industry will employ emotive language and massively exaggerate job figures to manipulate public opinion.

Extractivist industries (fossil fuel extraction as well as logging) always play the jobs card to fight inevitable change.

This extract from a new book about the Green New Deal explains this well.

Pictures: Ketan Joshi (thanks)

To finish, apropos of nothing, here is another old timey industry that:

employed people to 'harvest' something it did not grow
caused immense damage to the environment and wildlife
had substitutes for its product
had lost its social licence