As $45 million of your taxes is about to be divvied up for broke loggers, a worrying precedent has come to light that raises serious questions about this bailout of a struggling industry.

Attempts by successive federal governments to pay businesses out of the native forest industry in Tasmania have failed to meet basic benchmarks for proper government funding — let alone meet the goal of making the industry more sustainable.

Instead, largesse for new equipment in one program was followed by a more costly exit package to some of the same businesses in the next program.

These failures, by both the Howard and now Labor governments, are being pursued through Senate committees and questions by Greens senator Christine Milne. They are recorded in the dry accounting language of an Ernst & Young investigation into a $54 million Howard government program run by the Federal Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry.

There’s no question that the island’s native timber industry is in a dire state. ANU researcher Dr Jacki Schirmer found in a 2010 study for the Forestry CRC that one-third of Tasmania’s forest workers had lost their jobs in the previous two years. The burdens of the high dollar, global market shifts to certified plantation timber, and environmental campaigns were largely to blame.