Pretty much everyone is sick of the slogans used by the major parties in the election. But jobs, growth and fairness remain pertinent to the current situation in the native forests of Victoria's Central Highlands. There, the reality is that native forest logging provides few jobs; it is not a growth industry – its resource availability is shrinking. It is not fair that taxpayers have to subsidise an industry worth far less to the economy than alternative uses of the forest.

A new approach to native forest management in Victoria is overdue. The need for a comprehensive rethink – both for economic return and environmental benefits – is underscored by rapidly declining sawlog resources, the marginal profitability of the industry, declining employment, rising numbers of threatened species, increasing susceptibility to extreme fires, and an entire forest ecosystem at risk of collapse.

It's time to log off... Credit:Penny Stephens

Some key statistics emphasise the myriad issues associated with native forest logging in Victoria. Employment in native forest logging represents 0.006 per cent of the state's workforce. Each full-time equivalent job in native forest logging costs a staggering $5,041,000 in infrastructure investment. That is 12 times the average for a job in Victoria and 10 times that of a job in the plantation sector (which provides more than 77 per cent of all forestry jobs in Victoria). An Environmental and Economic Accounting Analysis of the Central Highland forest region shows that the value-added value of paper and timber products (that is, the contribution to state GDP) is $29 a hectare a year. Water is worth 72 times that ($2033), and tourism worth 12 times ($353).

But there are yet deeper problems. At present harvest rates, sawlogs from the Central Highlands region will be available for, at best, only 15 to 20 more years. This assumes no loss of sawlogs to forest fires in the next two decades, even though 4.3 million hectares of Victoria's forests have burned since 2003 – as much as burned in the preceding 50 years.