Before the arguments and the political noise, there was a plan. It was not perfect, but it was clear in its timing and logic. In 2019 the Victorian Forestry Plan set the end of native hardwood harvesting for 2030. That date shaped everything that followed. It set the pace for the Local Development Strategies. It set the pace for the Community Development Fund. It set the pace for the work that towns like Yarram were told they needed to do. The promise was simple. Ten years of planning. Ten years of sequencing. Ten years to shift from one economic footing to another.
Once you understand that timeline, the rest of the story makes more sense. Regions need time. Economies need time. New industries need even more time. A decade sounds long on paper, but it is barely enough for a town to identify its strengths, test ideas, secure investment and bring a new economic identity into being.
The LDS program was built with that pace in mind. The first two or three years were meant to focus on understanding each town’s profile. Data collection. Interviews. Mapping out supply chains. Public workshops. After that, the real work would begin. Business cases. Industry partnerships. Early feasibility studies. The Community Development Fund would then support the first wave of projects as they moved from paper to practice. Most of this activity was scheduled for the middle of the decade.
The approach mattered. It assumed towns had the time to stretch their planning muscles. It assumed councils could hire staff and hold proper conversations. It assumed industry partners would stay long enough to co design opportunities. The state was creating a transition scaffold, not a rapid response plan. No one imagined that the most significant economic shift in these communities would arrive halfway through the scaffold being built.
When the timeline changed in 2023, the logic broke. The end of native harvesting was brought forward by six years. The reasons were tied to bushfires, threatened species rulings and the legal pressure surrounding VicForests. The sudden shift was intended to bring certainty. Instead it removed the one thing the LDS process needed most. Time.
This is where the reality diverges from the public story. The LDS program did not fail. It was interrupted. It was never designed to front load heavy industry planning. It was designed to move slowly, to let communities grow their capacity and confidence. By late 2023 most towns had only just moved from context analysis into early working groups. A few had feasibility studies underway. None had mature business cases. The heavy lifting was scheduled for 2024 to 2027.
That schedule made sense under a 2030 horizon. It stopped making sense once the horizon was cut to 2024. The scaffolding was half built when the ground shifted under it. People who assume the transition plan should have been further advanced by the time harvesting ended forget that the program was only in its fourth year. It was still in the learning phase. It was still working out the difference between local aspiration and realistic economic pathways.
This is the hidden truth in the debate. The original design was not flawed because it was slow. It was flawed because it depended on a long horizon that never arrived. Once the timeline collapsed, the whole structure was exposed. Towns were left with good intentions, early concepts and a short list of soft projects. The hard work of industry development had not yet begun. It was meant to begin in the years that would follow.
The misunderstanding has consequences. People look back and assume the transition program should have delivered full replacement industries by the time the closures hit. That expectation does not reflect what the program was built to do. Yarram, Orbost, Heyfield, Noojee, Swifts Creek and the Upper Yarra were all still in formation. They were not behind schedule. The schedule was taken from them.
What you see today is the result of that truncation. Communities carrying the weight of multiple shocks without the tools that were supposed to cushion them. A plan that made sense under one timeline but not under another. A transition built on sand because the foundation stone was moved mid build.
If we want to understand how we arrived here, we need to start with the timeline. Everything else sits on top of it.
At the end of this series, the choices will feel less mysterious. But for now, the simple truth is this. A transition designed for ten years was forced into four. No small town can stretch that far without tearing at the seams.
This is Part 2 of the series. The next piece looks at the method used to guide these towns and why it could not carry the weight placed upon it.
