When a town loses a major employer, the political machinery moves fast. People are hurting. Media is hungry. Oppositions go searching for lines that will land. Governments defend themselves. In moments like this, the simplest story often becomes the loudest. In Yarram, that simple story is that the Victorian Government’s ban on native timber harvesting caused AKD to close.
It is a compelling narrative. It fits the emotional temperature of the region. It gives people something concrete to point to. But it is not the truth of what happened.
AKD Yarram was a softwood mill. It processed plantation pine for the construction industry. Softwood and native hardwood are different economies. They have different supply chains, different customers and different cost structures. They rise and fall for different reasons. The native timber policy did not affect AKD’s feedstock, cost base or commercial viability.
AKD’s own explanation for the closure is stark and familiar: deteriorating market conditions, falling demand and financial pressures connected to the construction slowdown. This is a national story, not a Victorian forestry story. The entire building sector is still digesting the aftershocks of the Covid-era fixed price boom. Materials spiked. Labour was scarce. Transport costs rose. Builders went under. Margins collapsed. No part of that spiral came from the ban on native hardwood harvesting.
Where native hardwood policy does matter is in a different way. It isn’t causal for AKD. It is contextual for Yarram.
The Victorian Forestry Plan released in 2019 set a 2030 end date for native harvesting. That ten-year horizon shaped how the state designed the transition. Eleven towns, including Yarram, were asked to map out new industries, new opportunities and new patterns of work. The Local Development Strategy program was built on that assumption. Councils and communities were told they had the better part of a decade to prepare.
Then the timeline shifted. In May 2023 the government brought the end of native timber harvesting forward by six years. There were reasons for this: bushfire impacts, environmental rulings and ongoing legal constraints meant the industry was already operating under severe pressure. But the effect on transition planning was real. The work conceived as a long glide path was suddenly on borrowed time. Transition scaffolding that should have matured through the middle of the decade was still in early formation when the cut-off arrived.
This is the point that has been lost in the rush to assign blame. The native timber decision did not close AKD. The accelerated timeline weakened the region’s ability to absorb any major shock, including AKD’s closure from unrelated causes. That distinction matters if we want to understand what actually happened.
Some political figures blurred these lines. Public comments began treating “timber” as a single, undifferentiated category, as though hardwood, softwood and plantation supply chains were interchangeable. It is a convenient simplification. It helps an argument fit on a bumper sticker. But it collapses the truth with it. Hardwood and softwood do not share markets. They do not share risk profiles. They do not share customer bases. When you merge them into a single narrative, you produce diagnosis by metaphor rather than fact.
Communities deserve better than that. Yarram deserves better than that.
The real story is harder and much more important. A softwood mill closed because the construction sector is under strain. A native hardwood industry ended earlier than expected. A transition program designed for a ten-year horizon was cut to four. Those three dynamics collided. The closure did not come from forest policy. The impact came from timing.
If we want to help communities recover, the first obligation is accuracy. Blame is easy. Understanding is harder. But only one of those leads to solutions.
